The same sentence costs 60% more to ask AI in Chinese than in English

For the very same sentence, asking AI in Chinese is billed about 65% more than in English. That's the figure on Anthropic's system; on OpenAI's version, it's roughly 15% more. Chinese-language users are paying extra every day, and hardly anyone notices. First let me spell out this "billing unit." When AI reads your sentence, it doesn't read character by character. It first cuts the sentence into small chunks it can understand, then charges by the number of chunks. The English way of cutting grew up around English, so when it cuts Chinese, it cuts more finely, into more chunks. So for the same meaning, Chinese takes up more boxes than English. You're on the same plan as English users, but the space each conversation can hold is fixed, and Chinese can't pack in as many words as English can, which means with the same window, you run out faster. There's something even deeper underneath. AI grew up eating data, and in the training material it swallowed, English made up about half while traditional Chinese was only one percent. The more it ate of something, the better it understands it. So when it deals with Chinese, now and then it leaves you feeling something is a little off: the metaphors it gives feel imported from elsewhere, the sense of the language feels translated in from somewhere else. You're looking for resonance, and what it gives you is a standard answer that just gets by. People in publishing have also mentioned the flood of simplified-to-traditional converted books in recent years. If AI grew up reading those too, then the traditional Chinese it learned may, deep down, belong to another context. For people who use Chinese every day to look things up, put together reports, and write emails, there's no need to be anxious about this, but it helps to know. First, AI answering Chinese smoothly doesn't mean it truly "gets" the way you say things here. When something feels off in the language, just trust your own ear. Second, since Chinese eats into your quota more, if you want to save a bit on long conversations, you can make your questions more focused, or, where it won't hurt comprehension, drop those long blocks of source material in English, which gives it a bit more room to work. This isn't a case of one version being done badly. It's that whatever language a tool grew up on, it understands the people who speak that language better. Traditional Chinese is only one percent of that data pool. It picks up our words well enough. It's just that beneath that fluency, what's standing there is mostly still someone else's shadow.