The AI industry just entered its most dangerous phase. Not because models are becoming smarter. Because they are becoming cheaper. For the past two years, US companies dominated the AI conversation: OpenAI built the most popular chatbot. Anthropic focused on safety. Google pushed Gemini into everything. Meta open-sourced powerful Llama models. But suddenly, Chinese AI companies started changing the game. Instead of trying to beat US models only on intelligence, they attacked the market from another angle: Price. And that changes everything. Today, developers are asking a completely different question: “Why pay premium prices for US AI models when Chinese AI models are becoming fast, powerful, open-source, and dramatically cheaper?” This is no longer just a technology race. It’s an economic war. Why Chinese AI Models Are Suddenly Everywhere Chinese AI labs learned something Silicon Valley ignored for too long: Most developers do NOT need the absolute smartest model.…