The enterprise AI market is starting to look less like a contest over which frontier lab has the best model and more like a procurement decision. Eli Tan reports that companies including AT&T are increasingly using cheap, freely available models instead of paying for systems from Anthropic and OpenAI.
AT&T says open models went from 20% of its AI use in May to 40%, with a possible rise to 60% in coming months—and that the company is saving up to 80% compared with earlier-year costs. Across U.S. user data from OpenRouter, open models represented 58% of AI use last month, up from 10% a year earlier.
The article’s important qualification is that “open” covers both open-source models (with underlying code released) and open-weights models (with the trained numerical parameters released). Chinese models from DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and Alibaba have driven much of the momentum: some are described as approaching the capability of leading closed models at a fraction of the price.
Most companies are still mixing the two approaches. Closed models remain stronger for demanding coding, image, and video work; open models are attractive for cheaper, specialized tasks and can be customized for things such as call transcription and customer service. U.S. firms also have to weigh data privacy and regulatory concerns when considering Chinese models, which helps explain the interest in American open models such as Google’s Gemma and Meta’s Llama.