Brandon Carl's charts of OpenRouter data show the first weekly drop in total tokens in about a month, with Chinese models far ahead of American ones
OpenRouter's weekly numbers are in: • Overall usage was down slightly. It's the first weekly decline in about a month • Opus continues to keep Anthropic back on the map • Google's model releases haven't done much overall, they seem to be having trouble finding their footing
Context
OpenRouter usage is one of the few public views of which models developers actually pay for, though it covers only that service and not the labs' direct customers.
These charts are a secondhand analysis. Brandon Carl, who posts about markets and AI, built them from OpenRouter rankings data, and OpenRouter itself did not publish them. OpenRouter is a service that routes developers' requests to many AI models, so its numbers do not include traffic that goes straight to OpenAI, Anthropic or Google.
Deep dive
On October 19, Brandon Carl posted that OpenRouter's weekly numbers are in. He wrote that overall usage was down slightly, the first weekly decline in about a month, that Opus continues to keep Anthropic back on the map, and that Google's model releases haven't done much overall and seem to be having trouble finding their footing.
His charts label the week of October 12 with a 4.7 percent week over week drop in total tokens. For the latest week they show 79.2 trillion tokens for providers assigned to China against 17.4 trillion for American providers, 6.21 trillion for OpenAI, 6.18 trillion for Anthropic and 131 trillion in total excluding DeepSeek. Google's chart shows 0.00 trillion for the latest week, which may reflect how his data is labeled rather than true usage.
The account AllThingsVentured quoted the post with a crop of the Chinese, American and total charts, writing that US model token consumption stopped growing 8 weeks ago, that OpenAI is falling off a cliff, and, sarcastically, that it is a good thing these companies have 10x the effective compute coming online in the next 24 months. That reading is commentary, and the charts cover only OpenRouter traffic.
What to expect next
One weekly drop is not a trend, so watch whether the decline continues in the next OpenRouter numbers. The gap between Chinese and American models on OpenRouter likely reflects price sensitive developers, and may not match the labs' own revenue. Watch whether OpenAI's new models or Google's upcoming Gemini 4 Carbon change the picture, and treat claims about the AI compute buildout based on this data with caution.