Open-source AI models like DeepSeek have captured significant token volume on major platforms, but frontier models from companies like Anthropic still command the vast majority of spending due to much higher per-token prices.
The data suggests the AI market is developing into two complementary tiers: expensive frontier models for new use cases and discovery, and cheaper open-source models for proven, mature tasks.
What happened
DeepSeek and other open-source models have surged in token volume across major AI platforms — DeepSeek now processes just over a third of tokens on Vercel's gateway, and V4 Flash handles 5.3 trillion tokens weekly on OpenRouter. However, Anthropic still accounts for more than half of overall AI spend on Vercel, and Anthropic's Opus 4.8 commands roughly 23× higher token costs than V4 Flash ($1.37 per million tokens compared to 6 cents).
Why it matters
The data suggests frontier AI models and open-source alternatives are complementary rather than directly competing — new use cases keep emerging that demand expensive state-of-the-art models, even as mature deployments shift to cheaper open-source versions. This means frontier labs may be able to maintain profitability through premium pricing on high-value tasks, rather than being undercut into commodity status. For businesses, this suggests a two-tiered market: frontier models for discovery and novel problems, open-source for proven, repetitive work.
What to watch
Nvidia's Nemotron model is noted as a newest arrival poised to leap to the front of the usage pack by virtue of Nvidia's strong connections and the model's extreme adaptability. The stability of this two-tiered economy — and whether frontier labs can sustain their pricing premium — remains to be seen.
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The article presents a counterintuitive picture of the AI market's evolution. Rather than open-source models cannibalizing frontier labs' revenue, the two appear to occupy distinct roles in a maturing market. Vercel and OpenRouter data show that while open-source alternatives like DeepSeek have exploded in token volume—DeepSeek now leads Vercel's platform—this has not significantly eroded the spending share of frontier providers like Anthropic. The mechanism is pricing: frontier models command per-token costs many times higher than open-source equivalents, insulating them from direct competition even when their volume share declines.
The article frames this as a natural market segmentation: frontier labs are winning the "discovery" phase, identifying novel use cases and proving their value, while open-source models capture the "production" phase, handling proven, repetitive tasks at scale. This two-tiered structure appears stable because the addressable market for AI tasks is expanding fast enough that new high-value problems continuously emerge, sustaining demand for premium models. Notably, the article does not claim this dynamic will last indefinitely—it observes that frontier labs "aren't suffering too much from the rise of open source … at least not yet"—but the market structure it describes may represent a durable equilibrium where both tiers coexist profitably.
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