Comment by 827a
9 days ago
Hot take: The reason this is happening is because the market for Chinese AI models hosted by Chinese companies is struggling. Even the market for Chinese AI models hosted by western companies is soft: During the week of May 18, OpenRouter processed 3.4T DeepSeek v3 Flash tokens (their most popular model). Google has announced that Gemini is processing 746T per week; Claude is probably processing more. And the Chinese models were already staggeringly cheap, far cheaper than most Gemini, Claude, or GPT models, before this recent array of pricing changes.
Broadly: No one is using the Chinese AI models. Everyone, globally, everywhere, including in China, is using the models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. The models from the Big Three western labs represent >80% of all tokens processed and likely >95% of all revenue.
> OpenRouter processed 3.4T DeepSeek v3 Flash
> Gemini is processing 746T per week
I read this totally differently. A startup nobody really knows is doing half a percent of Google on a commodity task?!? Google, which puts Gemini on billions of devices by default, without the user asking? Google, which is distributing Gemini to users who are unaware they are even using it?
Versus a startup that does not even have a login button on its homepage?
This is astonishing.
Unfortunately, the market doesn't generally let you buy Blackwells with "we got half a percent of Google's marketshare with a model we're literally giving away for free [1]". You need that thing we call Capital. But, they may certainly opt to have it written on their gravestone, as Google is (checks notes) continuing to put Gemini on billions of devices and doing quadrillions of tokens per month.
[1] https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash:free
This is a bizarre comment for a couple of reasons.
First, obviously everyone involved understands that someone has to pay to provide a free service. Everyone involved also knows that this sometimes makes sense as a business strategy (I have not paid to ship anything from Amazon for close to two decades).
Second, OpenRouter's business model specifically does not require them to run all (any?) of the models available through the platform. Provider is one of the choices when you choose a model, and each provider can have separate pricing.
The link you posted shows only one provider, Crucible. That may/may not be affiliated with OpenRouter? Even assuming an affiliation, it's opaque who is subsidizing this usage. Is it OpenRouter or Crucible?
All of this is somewhat of a distraction. Even if someone gave search away for free (like Google), it would still be an accomplishment to get to half a percent of Google's volume. Or to sell half a percent of the volume of Android phones. Or whatever.
Kudos to the OpenRouter team!
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Agreed.
Not to mention, week on week more and more tokens are being processed via OpenRouter. [0]. The number keeps going up, with no end in sight in my opinion, if the China models continue offering cheaper inference, whilst tailing behind not too far, the line will keep going up.
[0] - https://openrouter.ai/rankings
OpenRouter is not the only "router" type AI company. More fixed providers like OpenCode and commandcode are offering subscription services on open/china models, likely consuming billions of tokens each. Who know how many tokens are being process directly against Deekseek and Kimi's APIs.
OpenRouter is not indicative of volume. Most high volume clients will go to the providers directly. There's not point to paying the 5% OR cut if you know what you want.
That's just it: This is not happening with the Chinese models, because western corporations are the primary drivers of AI adoption globally and western corporations are not signing up for a DeepSeek API key. If they're working with Chinese models at all, which they rarely are, it is via a western-hosted provider like Bedrock, Vertex, or OpenRouter; or self-hosting. Sure, hobbyists and individual programmers might be comfortable forming a business relationship with a nationalized Chinese entity, but you'd need a microscope to see that relative to the spend that, say, Eli Lilly is throwing at Anthropic every week.
But you're right that OpenRouter is only one data point. It is, unfortunately, one of the few we have.
Here's another: https://xcancel.com/FireworksAI_HQ/status/206010388602804673...
Fireworks is processing 30T tokens a day on open models, or about 210T a week. So about 40% of gemini? I'd say that's pretty good.
Two more points: 1. https://openrouter.ai/provider/fireworks ~5B tokens average daily on openrouter from fireworks, which is a ration of ~1:6000 2. https://openrouter.ai/rankings total tokens on openrouter, ~4T daily, and more than half seems to be open. Say 2T.
If other providers' ratio is anywhere close to fireworks, that's on the order of 10 quadrillion open tokens daily.
That said I'd guess the ratio is probably not nearly as high for most providers.
If you're going to compare OpenRouter numbers for DeepSeek at least use the same metric to compare Gemini. During last week DeepSeek V4 Flash did 3.72T tokens which is way higher than combined token counts for Gemini (2.5 Flash + 3.5 Flash + 3.1 Pro)
DeepSeek's official API, which has 10x cheaper cached input cost isn't even on OpenRouter as a provider, so just like Google, most volume is not going through OpenRouter. (Gemini's official hosted api is on OpenRouter BTW)
Also you're comparing an API with Google's internal corporate and consumer app use. Bytedance announced they were using 63T tokens/day (441T / week) at the end of 2025, so they are probably even higher than Google now. We don't know how much weekly tokens the DeepSeek chatapp uses, but it would also be a very high number much higher than OpenRouter tokens.
For the real reason of the recent price drops, go ask your AI about how much it would cost to run DeepSeek V4 or MiMo 2.5 after Ascend 950 PR have started to be mass delivered in 2026 Apr at $10k / card.
The issue you're not seeing is: Western corporations, the primary drivers of AI spend globally, are not forming business relationships with nationalized Chinese AI labs in order to directly use the DeepSeek API. They're using it through western proxies like OpenRouter, if they're doing it all (newsflash: they aren't). They are forming business relationships with Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI to directly use their APIs.
You can access Deepseek on Azure, Perplexity, Cohere, Bedrock what are you hallucinating about
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comparing deepseek usage on openrouter to google usage in total is not statistically correct
you could equally say, in the last complete week openrouter processed more deepseek tokens than any other provider including google
that also would not tell you much about how many tokens are used on deepseek
Why are you using Openrouter as metric here? Most people use the APIs directly.
That makes some sense.
I mean, I am going to use the best I can afford. And at work that's Opus, but while work is happy to let me spend $50+/day, that's just not viable for personal hobby use, I need to keep that in the realm of a WOW/mmo subscription.
Yup; its not just that people want the best models, so they use Opus or GPT-5.5. Its also that we're talking about nationalized chinese companies. Western corporations are not en masse forming business relationships with Chinese firms and subjecting their proprietary code to whatever harness they cook up just to save a million dollars. Its not happening. And that's why the Chinese labs are failing; they're struggling to build a domestic market for token consumption. The Chinese domestic market sucks for almost everything China builds, they need export partners like the US to keep most of their factories on, but in the case of AI: no one overseas is buying.