US tech firms including Pinterest and Airbnb are increasingly turning to Chinese AI models to enhance their services, citing superior performance, open-source flexibility, and lower costs, according to industry executives and recent reports.

Pinterest, the San Francisco-based platform known for lifestyle and creative inspiration, has been experimenting with China’s DeepSeek R-1 model since its launch in January 2025. The company says the AI has helped refine its recommendation engine, effectively turning the platform into a “shopping assistant,” according to Pinterest CEO Bill Ready.

“We’ve effectively made Pinterest an AI-powered shopping assistant,” Ready told BBC.

Pinterest Chief Technology Officer Matt Madrigal said Chinese open-source models allow companies like his to customise AI for their needs. “Open-source techniques that we use to train our own in-house models are 30% more accurate than the leading off-the-shelf models,” he said, adding that these models can be deployed at up to 90% lower costs compared to proprietary US alternatives.

Chinese competitors in this space include Alibaba’s Qwen and Moonshot’s Kimi, while TikTok owner ByteDance is also developing similar technology.

The trend is not limited to Pinterest. Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky told Bloomberg last October that his company relies “a lot” on Alibaba’s Qwen for AI-driven customer service, citing speed, quality, and cost-effectiveness as primary reasons. Airbnb also uses US-based models but hosts them securely within its own infrastructure.

The popularity of Chinese AI models is evident on platforms like Hugging Face, which hosts ready-made AI models for developers. Jeff Boudier, a product developer at Hugging Face, noted that Chinese models often dominate the top downloaded spots. “There are weeks where four out of five top training models on Hugging Face are from Chinese labs,” he said.

Qwen recently surpassed Meta’s Llama series to become the most downloaded family of large language models on the Hugging Face platform. Analysts say this marks a shift in global AI development dynamics.

A Stanford University report released last month highlighted that Chinese AI models “seem to have caught up or even pulled ahead” of their global counterparts in both capabilities and adoption. The report also pointed to Chinese government support as a factor in advancing open-source AI development.

Meanwhile, some experts suggest US tech firms are overly focused on achieving “superintelligence,” a long-term goal that may allow Chinese players to dominate the open-source AI space. Sir Nick Clegg, former UK deputy prime minister and former Meta executive, noted in a BBC interview that China is “doing more to democratise the technology they’re competing over” compared to the US.

OpenAI, a US AI developer behind ChatGPT, has mostly focused on proprietary models to generate revenue, recently releasing two open-source models—the first in years. CEO Sam Altman said the company continues to invest heavily in computing power and infrastructure for its future AI models.

As Chinese AI gains traction among Fortune 500 companies, industry observers say the shift reflects a broader trend: open-source AI, often developed in China, is becoming a key driver for businesses seeking cost-effective and adaptable AI solutions.