US providers dominate AI use in German companies

German companies using AI rely overwhelmingly on US providers, according to a representative Bitkom survey of 603 companies with 20 or more employees. ChatGPT from OpenAI leads with 76 percent adoption, up from 70 percent in the previous year, followed by Microsoft Copilot at 35 percent (2025: 28 percent) and Google Gemini at 28 percent (2025: 22 percent).

Other systems have much smaller reach. Meta’s Llama models are used by 8 percent of AI-using companies, SAP’s Joule functions by 6 percent, and Anthropic’s Claude by 3 percent. DeepSeek is used by only two percent, Alibaba’s Qwen models by one percent, Grok from xAI is used by less than one in a hundred companies, and no surveyed company reported using Perplexity or France-based Mistral.

Bitkom President Dr. Ralf Wintergerst said the results show the German economy depends almost entirely on US applications and urged companies seeking digital sovereignty to give European providers a chance. He also pointed to opportunities for smaller, specialized systems that can meet many business needs more cost-effectively.

Chinese open-weight models such as Kimi K3 and Qwen 3.8 have recently drawn attention for benchmark performance, lower token costs and the ability to run locally. Coinbase and Airbnb have publicly said they use Chinese open-weight models on Western infrastructure for some tasks, while Nvidia is pushing a US ecosystem of more open models after acquiring Hugging Face.