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

South China Morning Post · Feb 25, 2026 · Collected from RSS

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Chinese open-source artificial intelligence models, led by those from MiniMax AI and Moonshot AI, have topped global token usage, ending a year of market dominance for US developers, according to data from OpenRouter.Online AI hosting platform OpenRouter’s latest ranking reflected the increased international demand for Chinese open-source models on its site following a series of new releases.Launched around two weeks ago, the M2.5 from Shanghai-based MiniMax emerged as the most popular AI model by token usage so far this month, according to OpenRouter, which found 4.55 trillion tokens used on the M2.5 model by developers via its platform.A token is the fundamental unit of data input – including whole words, parts of words, characters or punctuation marks – that an AI model processes to generate output.Released last month, Kimi K2.5 from Beijing-headquartered Moonshot was ranked second with 4.02 trillion tokens used by developers on OpenRouter.MiniMax, Moonshot and DeepSeek accounted for nearly two thirds of the total token usage among the top five models ranked this month, according to OpenRouter.

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