More US Firms Turn to China's DeepSeek over Pricey Silicon Valley AI

Chinese artificial intelligence start-up DeepSeek took the top spot on a major US business spending index in June, surging as more companies swap out expensive American options like OpenAI and Anthropic in favour of more affordable alternatives. According to a “trending software vendors” list from New York-based corporate spending platform Ramp – which tracks when businesses buy from a software vendor for the first time – DeepSeek’s rise placed it ahead of event-management platform PheedLoop and open-source model-serving platform Fireworks AI. Notably, US firms were making direct payments to DeepSeek, suggesting they were sending and receiving data directly through DeepSeek rather than hosting its open-source models on their own internal servers, said Ara Kharazian, lead economist at Ramp Economics Lab, in the report on Wednesday. “In probably the biggest sign that companies are looking for cheaper alternatives to OpenAI and Anthropic, some are willing to use cheaper, Chinese models, sending US data back and forth from China-hosted servers,” Kharazian said in a social media post. This was not DeepSeek’s first increase in popularity. Kharazian noted that DeepSeek “enjoyed a modest hype cycle” in January 2025, when US corporate adoption ticked up to 0.3 per cent before receding to 0.1 per cent, according to the Ramp AI Index. By this April, DeepSeek’s adoption rate still hovered at 0.1 per cent. For context, market leaders Anthropic and OpenAI dominated the index at 34.4 per cent and 32.3 per cent, respectively. Ramp did not provide the market share percentages for June. “It looks like firms are back on DeepSeek, for now,” Kharazian said, adding that he would not “overstate the durability of this trend”. The resurgence is part of a broader migration towards open-source models. Platforms like Fireworks AI, Fal AI and DeepInfra also ranked among June’s trending vendors as open-source capabilities began to rival premium proprietary models at a fraction of the cost.

Fireworks AI said on Wednesday that on Harvey’s Legal Agent Benchmark (LAB), a test used to measure an AI model’s ability to handle complex, real-world legal work, Chinese firm Zhipu AI’s GLM 5.1 ranked highest among open-source models, closely behind Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.7 and on par with OpenAI’s GPT-5.5. Moonshot AI’s Kimi K2.6 and DeepSeek V4 Pro came in just below GPT-5.5 in the LAB test, but were “still clearly viable” for legal workloads, according to Fireworks AI. DeepSeek last week announced a permanent price cut for its latest flagship V4 Pro model, a month after it released the long-awaited V4 series, which also includes the lighter variant V4 Flash. Following the price cut, benchmark firm Artificial Analysis ranked DeepSeek V4 Pro as one of the world’s best on an intelligence-per-dollar basis. Fuelled by this commercial momentum, the Hangzhou-based start-up is finalising its first external fundraising round. DeepSeek has secured over 50 billion yuan (US$7.4 billion) at a valuation of just under US$60 billion, with major backers including Tencent Holdings and electric-vehicle battery giant Contemporary Amperex Technology Limited (CATL) committing roughly 30 billion yuan to the round, the South China Morning Post reported on Wednesday.