China AI Substitution Monitor

Chinese AI Adoption Index – weighted composite, 0–100. Weights follow the source methodology; families without a live or recent source are excluded and weights renormalized.

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ContainedBuildingDisplacing

Substitution Pressure Index (SPI)

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Chinese-lab tokens ÷ US-lab tokens, OpenRouter trailing week

Chinese share of routed tokens

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named Chinese labs, trailing week

4-week change

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share, percentage points

Frontier price gap

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US flagship output $/M ÷ Chinese flagship

Substitution pressure trend – weekly Chinese vs US lab share of OpenRouter routed tokens (named authors; the platform's "others" bucket is excluded, so Chinese share is a lower bound)

Chinese labs share US labs share SPI (CN÷US, right scale)

OpenRouter usage – by lab – trailing week, live

Tokens routed through OpenRouter only – first-party OpenAI/Anthropic/Gemini API traffic is invisible here, so this measures the price-sensitive, model-agnostic segment where substitution shows up first.

Top models by routed tokens – trailing week, live

#	Model		Tokens/wk	Share

Inference price compression – flagship $/1M tokens, live from OpenRouter

Model		Input	Output

Hugging Face adoption – 30-day rolling downloads by lab, live

Chinese labs vs US open-weight families (Llama, Gemma, GPT-OSS, Phi, Nemotron, OLMo). Sum of each org's top-50 repos; community quantizations/finetunes not attributed, so both sides are undercounts.

GitHub developer engagement – flagship repos, live

Repo	Stars	Forks	Δ/day

Star velocity is measured against this browser's first visit (stored locally), so it reads "calibrating" until a later visit. Fork counts are the stronger adoption signal.

Leaderboard proximity – snapshot

Best Chinese model on LMArena

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Elo gap to US leader

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Chinese models in top 10 / top 20

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text arena, ordinal ranks

Artificial Analysis index

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Source: arena.ai (ex-lmarena.ai) and Artificial Analysis. No public CORS API – refreshed via the updater script, values dated in the header.

Prediction markets – Chinese AI leadership – live Polymarket odds

Market	YES	24h Δ

Leadership markets resolve on arena.ai rankings. These are the market's own probabilities that Chinese labs take or hold the frontier – the cleanest forward-looking read in this monitor.

US AI equity check – the stocks this pressure would show up in

Prices from the site's shared feed (market-data.json, auto-refreshed server-side). Drawdown is vs the 6-month high. Correlation caveat: the AI Crash Monitor's lead-lag study finds no statistically significant lead from prediction-market signals to NVDA/SOXX yet – treat this page as a market-pricing monitor, not a validated forecast.

Why this matters for US AI stocks

Enterprise switching is underway. CNBC (2026-07-07): Coinbase cut AI spend nearly 50% by moving ~1,200 internal agents to GLM-5.2 and Kimi K2.7; Lindy migrated fully off Claude to DeepSeek; Uber capped engineer AI budgets at $1,500/month; Citi reportedly restricted access to the most expensive OpenAI/Anthropic tiers. Chinese models price 60–90% below US flagships for near-frontier quality.

The capex asymmetry is the exposure. US hyperscaler capex was ~$400B in 2025 with >$520B consensus for 2026, vs ~$57B for China's major platforms (UBS). If cheap open-weight models keep compressing inference pricing, the revenue side of that capex – and the margin structure of proprietary US model vendors – is what gets repriced. NVDA's China datacenter revenue already fell from ~$4.6B/yr to ~zero under export controls, so the remaining channel is margin pressure and demand-mix shifts, not lost China sales.

The counter-thesis is live too. 2026 has produced no repeat of the Jan-2025 DeepSeek selloff: NVDA beat earnings through DeepSeek V4's launch window and made new highs after V4-Pro. Chinese labs remain export-control constrained, and US frontier models still hold the #1 spots on quality leaderboards. Watch this page for the divergence, not the conclusion.