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East/West AIpha Daily · Wednesday 4 November 2026
Many surveys. One direction.
Revolut and Coinbase Already Run Chinese AI. Are Your Vendors Next?
Facebook held your posts. An agent holds your keys. Three layers of evidence, and what it means for builders and allocators.
Source: CLSA via Cailian Press (reported)
My view. No single survey asks the world whether it trusts Chinese AI or American AI. Together they show trust in China's government, technology and AI companies rising, and the US side falling.
Business runs on trust; AI runs on big data and trust, and agents compound it. At most one in four people in advanced economies would give an agent their bank account (Public First).
Use moves before trust. On OpenRouter, one platform, CLSA's analysis of September 2026 data puts Chinese models at about 65% of tokens but 30% of spend (reported, Cailian Press). Revolut runs Z.ai's GLM 5.3 for about 2,000 engineers at a tenth of its old bill (The Register). It isolates the model instead of trusting the vendor: open weights, self-hosted on 56 Nvidia B200 GPUs.
Companies. Trust in firms by headquarters: US 52, China 44, from 57 and 41 a year earlier (Edelman, p. 47).
Models. Net trust by origin still US +16, China -8, yet South Africans trust a Chinese model more, 52% to 37%; Vietnam prefers the US, 72% to 46% (Public First).
The caveat. Edelman's 87% China vs 32% US is own-country trust in AI, not Chinese vs US AI. No single survey settles it.
路遥知马力，日久见人心
lù yáo zhī mǎ lì, rì jiǔ jiàn rén xīn
"A long road shows a horse's strength; time reveals a person's heart."
Trust isn't declared, it's earned by use. Chinese models are winning the long road on volume. Whether they win the heart is still open. Views are my own.
What it means
Hybrid is unavoidable. Running only expensive Western models makes you uncompetitive.
The frontier gets repriced. China wins volume; US labs keep most of the money, for now.
Diversify, just enough.
Implications for builders and allocators (opinion, not recommendations)
Builders: pick the best model on capability, cost, trust and integrations. Own the gate.
Allocators: price closed labs on hard task revenue, not routine tokens.
Trust the weights. Own the gate.
Top 2 China and East
Top 2 US and West
At the time of writing, San Eng and entities he controls hold no direct positions in the companies named in this edition. Usage data cited from OpenRouter. Research and opinion, not investment advice or an offer of any security. Views are my own.
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Pick the best model, not the geopolitics.
The West is loud. The East is quiet. You get both stories.