US and Chinese companies train almost all of the world’s most-used AI models

Dozens of companies worldwide develop large AI models, but it can be difficult to get a sense of where the most-used ones tend to come from.

OpenRouter is a large platform that allows users to interact with and write software on top of AI models through a single interface. It includes all the models from large companies like Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, DeepSeek, and Alibaba, as well as many, many others.

I analyzed the data published by OpenRouter on the 50 most used models each day since January 2025 and calculated the average monthly presence by origin country of the models.

As you can see on the chart, US-based companies still account for most models in OpenRouter’s top 50. But their presence has declined, and China-based companies have grown rapidly, from 5 models in the daily top 50 at the beginning of 2025 to 20 in May 2026.

Very few top-50 models come from companies outside the United States and China. Canada was represented early in 2025 by Cohere’s Command R models, while France remains represented by Mistral AI’s NeMo model.

A technology that more people use every year is, so far, almost entirely the product of two countries.

Where this page came from

This page was imported from Our World in Data. “US and Chinese companies train almost all of the world’s most-used AI models” by Edouard Mathieu, published by Our World in Data under CC BY 4.0. Changed here: set as a page, its interactive charts shown as pictures. Data from third parties keeps its own licence.

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