Ramp Report: To Cut Costs, Many US Companies are Directly Purchasing the Official DeepSeek API from China

According to the Beating Market Intelligence, a report released by the U.S. corporate expense management platform Ramp in June 2026 revealed that the Chinese AI company DeepSeek topped the hot software list. Despite previous official U.S. concerns about Chinese large models, actual commercial transaction data unveiled a different reality. Ramp analyzed credit card transaction records from over 50,000 companies on the platform and found that many U.S. companies did not deploy open-source models locally but instead opted to directly purchase DeepSeek's official hosted API service. This means that a large amount of U.S. corporate data is being sent directly to and stored on servers located in China.

The actual fund flow revealed a stark contrast to the cautious attitude towards DeepSeek R1 when it was first released over a year ago in U.S. society. Back then, due to concerns about leaks and security, major U.S. corporations and government agencies generally restricted the use of Chinese models. However, faced with the hefty bills of U.S.-based large models like OpenAI or Anthropic, many small and medium-sized enterprises eventually chose to bow to cost pressure and directly purchase official services hosted in China to reduce expenses.

In addition to directly using DeepSeek, U.S. companies have also started to scrutinize their AI expenditures, gradually shifting from OpenAI and Anthropic to the open-source ecosystem. Inference platforms such as Fireworks AI, fal AI, and DeepInfra, which provide API calls to open-source models, have made their way onto the list. Many companies have begun to adopt an intelligent routing strategy, only utilizing expensive OpenAI or Anthropic flagship models for the most complex tasks, while delegating the majority of daily routine tasks to cheaper open-source models.

While the market once worried that AI agents would replace traditional software design tools, actual data shows that design software remains resilient. In this month's rankings, the design tool Figma topped the fastest-growing list, and the collaborative design tool Paper also entered the popularity rankings, indicating that traditional design software still stands strong in the enterprise space.