Chinese AI model providers are adjusting pricing and billing strategies as competition intensifies in the domestic market.

Pressure on local rivals increased after DeepSeek’s V4-Pro kept API prices at about 0.03 yuan (US$0.0037) to 6 yuan (US$0.89) per million tokens following an earlier discount that was made permanent.

Xiaomi’s MiMo-V2.5 model climbed to sixth place on the US-based model marketplace OpenRouter after the company cut API prices by up to 99% on May 27.

The model processed 1.7 trillion tokens in the seven days to Monday, up more than 999% from the previous week.

Xiaomi’s MiMo platform bills based on actual token usage through API keys, showing the cuts are aimed at developers and enterprise customers.

MiniMax, a Shanghai-based AI startup, on Monday launched M3 with token-based billing and subscription plans, adding a hybrid pricing model for a system that supports long-horizon agentic work, coding, and tool use.

The moves extend a broader AI price war in China across more than 200 local large language models.

🔗 Source: South China Morning Post

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