China’s MiniMax, Moonshot top AI token use ranking, ending year of US dominance

South China Morning PostCenter-RightEN 1 min read 100% complete by Ben JiangFebruary 25, 2026 at 12:30 PM

AI Summary

short article 1 min

Chinese open-source AI models from MiniMax AI and Moonshot AI have surpassed US developers in global token usage, according to data from OpenRouter, an online AI hosting platform. This marks the end of a year of US dominance in the AI model market. MiniMax's M2.5 model, launched recently, leads with 4.55 trillion tokens used this month by developers via OpenRouter. Moonshot's Kimi K2.5, released last month, ranks second with 4.02 trillion tokens. Together with DeepSeek, MiniMax and Moonshot account for nearly two-thirds of the total token usage among the top five models on OpenRouter this month. The increased usage reflects growing international demand for Chinese open-source AI models.

Key Entities & Roles

Key Player Opposition Context

DeepSeek 30% Shanghai 40% Beijing 40% United States 60% China 70% OpenRouter ×580% Moonshot AI ×385% MiniMax AI ×490%

Keywords

artificial intelligence 100% ai models 90% token usage 80% minimax ai 70% open-source 70% moonshot ai 70% openrouter 60% china 60% market dominance 50% developers 40%

Sentiment Analysis

Positive

Score: 0.30

Source Transparency

Source

South China Morning Post

Political Lean

Center-Right (0.50)

Far LeftCenterFar Right

Classification Confidence

90%

Geographic Perspective

China

This article was automatically classified using rule-based analysis. The political bias score ranges from -1 (far left) to +1 (far right).

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