# Switching From OpenAI to Chinese Models: A Drop-In Migration Guide (2026)

Source: https://aiapi-pro.com/blog/switch-openai-api-to-chinese-models-2026

Because Chinese providers expose OpenAI-compatible Chat Completions, migration is usually a config change:
set base_url to https://aiapi-pro.com/v1 and pass a Chinese model id.

Starting model mapping (verify with your own eval set):
- GPT-4o-mini -> deepseek-v4-flash
- GPT-4o -> qwen3.8-max or deepseek-v4-flash
- o-series reasoning -> deepseek-v4-pro or glm-5.3
- long context -> kimi-k2.8-preview / kimi-k3
- coding agents -> kimi-k2.7-code / deepseek-v4-flash
- vision -> qwen3-vl-plus / glm-4.6v
- image generation -> doubao-seedream-5.0 (per image)
- video generation -> doubao-seedance-2.0-fast (per second/generation)

Python:

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

What breaks / verify first: tool calling schema strictness, JSON mode support, vision model gating,
tokenizer differences (prompt_tokens differ), OpenAI-only APIs (Assistants/Responses), per-account rate limits.

Rollout: build a 50-200 prompt eval set from real traffic, shadow-compare, route a small percentage with a
kill switch and fallback, measure cost per successful task, watch latency by region.

Cost model: https://aiapi-pro.com/costs/ and price feed https://aiapi-pro.com/china-ai-leaderboard.json