Vlad Tchouchkov (@tchouchkov) on X

What it claims

The thread reads OpenRouter usage charts as evidence that open-weight models and rapid absolute token growth are rising together. The author says this is "consistent with" cheaper, more accessible AI driving adoption. Weekly volume approaches 200 trillion tokens, against single-digit trillions about a year earlier. Growth accelerates from August onward, with week-to-week swings. Open-weight models hold 72.6% of tokens (136 trillion), up from roughly 30% a year earlier. Closed-weight models hold 27.4% (51.2 trillion), and stealth models are excluded from both figures.

Evidence

The thread uses three different share measures, and they rank providers differently.

Request share. DeepSeek has 26.5%, Google 20.1%, OpenAI 18.5%, Z.ai 10.7% and Anthropic 5.4%. The top three together hold 65.1%. Anthropic is a small share of requests while showing the steepest growth in absolute tokens.

Token share. Free models rank high. MiniMax's free model is third by tokens and Nvidia's free model is ninth. The author notes that token volume says nothing about revenue or profitability.

Anthropic tokens. Its seven-day average rose from about 0.6 to 2.25 trillion daily tokens, nearly fourfold. Daily peaks approach 3 trillion. The chart places this growth around the Opus 5.5, Sonnet 5.5 and Haiku 5.5 releases. It does not attribute the growth to any single release.

Spending share. Agents plus coding make up 57.7% of spending. Adding data tasks raises the share to 68%, and general tasks take the remaining 32%.

The author also observes that closed-weight models can grow in absolute usage while losing share.

Limits

The page is commentary on screenshots. The charts, axes and exact date ranges are not in the text, and the thread's own date is not given, so "a year earlier" and "August" cannot be pinned to calendar years.

The author states that the screenshots do not establish three things:

• falling token prices,
• industry-wide spending growth,
• returns on data-center investment.

All figures describe OpenRouter traffic only. Free-model volume inflates the token rankings relative to paid usage.