The Biggest AI Arbitrage Nobody Is Talking About

85% of the volume. 10% of the spend

On OpenRouter, the best public proxy for open-weight usage, Chinese models carry 85–89% of the world's agentic and coding tokens, yet capture just 10–16% of spend. The market sees a 10% monetization story. Underneath it sits an 85% volume story.

And the distribution funnel keeps widening. Alibaba's Qwen passed 3bn downloads over the past six months, more than Meta and Google combined.