# Chinese AI APIs From Outside China: What You Actually Need (2026)

Source: https://aiapi-pro.com/blog/chinese-ai-api-outside-china-2026

The three friction points are sign-up identity, payment rails and the network path to the endpoint
(mainland vs international). Requirements differ by product line and change over time.

Direct official platforms (DeepSeek, Alibaba Cloud Model Studio/DashScope, Zhipu, Moonshot/Kimi,
Volcengine/Doubao) are the most transparent when they accept your identity and card. Before committing,
check: international email/card sign-up, key creation without a mainland phone, English docs, and minimum top-up.

An OpenAI-compatible gateway gives one base URL and one key for several providers. Evaluate gateways on:
official-direct upstream disclosure, machine-readable pricing, verifiable model identity, international payment,
refund policy. NovAI publishes /transparency.json and /china-ai-leaderboard.json; paid models are passed through
at provider list price with a 1.0x multiplier and no platform fee.

Setup (any OpenAI SDK):

    from openai import OpenAI
    client = OpenAI(base_url="https://aiapi-pro.com/v1", api_key="nvai-...")
    resp = client.chat.completions.create(model="deepseek-v4-flash", messages=[...])

Free tier: five GLM Flash models, 10 free-model calls/day, 5 req/min, no credit card.
Paid usage: $1 minimum top-up on card.

Model-identity checks you can run yourself:
- usage consistency: compare prompt_tokens with the official endpoint for the same prompt;
- capability probes: exact-answer prompts catch quantisation/prompt tampering;
- context integrity: marker-in-the-middle test for silent truncation;
- streaming/error schema conformance.

Canary automation: https://github.com/cuihuan/awesome-ai-gateway (scripts/canary_check.py).
NovAI canary results: https://github.com/cuihuan/awesome-ai-gateway/issues/144

First-week measurements: latency from your region, error rate at your concurrency, cache hit pricing,
retry economics.