US Ban on Chinese Open-Weight AI Models Could Cost American Businesses Up to $12 Billion Annually

A potential US ban on Chinese open-weight artificial intelligence (AI) models could cost American businesses up to US$12 billion per year, according to calculations by a US-based academic, as technology firms increasingly turn to cost-efficient Chinese solutions.

While the exact economic toll of a ban remains difficult to quantify, usage data from New York-based OpenRouter – a large language model (LLM) aggregator – offers a glimpse into the potential fallout, said Daniel Yue, an assistant professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology’s Scheller College of Business.

If OpenRouter users were forced to migrate from Chinese open-weight models to top proprietary alternatives, they could face an additional annual bill of about US$2 billion, according to Yue. The estimate was based on token usage and price gaps between open and closed models recorded from July 21 to 27, he said.

Extrapolated to the broader US economy, the cost increase could range between US$3 billion and US$12 billion, depending on the country’s overall reliance on open-weight models from China, Yue added.

The researcher stressed the figures were an “order of magnitude” approximation rather than a definitive projection, citing the difficulty of tracking usage outside centralised platforms.

New York-based OpenRouter, which enables developers to switch between various AI models through a unified application programming interface (API), captures only a fraction of the global LLM inference market.