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Two widely accepted narratives about global artificial intelligence are unraveling as market data show U.S. models are often cheaper per completed task than Chinese competitors, while enterprise AI spending is stabilizing despite surging usage. Martin Chorzempa, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute, wrote in a social media post Tuesday that benchmarking data from Artificial Analysis indicates top U.S. models from developers like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google tend to be more efficient with tokens when accomplishing equivalent tasks, even though Chinese models may offer lower upfront pricing per token. Chorzempa noted that industry observers routinely focus on technical papers from Chinese labs highlighting architectural improvements while overlooking what U.S. firms have behind the scenes that would cut down on their number one cost, alongside access to more efficient hardware chips. He also pointed out that while open-weight models can be downloaded for free, most commercial enterprises rely on cloud infrastructure, where Chinese labs are reportedly asking for a 30% cut from cloud providers, passing additional expenses on to enterprise users. Separately, Chorzempa cited analysis from Ara Kharazian, lead economist at AI finance platform Ramp, showing that corporate AI spend actually fell 5.2% in recent tracking even as token consumption volumes reached all-time highs, with businesses becoming increasingly adept at picking the right cost and capabilities tradeoffs and leveraging fierce price competition between major U.S. labs.