What are the most-used AI models on OpenRouter right now?
As of the July 2026 reporting, the top six most-used models on OpenRouter are all open-weight releases from Chinese firms, including Tencent, Xiaomi, DeepSeek, MiniMax, and Z.ai. That is a near-total sweep of the leaderboard by companies that were largely absent from Western developer conversation two years earlier.
Answered in
Chinese Open-Weight Models Now Beat US Models on Hugging Face DownloadsChinese open models hit 41% of Hugging Face downloads this spring and now fill OpenRouter's top six, with Claude Opus 4.7 down at seventh.
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