007How fast is AI demand growing?

What OpenRouter can see

OpenRouter sells access to more than 400 models through one API and publishes the daily token count of the 50 biggest, plus a single row for everything else. It sees developers, startups and agent tools. It doesn’t see ChatGPT’s subscribers or companies that call OpenAI and Anthropic directly, and its public counts leave out private and zero-data-retention traffic. So it is a slice: about $4.2B a year of spend, against roughly $120–140B of annualized revenue at OpenAI and Anthropic combined, depending on how OpenAI’s revenue is counted. But it is one of the few public daily counts of AI demand, and it has been growing faster than Google, which gives a figure from time to time. Google said in May it was processing 3.2 quadrillion tokens a month, 7× a year earlier. OpenRouter grew 12× over the same twelve months.

Tokens up 23× this year, dollars 11×

Since January, daily tokens are up 23× and our estimate of spend 11×. The difference is price. The average million tokens cost $0.96 in the first half of the year and $0.48 in October. We price every model at today’s list price, so the whole fall is mix: cheap models, above all from DeepSeek and Z.ai, took share. At the first half’s average price, October’s tokens would be worth $8.3B a year, not $4.2B.

Dollars are also where growth has started to slow. Spend grew 30% a month from April to July and 21% a month from July to October. Tokens went the other way, from 35% to 48%.

China’s tokens, America’s dollars

Models from Chinese labs first passed US models in weekly tokens in the week of March 23 and have led every week since April 27. Over the past four weeks they were 57% of tokens (64% last week) and 26% of estimated spend. DeepSeek is the biggest lab by tokens, with 26%, and takes 4% of the dollars. Anthropic has 5% of the tokens and 35% of the dollars; OpenAI 9% and 26%. Between them, the two take 61% of the dollars from 14% of the tokens.

Much of what is spent on Chinese models doesn’t reach Chinese labs either. Their models are open-weight, so anyone can host them: 28 providers serve the September version of DeepSeek V4.1-Flash, its most-used model, and DeepSeek isn’t one of them. On a snapshot of where requests go, DeepSeek serves 9% of the spend on its own models, Z.ai 6% and Moonshot 10%. The rest goes to hosts such as Together, DeepInfra and Baseten. Tencent, Xiaomi and MiniMax keep most of theirs.

Those hosts often charge more than the single price OpenRouter lists for a model, which is the one we use. Weighting each host’s price by its share of requests in the same snapshot would add about 17% to October’s spend, most of it on Chinese models, and lift their share of the dollars to about 37%. We leave that out of our figures because a 30-minute snapshot can’t be applied to earlier months.

Agents are the demand

The average request from OpenRouter’s 100 biggest apps carried 73,000 tokens in October, against 13,000 in January. Coding agents re-send their working context at every step, so one task can run to millions of tokens. Hermes Agent, Claude Code, Kilo Code and Cline are the four biggest apps, and OpenRouter classifies 63% of last week’s tokens as code or agent work. Roleplay, about a third of tokens in mid-2025, is down to about 5%.

Agents also make dollars harder to measure. Much of what they send is context they have sent before, which providers bill at cached rates, often a tenth of the input price or less. The cached share is the biggest unknown in our spend estimate; matching Sacra’s July revenue figure implies about 51% of input.

Free tokens are a launch strategy

Labs buy demand on OpenRouter with free models. Free versions and stealth models, released under code names before launch, were 15% of tokens over the past four weeks and peaked at 31% in April 2025. Z.ai ran GLM-5.3-Flash as “Ox Alpha” for a week in August; on August 24, OpenRouter said it was on track for nearly 6 trillion tokens that day. A model called Space Bunny Alpha has done 57 trillion tokens in the past 30 days without its maker being named. We count all of it at $0, which is why tokens and dollars can diverge sharply within a month.

A read on Anthropic

Spend on Anthropic’s models through OpenRouter was 1.8% of its reported revenue in the first quarter, 2.1% in the second and 1.7% in the third. In October so far it is running 36% above the third quarter’s pace. If OpenRouter’s share stays in that range, Anthropic is on course for $19–23B of revenue in the fourth quarter, against $16.8B in the third. That is the quarter in which it plans to list; bankers are reported to be pricing the IPO on $190–200B of revenue in 2028. Anthropic released Opus 5.5 and Sonnet 5.5 in late September and Haiku 5.5 in October, and launch weeks can pull spend forward.

OpenAI is different. Spend on its models through OpenRouter grew 4× from the first quarter to the second and 13× by the third, while its reported revenue grew 18% from the first quarter to the second. OpenRouter is not a read on OpenAI.

The forecast

Spend growth on OpenRouter slowed from 30% a month to 21% between the last two quarters. That is what a growth rate halving about every 6 months looks like, and it is our base case. On it, spend reaches about $18B a year by December 2027, 4.2× today’s, and is still growing about 5% a month. If growth halves every three months, spend levels off near $10B; if it halves only once a year, it reaches about $29B. Even the low case is 2.5× today’s. The high case needs another wave like 2026’s, with agents spreading from coding into other work.

The token paths are steeper because tokens have been growing faster than dollars. In the base case OpenRouter handles about 513T tokens a day by the end of 2027 at about $0.09 per million. That only happens if cheap models keep taking share.

The three paths barely differ over the next quarter: spend grows 60% to 72% from October to January on all of them. They separate during 2027, so the early quarters won’t settle which one we’re on.

What it means for packs 001–006

Pack 005 adds up to about $1.54T of debt and equity that the buildout needs through 2030. On OpenRouter, demand is not the constraint: spend is growing about 21% a month and tokens about 48%.

What changes is what a dollar buys. A dollar spent on OpenRouter buys 2.0× as many tokens as it did in the first half, because the mix has moved to cheaper models. This data can’t say how much of that is cheaper serving and how much is thinner margins; the models taking share are smaller, so some of it is efficiency. Pack 006 found the same pattern in list prices: the price of a top-tier token has held while everything below it falls. It is why the labs’ share of the dollars matters more than their share of the tokens: Anthropic and OpenAI take 61% of the dollars from 14% of the tokens.

What to watch

The dollar growth rate in the spring. Average monthly growth from December to March of about 11% would put spend on the low path, 15% on the base path and 18% on the high one. Single months are noisy: spend fell 2% in August and rose 47% in September.

Anthropic’s share. If OpenRouter stays near 1.7–2.1% of Anthropic’s revenue, it is a weekly read on Anthropic’s growth ahead of its IPO.

Free and stealth tokens. When they spike, token counts overstate demand.

Who hosts the open models. DeepSeek serves 64% of requests for its new V4.1-Flash-1017 itself, against none of the September version. Chinese labs taking back hosting would move dollars back to them.