US companies could face $12B in extra costs from banning Chinese AI models

Chinese open-source AI models are considered highly cost-effective, attracting not only users in China but also American companies. The US authorities dislike this dependence, but a ban on Chinese models could cost American businesses between $3 billion and $12 billion per year. Daniel Yue, an associate professor at Georgia Tech, based his estimates on data from the American open-source AI model aggregator OpenRouter, analyzing token usage and access tariffs from July 21-27. He calculated that forced migration to more expensive American proprietary analogs would increase service user costs by $2 billion annually, and extrapolated this to the entire US corporate sector. The professor notes that available data are insufficient to fully assess American business dependence on Chinese open-source models, making estimates approximate. American experts, including Nvidia founder Jensen Huang, have spoken out against a potential ban.