China's open-weight AI models have triggered the most dramatic price war the industry has ever seen, with LLM inference costs per million tokens plummeting from above $2 to $1.2 in just two months. Breakthroughs from Chinese labs like Moonshot AI and Alibaba are spooking US investors, but analysts argue this is actually a demand accelerator that will turbocharge global AI adoption.

[UPDATED]

The pricing bloodbath is reshaping competitive dynamics. OpenAI responded by slashing...