Where Data Tells the Story
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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.