Asian AI Models Are Quietly Undercutting Western Prices — Here's the Full Spread

With Anthropic's export restrictions making headlines, it's a good moment to look at what Asian AI models actually cost compared to the big Western names — because the gap is significant.

At the top end, GPT-5.5 runs $5.00 in / $30.00 out per million tokens. Claude Opus 4 variants match the input price at $5.00 in, but come in cheaper on output at $25.00 out. Claude Sonnet 4-6 drops to $3.00 in / $15.00 out — more manageable for most workloads.

Now look at the other side. Qwen3.7-Max from Alibaba Cloud is $2.50 in / $7.50 out. Kimi-K2.5 runs $0.57 in / $2.41 out. DeepSeek-V4-Pro? $0.43 in / $0.87 out. And DeepSeek-V4-Flash — available in both Singapore and US regions — sits at $0.14 in / $0.28 out. That's over 100x cheaper on output than GPT-5.5.

GLM-5.2 via OpenRouter lands at $1.40 in / $4.40 out, which slots nicely between the two worlds.

For teams watching their API bills, these Asian models aren't a niche option anymore — they're a real budget decision. Quality varies, but so do prices, dramatically. Worth knowing where everything sits before you commit to a stack.