99% of business software that says whose AI it uses names an American company.
We read the terms and policies of nearly 3,700 software products. 19 say they use or offer a Chinese model, and 16 of those name an American one as well.
- Nearly 3,700
- business software products, their terms and policies read in full
- More than 3,400
- of their documents that mention AI
- 411
- products that name an outside AI company
Key findings
- 99% of business software products that name an outside AI company in their own documents name an American one. 84% name only American companies.
- OpenAI is the AI company that software products name most. 67% of those that name a supplier name OpenAI, 41% Anthropic and 33% Google.
- 89% of products don't name any outside AI company in their terms and policies.
- Customer service software names an outside AI company most often, in 24% of products, and healthcare software least often, in 4%.
- Sellers outside the US name American AI too. 97% of European sellers that say whose AI they use name an American company.
- 19 products say they use or offer a model from a Chinese AI company, most often DeepSeek. 16 of the 19 also name an American AI company.
- Over the past year, Chinese labs released 54 of the 100 new open-weight models on our release tracker.
- 1.5% of products limit where their AI runs or who supplies it, most often by keeping it in a named place. Three keep away from Chinese servers or companies, and none of the three says why.
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Two in three name OpenAI.
The AI companies named by the 411 products whose documents name an outside AI supplier. Many name more than one.
- OpenAI, American
- 277 products
- Anthropic, American
- 169 products
- Google, American
- 135 products
- Microsoft, American
- 52 products
- Amazon, American
- 41 products
- xAI, American
- 28 products
- Meta, American
- 19 products
- Mistral, Elsewhere
- 13 products
- DeepSeek, Chinese
- 12 products
- Moonshot (Kimi), Chinese
- 9 products
- Cohere, Elsewhere
- 4 products
- Alibaba (Qwen), Chinese
- 4 products
- Other American AI companies, American
- 102 products
- Other AI companies outside the US and China, Elsewhere
- 44 products
fulkersonadvisors.com
Zhipu (GLM) is named by 3 products. ByteDance, Kuaishou (Kling), MiniMax and Tencent (Hunyuan) are named by 2 products each. Other American AI companies include ElevenLabs, Deepgram, OpenRouter and Hugging Face. Of the 47 Chinese-owned products we set aside, three name an AI supplier in their own text, CapCut, Solvea and AEOBox, and all three name American ones.
Customer service software names its AI supplier most often.
The share of products in each kind of software whose documents name an outside AI company. OpenAI is the company named most in every kind, tied with Anthropic in two of them.
- Customer service
- 24%
- Content and design
- 21%
- Work and collaboration
- 15%
- Education
- 15%
- Developer and data tools
- 14%
- Sales and marketing
- 13%
- Legal
- 13%
- HR and recruiting
- 11%
- IT and security
- 8%
- Finance and accounting
- 8%
- Operations and industry
- 5%
- Healthcare
- 4%
Products built around AI name a supplier about three times as often as other software, 26% against 8%.
fulkersonadvisors.com
Chinese models show up next to American ones.
The 19 products whose own documents say they use or offer a model from a Chinese AI company, with the line that says so. 16 of them also name an American AI company. DeepSeek comes up most, in 12.
- ClassroomIOChinese AI named: Moonshot (Kimi)Also names an American one: YesPrivacy notice
including providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Moonshot
- ClipTrend.aiChinese AI named: Kuaishou (Kling)Also names an American one: YesTerms
fal.ai: Supplementary AI video generation (Kling O3, Kling O1 edit)
- DocsGPTChinese AI named: DeepSeek, Moonshot (Kimi), Zhipu (GLM)Also names an American one: YesData processing agreement
LLM inference (Kimi K3, DeepSeek; the global fallback model)
- Fast3DChinese AI named: Tencent (Hunyuan)Also names an American one: NoTerms
Certain 3D generation features of the Services are powered by Tencent Cloud Hunyuan 3D models
- FloyoChinese AI named: Tencent (Hunyuan)Also names an American one: NoTerms
You agree not to use Tencent Hunyuan: Outside the Territory (where “Territory” shall mean the worldwide territory, excluding the territory of the European Union, United Kingdom and South Korea)
- GoPostChinese AI named: DeepSeekAlso names an American one: NoPrivacy notice
DeepSeek (China) … AI language model API used to generate suggested titles and captions.
- HackerAIChinese AI named: DeepSeek, Moonshot (Kimi)Also names an American one: YesTrust page
routed through OpenRouter to the provider behind the model you select, such as Anthropic, Google, DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, or xAI
- PickaxeChinese AI named: DeepSeekAlso names an American one: YesTerms
Deepseek: Deepseek's terms apply which does not include a commitment not to train to our knowledge.
- PlaycodeChinese AI named: DeepSeek, Moonshot (Kimi), Zhipu (GLM), Alibaba (Qwen)Also names an American one: YesPrivacy notice
DeepSeek (China): DeepSeek models, only when you select them.
- Prompt2CADChinese AI named: DeepSeekAlso names an American one: YesPrivacy notice
use DeepSeek V4.1 Flash through OpenRouter and a pinned Fireworks endpoint
- PteroChinese AI named: DeepSeekAlso names an American one: YesHome page
Available models … Deepseek v4.1 Flash (Free)
- RichpanelChinese AI named: DeepSeek, Moonshot (Kimi)Also names an American one: YesAI page
See which models brands run.
- RiffkitChinese AI named: ByteDance, MiniMaxAlso names an American one: YesTerms
currently including Seedance and MiniMax for video and the sound in it
- Runyour AIChinese AI named: Alibaba (Qwen), Zhipu (GLM), MiniMax, Moonshot (Kimi), DeepSeek, Xiaomi (MiMo)Also names an American one: YesAI page
Its AI policy's table of model providers lists Alibaba's Qwen, Z.ai's GLM, MiniMax, Moonshot's Kimi, Xiaomi's MiMo and DeepSeek.
- Talkory.aiChinese AI named: Moonshot (Kimi)Also names an American one: YesPrivacy notice
your prompt is transmitted to the AI model providers you select, which may include OpenAI (GPT), Anthropic (Claude), Google (Gemini), Perplexity AI (Perplexity Sonar), xAI (Grok), and Moonshot AI (Kimi K3)
- TransanaChinese AI named: Alibaba (Qwen), DeepSeekAlso names an American one: YesAI page
Its AI help page tests open-weight models a researcher runs on their own computer, Qwen's and DeepSeek's among them.
- TubeOnAIChinese AI named: DeepSeek, Moonshot (Kimi)Also names an American one: YesPrivacy notice
TubeOnAI uses DeepSeek in a self-hosted, offline configuration deployed entirely within TubeOnAI’s own infrastructure.
- UmbracoChinese AI named: DeepSeekAlso names an American one: YesAI page
Supported provider packages currently include: OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon Bedrock, Google Gemini, Microsoft AI Foundry, Mistral, DeepSeek
- Vercel AI GatewayChinese AI named: Alibaba (Qwen), ByteDance, Kuaishou (Kling), Moonshot (Kimi)Also names an American one: YesAI page
Its AI Gateway docs list Alibaba Cloud, ByteDance, Kling AI and Moonshot AI among the providers it routes to.
fulkersonadvisors.com
Chinese labs release most open-weight models. Few products name them.
The share of new open-weight models that came from Chinese labs in the past year, on our release tracker, and the share of products naming an AI supplier that name a Chinese one.
- Open-weight models released by Chinese labs
- 54%
- Products naming a Chinese AI company
- 5%
On the tracker, a release is one model in its catalog, and it counts as open-weight when its license isn't proprietary. Models with no stated license are left out. Chinese labs are the 14 developers the tracker places in China, DeepSeek, Alibaba's Qwen team, Zhipu, Moonshot and ByteDance among them. The tracker counts models released and says nothing about how much each one is used, so the two bars measure different things.
fulkersonadvisors.com
Few products limit where their AI runs or who supplies it.
54 products state a limit, most often a place where their AI processing stays, such as the EU or the UK. Three keep away from Chinese servers or companies, and none of the three says why.
- Keeps AI processing in a named place
- 65%
- Uses only named providers or routes
- 43%
- Limits by country
- 13%
A product can state more than one kind of limit.
fulkersonadvisors.com
Four of the limits
- Cursor
Cursor does not use or maintain any infrastructure in China. We do not use any companies headquartered in China as subprocessors
- DocsGPT
The DeepSeek first-party API (api.deepseek.com, People’s Republic of China) is not used.
- OneAdvanced
hosted in the UK to maintain UK data sovereignty
- meetergo
eine Übermittlung an einen US-KI-Anbieter oder in die Vereinigten Staaten findet nicht statt
(no transfer to a US AI provider or to the United States takes place)
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How we did it
We started from the 3,684 business software products in our study of software terms and AI training, drawn at random from a large public software directory. For each one we had saved the seller's own terms of service, privacy notice, data processing agreement or AI policy in full, and its security or trust page, all captured October 8 to 11, 2026. They come from 3,539 companies. That study also sorted each product by kind of software and by whether it is built around AI.
We set aside 47 products whose sellers are in mainland China or Hong Kong or belong to a Chinese group, and 25 that are an AI lab's own models, such as Claude Opus 4.1, GPT-4.1 nano and Mistral Small. Shares on this page are of the 3,612 products left, from 3,484 companies.
Two passes found the passages to read. A keyword scan for AI company and model names, and for phrases such as "AI provider", pointed at 962 products. An extraction model read all 3,449 documents that mention AI and copied out every AI company, model and sentence about where AI runs. Its finds added 1,029 products, 1,991 in all. A product neither pass pointed at names no AI supplier.
An AI model (Jev, from TypeSafe) read each of those products' passages and answered every question in one go. It said which outside AI companies the product names as used or offered, whether a Chinese model is among them, where the product's AI runs and whether it limits that by place, provider or country.
We read by hand, against the saved text, every product the model said uses or offers a Chinese model (30) and every limit it found (95). The text bears out 20 of the first and 55 of the second. Reading the near misses turned up one more Chinese model, on an AI lab's own page. The other 10 show Chinese model names only in site menus, banners or footers saved with the document, or name a Chinese AI platform the product monitors, and don't count. Buildra sends prompts to an AI provider it doesn't name that "stores and processes data in the People's Republic of China", so it isn't counted as naming a Chinese company. Supplier counts weren't checked by hand, apart from the six products that name no American company.
The open-weight figures come from our release tracker, which reads LLM Stats' catalog of AI models. On October 21, 2026 it counted 100 open-weight models released in the 12 months before, 54 by Chinese labs, 25 by American labs and 21 by labs elsewhere.
Documents say what a product uses and almost never why. 89% of products name no outside AI company, so whose AI software runs on is known only for the 11% that do. A supplier named only on a separate subprocessor page we didn't save is missed. The directory has many small and AI-first tools from many countries, so these products don't stand for US businesses as a whole.
The CSV lists every product with the AI companies its documents name, and the sentence behind each Chinese model and each limit. It's free to use under CC BY 4.0 with attribution to Fulkerson Advisors. What the AI companies themselves promise business customers is in a separate study.
Cite this study
Fulkerson Advisors (2026). Which AI does business software use? The AI companies named by 3,612 software products, October 2026. https://www.fulkersonadvisors.com/research/american-ai-in-business-software
The charts and the CSV are free to use with a link to this page.
Questions
Which AI do software companies use?
When their documents say, nearly always an American company's. 99% of the products that name an outside AI supplier name an American one, OpenAI most often, then Anthropic and Google. 89% of products don't name one at all.
Does business software use DeepSeek?
Rarely, going by its own documents. Of the more than 3,600 products we counted, 12 say they use or offer DeepSeek, and 19 name a model from any Chinese AI company. 16 of the 19 name an American AI company as well.
Do software companies avoid Chinese AI?
Their documents don't say so. Three products say they keep away from Chinese servers or companies, and none of the three gives a reason. Most limits on where AI runs keep it in a named place, such as the EU or the UK.
Do European software companies use American AI?
Yes, going by their documents. 97% of European sellers that name an AI supplier name an American one, against 99% of US sellers.
How many open-weight AI models come from China?
More than half of new ones. On our release tracker, Chinese labs released 54 of the 100 open-weight models in the 12 months to October 21, 2026.