Tools: Is This a Technical Victory, or a Price War Victory?

If you only follow discussions on social media, you might think AI coding is still dominated by Claude, GPT, and Gemini. But Kilo Code’s usage data on OpenRouter paints a somewhat counterintuitive picture: over the past 30 days, the top three most-used models on Kilo Code were Step 3.5 Flash, MiniMax M2.5, and Ling-2.6-1T. Together, they accounted for roughly 3.15T tokens, or about 58% of Kilo Code’s total token usage over the same period. In other words, in this real-world AI coding agent usage scenario, Chinese models are no longer just backup options. They have become a major source of token consumption. Kilo Code’s OpenRouter data does not necessarily prove that Chinese models have fully surpassed Claude or GPT. But it does show at least one thing: in high-frequency, high-token, highly automated AI coding agent workflows, Chinese models have already entered the core of real production usage. Why is this happening? Is it because Chinese models are cheaper, offer longer context windows, and are better suited for workloads that consume large amounts of tokens?