I’ve seen many charts dramatically showing the inexorable rise of new models as the former leaders’ market share tumbles, measured by tokens.
Yet very little about who is getting all the revenue, let alone the profits.
I started scraping OpenRouter to get a view on this.
Daily token volumes matched with their weighted input prices and their input/output ratios on each model page. Add up the revenue of all the models of all the labs... and you see who is making money. I started getting volume and list price data from May, then granular data from mid-June.
Meanwhile, Vercel kindly give wallet share for free, back to October 2025, but with fewer dimensions to showcase.
Neither of these firms’ customers are really great representatives of the wider AI customer base. They are a step below enterprise, where most of the money likely is.
In particular, devs use OpenRouter because they do not want to be stuck with just one provider. OpenRouter allows you to switch models on a sixpence for better performance or lower cost. Unrepresentative of most users but...
This brutal daily knife fight should tell us every new day who the champion is.
The data behind the charts can be downloaded from a web hosting of this here.
Let’s get into it.
Anthropic has won on every single day
Share of billed dollars, 12 June to 8 September 2026.
Two gateways, two different customer bases, the same answer. Anthropic took 47% of the $284M billed through OpenRouter over the period, and 63% of the money on Vercel. The runner-up on both is OpenAI, on 15%.
The competition got tougher. But Anthropic is still miles ahead
The gap between the two lines is the whole article. Anthropic’s share of the money has run at three to six times its share of the tokens, on both gateways, every single day.
The dollar share is slipping. The lead is not
Anthropic’s OpenRouter dollar share fell from 60% to 32% over the summer as OpenAI cut its prices and the Chinese labs launched. It is still 1.8 times the runner-up, and on Vercel it has held above 60% of spend in every month since April.
The avalanche: Chinese labs, free giveaways and wondrous new models
Since April the Chinese labs’ share of OpenRouter tokens rose from 47% to 63% and free variants carried up to a quarter of all tokens in a week.
Worse, the latest models are damn good too, matching Anthropic on a number of benchmarks.
Anthropic was the only one to hold their pricing. $5 / $25. Token share fell, but still took 47% of the money.
Anthropic held its price when it could have cut. The market kept paying it
Realised price is what the gateway actually billed, after cache reads at a tenth of list, promotions and free variants. Anthropic realises $1.42 per million tokens. The rest of the market combined realises $0.18.
It could have cut and bought share. It did not, and production teams kept buying anyway: five of the seven largest models by spend on Vercel are Claude, all at list.
The one lab that did cut bought four and a half times the tokens for the same money
OpenAI cut GPT-5.6 Luna by 80% on 30 July. Tokens went up 4.5 times. Dollars did not move.
The much-vaunted alternatives are not in the picture
Llama and Grok are talked about as the challengers. OpenRouter’s customers do not route to them: Meta has never reached 1% of the dollars, xAI is on 2%. On Vercel, Meta is 0.1% of spend and xAI does not appear in the export at all. Below, the big three are removed so the rest can be seen at all.
Method, in short
OpenRouter dollars are estimates, not disclosures.
Tokens per model per day come from the provider pages; they are multiplied by OpenRouter’s own weighted billed input and output prices, with cache reads and writes blended in, so free variants earn nothing.
That runs from 12 June.
Before it, from 26 March, tokens are multiplied by list price on a 70/30 blend, which ran 2 to 6 points higher on the overlapping days.
Vercel publishes its own daily spend share by lab, back to 1 October 2025, but no dollar totals.
OpenRouter’s own 30-day task-spend figures agree with this method within a few points on every large lab.
The full version of this piece, with every chart exportable as PNG or SVG and the data table sitting behind each one, is here:
https://noseyparker.pages.dev/which-labs-are-winning.html