Chinese AI Models Up to 60x Cheaper Than US Rivals, Developer Benchmark Finds

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A developer and working analyst spent three months benchmarking eight AI models — four from US vendors (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google) and four from Chinese vendors (DeepSeek, Alibaba, Zhipu, Moonshot) — across roughly 4,200 prompts over 14 days. The analysis found a stark pricing gap, with the median US output cost at $7.50 per million tokens compared to $0.78 for Chinese models, a nearly 10x difference at the median. At the extremes, Claude 3.5 Sonnet costs $15.00 per million output tokens versus DeepSeek V4 Flash at $0.25, a 60x multiple. For a workload of 80 million output tokens per month, this translates to roughly $1,200 under Claude versus just $20 under DeepSeek. The analyst noted that quality benchmarks — including MMLU and HumanEval — showed comparable scores within margin of error, making cost the decisive variable for budget-conscious teams.

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