DeepSeek has become the top trending AI vendor among US businesses as companies increasingly embrace open-source and lower-cost AI models that rival proprietary offerings from OpenAI and Anthropic.
Chinese AI startup DeepSeek has emerged as the top trending software vendor among US businesses, highlighting a growing shift towards open-source AI and lower-cost alternatives to proprietary models from OpenAI and Anthropic.
According to corporate spending platform Ramp’s June Trending Software Vendors list, which tracks first-time purchases from software vendors, DeepSeek ranked ahead of PheedLoop and model-serving platform Fireworks AI. Ramp Economics Lab found that many US firms are making direct payments to DeepSeek, indicating they are using China-hosted services rather than self-hosting its open-source models.
“In probably the biggest sign that companies are looking for cheaper alternatives to OpenAI and Anthropic, some are willing to use cheaper, Chinese models, sending US data back and forth from China-hosted servers,” said Ara Kharazian, Lead Economist at Ramp Economics Lab.
The trend reflects a broader enterprise move towards open-source AI. Fireworks AI, Fal AI and DeepInfra also appeared among June’s trending vendors as open-source models continue narrowing the performance gap with premium proprietary offerings at significantly lower costs.
Recent benchmark results further support that shift. Fireworks AI reported that Zhipu AI’s GLM 5.1 was the highest-ranked open-source model on Harvey’s Legal Agent Benchmark, performing close to Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.7 and on par with OpenAI’s GPT-5.5. Moonshot AI’s Kimi K2.6 and DeepSeek V4 Pro were also deemed viable for legal workloads.
DeepSeek’s momentum has been aided by a permanent price cut for its V4 Pro model. While Anthropic and OpenAI still lead corporate adoption at 34.4% and 32.3%, respectively, DeepSeek’s resurgence signals growing confidence in open-source AI as a cost-effective enterprise alternative.
