The full quote:

> When entrepreneurs walk into the offices of Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), a big American venture-capital firm, the odds these days are that their startups are using AI models made in China. “I’d say 80% chance [they are] using a Chinese open-source model,” says Martin Casado, a partner at a16z.

This is very different from what the author portrays. It may be the case that many pre-funded startups are using Chinese open-source models (somewhere in their workflow). But what percent of startups that survive more than a year (either with funding or revenue) are still doing this?

I imagine their pitch is: "look at how well we're doing using open source Chinese models! We'll do even better once we raise money to be able to afford frontier models!"

The way the author presents this quote makes me think he had a preferred narrative and found quotes to back it up. Or he's just a very uncareful reader.

It’s a sneaky statistic. You could say that 100% of the startups I worked at used Windows laptops because at least one person had a Windows computer somewhere.

If you saw the engineers you’d see 80% Macs and 20% Linux laptops.

The statistic would technically be true.

I use Chinese open weight models a lot, but they’re not what I reach for when I’m doing important coding work.

We're using deepseek with the idea that we would switch to something better when more of our customers are using the ai features but it ends up deepseek is awesome for what we're doing and so we probably won't switch because it's so much cheaper.

The ai libraries we use let us switch models with just a configuration change.

It depends whether it's talking about using models in the product versus for development. For example I have a few apps that use open weight models, whether on-device or via API if Internet is available, but for development I use Claude, Codex, Cursor for Grok etc.

Our small team (~6 devs) is still using Claude Code because we're still on the cost-per-seat-month plan. If we were being pressed to pay per token, we'd be re-evaluating for sure.

Cursor may make up the difference. A ton of companies use Cursor and Cursor's UI and billing model pushes their in-house "Composer 2.5" model pretty heavily - which is a modded Kimi K2.5 model under the hood. Anyone using Cursor is likely using Chinese models at least some of the time.

Its a bit more complicated than that quote implies

At posthog we see if a customer is using an llm, they use more than 1 model. The typical pattern is frontier models for a small percentage of 'harder' tasks and then one of these chinese models for more standardized procedures. As you get better at standardizing procedures you are able to use the chinese models for more and more work so token usage goes up, but the $ spend on top models has still been growing

I believe this depends on country. I would believe, US startups trust US tools more. In other countries which see china in a positive light https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2026/07/15/people-in-many... I would expect them to use Chinese models due to their lower cost.

Yeah. People should absolutely be _trying_ the Chinese models, and experimenting with running things locally, but the noise in development is genuinely all Claude and Codex.

I put my foot in the mobile comparison the other day, and will again. If you were to go back and be a mobile dev in 2010 by all means specialize on one platform, but play with both as a professional interest to stay realistic. Here it's important people have access to US/Chinese/Other, open/closed, local/cloud and that this remains. Don't become a blind Claude guy or a open weights fanatic: that way lies disappointment.

I can believe it with startups as they are trying to keep costs down. Established Enterprise however, is a different story and is where the money is usually. If those startups become successful the story may change, but most of them will fail.

If if it were true, who cares? Most startups fail. Most are terrible ideas and/or terribly executed. I fail to see why it's a useful metric.

It depends, I guess if they still dont care about losing money or they already had subscriptions then they keep using them, likely either openai or anthropic. If they noticed the bill going up, like with github copilot, they are looking at the alternatives.

We use US models for everything in practice, but we are looking at open-source models right now. So it may just be a turn of phrase hiding the reality. I can't imagine anywhere near 80% are relying on open-source as their primary models.

May be corporations should start having their open models running in-house. There might be a huge oportunity there.

But the big price is AGI and who gets there first, right?

There is a big divide between “application ai” and “model ai” startups.

Model ai startups start from OSS models, and use them extensively for different purposes as their work would usually be banned by proprietary labs.

Application ai startups don’t want to fight the model game, so they either pick the best or let the user control it.

Not everything runs on paid models. Claude and Codex are frontier models, but some people have much higher usage needs and finite budgets that force them to self-host. And if you're self-hosting, you're very likely running a Chinese model

I don’t think they meant exclusively Chinese models. Many companies including the one I work for uses big US model for most of the work but data sensitive ones are on prem open source ones.

Neither of you are clear on what exact location in the world you're sampling from here, could be you're both right, just missing that you're talking about different places.

I’m obviously a tiny, insignificant data point as a solo freelance dev, but I watch this space closely and I canceled my Claude Code subscription today.

It’s quite believable. Just a fact like “while all dogs breathe oxygen, all humans breathe nitrogen”.

the distinction may be between using the coding agents vs using models for products. for example where i work we're talking about dropping opus for a chinese model for the in-app agent (which is very expensive to run)

They are using both likely

If you're self-hosting a model as a startup (e.g. using GPUs), you're almost certainly using a Chinese model. If your a startup outsourcing (e.g. using tokens), you're going to be using a US based model

anecdotal but we heavily use Qwen to build our own models on top of

They probably use Claude and Codex for their actual development, but for the products they actually build and deliver to customers I imagine a lot use open-weight models.

If you're putting a lot of your money and time into a business, do you really want it built on a service only hosted by one company that will turn it off eventually and you have no recourse?

If you build something against an open model you can take that and run it anywhere. If your favorite model provider stops hosting it, you can go elsewhere, you can go rent GPU instances, you can even shell out and buy hardware to run it yourself if you've got the capital and it makes economic sense. Change some API keys, update a URL in your config, and you move on.

If the government decides that proprietary model is too good and so it gets shut off, what do you do? If a proprietary provider decides it's not worth it for them to continue hosting that model, what do you do? If that provider silently updates the proprietary model and it makes your app broken, what do you do?

I'm using a ten dollar a month US model to vibe code startup ideas. All my previous startup ideas i had to hire a graphic designer and back-ender or two to help. I use to be a web design front end enigeer since 2009 yet those skills are dumb now, so now Im a vibe coder.

The model I use to vibe code with I am just going back and forth with. Since Im building it as I go using an agent doesn't make sense but I guess that's where all the token usage comes from? Pardon ramping up my skills via vibe coding this one idea for about a month and have never hit any quota and or have gotten anywhere near my limit.

When developing AI services, Chinese models are cheaper. For the AI models used in actual services, like uploading an image and receiving a response, they use Chinese models.

On the other hand, when developers are developing, they mainly use US AI because the quality is better.

When developing AI related services, they prioritize Chinese models due to lower API costs.

It seems like the article didn't make this distinction.

So the claim that Chinese AI is the top choice for service level AI isn't entirely wrong.

There appears to be a very Chinese strategy of astrotufing going on here similar to what happened with Douyin around TikTok on Reddit.

All of a sudden in almost all social media channels I'm seeing this type of content and then its usually upvoted to the top.

Non-gatekept forums like this are exceptionally easy to astroturf.

What I’ve seen is coding is usually done with US frontier models and anything that is part of a feature on an app and runs at scale on the API is a Chinese model because they are dirt cheap.