Google DeepMind's Susan Zhang defended the metrics against critics.
"but openrouter isn't representative!" "it's a self selecting pool for open models!" "everyone moved to subscriptions!"
ahh yes ofc, everyone all became enlightened last month and all moved to subscriptions and this is all just tracking dum dum users who do dum dum things
so many levels of self-own here
No Digg Deeper questions have been answered for this story yet.
"the share of tokens used for US models on OpenRouter has collapsed" Bloomberg
On OpenRouter, US model token share fell from around 70% to around 30% in a year.
A clean warning signal.
open-weight Chinese models are becoming capable enough for routine work, cheaper to run, easier to customize, and less dependent on permission from a frontier lab.
UBS says 60% of companies now watching AI budgets are moving to cheaper models and open-source Chinese models
The pressure is coming from extreme bills, including users spending up to $35K/month, teams exceeding quotas by 200%, and companies cutting internal AI tools from 5 to 2.
Companies are not abandoning AI, they are using model routing, which sends easy tasks to cheaper models and saves premium models for hard reasoning, code, and long-context work.
Chinese open-source models such as Qwen, DeepSeek, MiniMax, GLM, and Kimi now fit the enterprise cost curve because they can be run locally or used through cloud catalogs.
---
news .futunn.com/en/post/75068082/ubs-group-finds-60-have-already-started-curbing-ai-spending?level=2&data_ticket=1780870170397383
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-25/ai-demand-begins-to-justify-massive-cost-of-data-center-buildout
"the share of tokens used for US models on OpenRouter has collapsed" Bloomberg
On OpenRouter, US model token share fell from around 70% to around 30% in a year.
A clean warning signal.
open-weight Chinese models are becoming capable enough for routine work, cheaper to run, easier to customize, and less dependent on permission from a frontier lab.
