Why China is winning the AI race more quietly than expected

China is being significantly underestimated in the global AI race, according to Quinten François. A chart he shared shows just how enormous the price differences are between Chinese and Western AI models. While Anthropic and OpenAI charge tens of dollars per million tokens, DeepSeek offers its model for virtually nothing.

In brief:

• DeepSeek V4 Flash is by far the cheapest AI model on the market, with costs that are nearly zero
• Anthropic Fable 5 and OpenAI GPT-5.6 Sol are dozens of times more expensive than Chinese alternatives
• According to François, users ultimately choose on price and quality, not geopolitics

Enormous price gap between East and West

The chart makes the disparity painfully clear. DeepSeek V4 Flash charges virtually nothing for both input and output per million tokens. Alibaba Qwen3.8-Max sits just slightly above that, followed by Moonshot Kimi K3 with an output price of around $13 per million tokens. That stands in sharp contrast to the Western competition.

OpenAI GPT-5.6 Sol charges around $27 per million tokens on the output side, but the most expensive model in the comparison is Anthropic Fable 5. That model costs more than $45 per million tokens for output, plus around $9 for input. The difference with DeepSeek is astronomical as a result.

Users choose on price, not politics

François draws a striking conclusion from this. Ordinary users do not base their choice on geopolitics or concerns about the Chinese government. They simply look at what works and what it costs. If a Chinese model delivers 90% of the performance for next to no money, then the question is why millions of people would continue paying for expensive Western tools every month.

That argument is not new, but the figures now give it concrete substance. The cost pressure that DeepSeek and other Chinese models exert on the market forces Western providers to either lower their prices or make it clearer what users are paying the extra money for. For now, that justification does not seem self-evident to many people.