There are a few problems with using OpenRouter's public statistics to make statements about the wider field:

- It only tracks companies that have decided to use OpenRouter to help them switch models - which biases towards companies that like open weights. Anyone using OpenAI or Anthropic directly is much less likely to be represented.

- OpenRouter don't share the number of unique users represented in those numbers. I worry a lot about whales - are there a few giant users of OpenRouter who, if they change their preferred model, instantly affect the global leaderboards?

In this case I suspect the numbers are affected by the release of Claude Haiku 5.5 and GPT-6 Luna - both excellent inexpensive models, which may well take market share from some of the models that OpenRouter is serving. OpenAI and Anthropic have the most mature client support so I expect it's more likely people will switch away from OpenRouter if those are their daily drivers.

Happy to be convinced otherwise if anyone has useful data that I've missed.

I agree with you about the sources of bias, and I’ll add one more: the acquisition of OpenRouter has led to a fairly clear step off the gas pedal in terms of marketing & mindshare.

Nonetheless, the AI market is supposed to be a rising tide that lifts all ships. That’s where the pricing is - indefinite perfection. If we’ve suddenly moved to a world of zero-sum competition, that’s significant.

Agreed, OpenRouter is competing in an increasingly crowded market and even a lot of cloud providers like Neon, Vercel and Cloudflare are rolling out their own gateways to vertically integrate with their hosting. It's hard to say what the true net usage of LLM look like in the world!

I had the same thoughts. I like OpenRouter a lot and still use them, but these numbers make me think more about how much more crowded the space has become. In the last year, you've had startups completely pivot into this niche (Respan and Requesty off the top of my head) who have lots of usage, infra companies like DeepInfra have really leaned in hard to the "serverless interface for open models" positioning, some of the popular harnesses that previously were complimentary to OpenRouter now sell their own gateway/subscription (OpenCode, Nous), and the subscription discount for Claude/Codex is wildly lopsided vs API pricing for solo devs.

Developers are no longer as excited about this stuff, and non developers either don’t care since it doesn’t solve their issues or quite openly hostile to this tech… companies are also starting to back off since other than some very limited cases it’s just extra costs that no one wants to see.

Luna is incredible for the price but I find 6 to be worse than 5.6.

"Companies"? A huge proportion of Openrouter tokens are coming from Hermes. That is not "companies", that is "AI bros using Hermes to do things that could be done with a dozen lines of python" and inflated by the massive overhead that is the system prompt hermes generates for each request. Even with just a few tools and skill files it can reach 20-30k tokens.

I'm not kidding when I say that if anything comes out which substantially improves Hermes token efficiency,or causes a large number of Hermes installations to fail or stop being used (like a major security vulnerability), Openrouter and some of their providers will be in trouble.

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