China holds top 6 model spots on OpenRouter
Harry Stebbings noted that on OpenRouter, the top six models by usage were Chinese, with the first US model (Anthropic) ranking seventh.
Snapshot · The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Why OpenAI and Anthropic Won't Win the App Layer | Why Teams Will Get Bigger Not Smaller in a World of AI | Why AI Removes Incumbents Advantage of Bundling | China vs America: Who Wins the AI War with Arvind Jain, Co-Founder @ Glean
Explore episode
Jul 11, 2026
Where this was said
China vs America: Who Really Wins the AI Race?
At 45:16 · chapter starts 42:20
Harry raises a question from the conference floor he's sitting in: we're in Europe, and sovereignty over AI models is becoming a real policy question. Arvind notes that the desire for sovereign national models peaked a year ago when everyone thought they could build one, but most countries have backed off as they've realised the investment requirements. [1] — Harry Stebbings "On OpenRouter, the top six models by usage are Chinese. The first US model — Anthropic — ranks seventh. Arvind Jain and Harry Stebbings deb…" 43:50 Harry then drops a striking data point: on OpenRouter, the top six models by usage are Chinese, with Anthropic as the first US model at rank seven. Arvind acknowledges this but argues the US won't accept this trajectory and that there is significant motivated capital — including NVIDIA — investing in US open-source model development. Harry pushes further, suggesting Sam Altman may be lobbying Trump for regulatory barriers against Chinese open-source models. Arvind pushes back on that scenario but doesn't entirely dismiss it, noting the US system needs to build competitively rather than win through regulation. The section ends with both agreeing that a multimodal competitive world — with US and non-US models — is important for everyone.
Sovereign AI Models: Strong Desire, Weak Execution
Every nation wanted sovereign AI models a year ago. Almost none succeeded. The reason: training a frontier model requires billions of dollars of upfront investment, making it fundamentally incompatible with the skunkworks, volunteer ethos of traditional open-source software development.
China vs America: The Top 6 AI Models Are All Chinese
On OpenRouter, the top six models by usage are Chinese. The first US model — Anthropic — ranks seventh. Arvind Jain and Harry Stebbings debate whether regulatory barriers or open-source innovation from the US can reverse this trend, or whether it's already too late to close the gap.
Similar snapshots
90,000+ Flock cameras in US
There are more than 90,000 Flock surveillance cameras currently in use around the United States.
10M Americans own Ring cameras
A 2023 report estimated that 10 million Americans own Ring cameras, roughly 1 in 5 households having a video-enabled doorbell.
ImageNet: 15 million images
The ImageNet dataset collected 15 million images to drive machine learning, becoming a cornerstone of the modern AI revolution.
Human image-label error rate: 4%
A Stanford graduate student benchmarked human performance on the ImageNet 1,000-category challenge at roughly 4% error rate, a figure AI surpassed by 2016.
AI beat humans in image labeling by 2016
From the 2012 ImageNet breakthrough, it took only about 3–4 more years for AI algorithms to surpass human performance in naming 1,000 object categories.
Flock scans 20B plates/month
Flock's surveillance network scans more than 20 billion license plates per month across the United States.
Sora video generation launched Jan 2024
OpenAI's Sora, released in January 2024, demonstrated AI's ability to generate realistic video from text prompts, marking a key milestone in video generation.
AlphaGo Move 37: never-seen human move
AlphaGo's Move 37 against Lee Sedol was a move that human Go masters had never considered, illustrating a unique form of AI creativity within constrained mathematical rules.
Internet = multimodal human behavior archive
The internet is not a random data source — it is the largest-ever multimodal archive of human behavior including text, images, video, and audio accumulated over decades.
