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AI Economics, US models cost less, same quality
×1.9 gap

At 60% on GPQA Diamond, the cheapest US model costs $0.028 per 1M tokens; the cheapest Chinese model $0.054.

Cheapest blended price per developer country among models with an Epoch AI GPQA Diamond score of 0.60 or more (at least three models per country). Country is the developer’s, from Epoch AI.

Source: Epoch AI, OpenRouter, LiteLLM price map. As of 2026-10-23. Based on 143 data points.

China and the US at the same quality

Cheapest blended price, per 1M tokens
Which country’s models are cheaper at equal quality?$0.01$1.00$10.00Sept 2024May 2025Feb 2026Oct 2026$0.054$0.028
  • China
  • United States
Log scale: each gridline is a multiple of the one below.
Cheapest model from each developer country scoring 60% or more on GPQA Diamond; at least three models per country.
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Quality data: LMArena (CC BY 4.0), Epoch AI (CC BY 4.0). Prices: OpenRouter, LiteLLM (MIT), provider pages. List prices in US dollars before discounts and taxes; other currencies converted at the European Central Bank reference rate. The figures on these pages are free to reuse under CC BY 4.0 with a link to this page.