Open-weight models surge to 29% of volume, price per token flattens
Open-weight models hit 29% of production volume. DeepSeek is now closing in on Google. Here's what enterprise routing data reveals about the real AI hierarchy.
Why it matters
Enterprise production data shows a dramatic shift in AI model adoption: open-weight models (especially DeepSeek) are capturing nearly a third of token volume at 1/25th the cost of closed models, while frontier labs are doubling down on high-stakes workloads. This signals a fundamental market segmentation where cheap open models handle scale and closed models command premium pricing for mission-critical tasks.
The key facts
12 to knowOpen-weight models: 29% of token volume, under 4% of spend (June 2026)
DeepSeek token share: 22.6% (third place, within 2 points of Google at 24%)
Open-weight share tripled since April (from ~11% to 29%)
Token volume grew 29% MoM, spend grew 27% MoM, price per token remained flat
Frontier closed-model prices up 12% per token in June, offsetting open-weight volume gains
GLM 5.2 (Z.ai open-weight model) saw 50x daily volume growth, hit #11 ranking in 2 weeks
Anthropic: 61% of spend on 32% of tokens; 72%+ of high-stakes use-case spend (coding agents, back-office)
OpenAI: token share fell from 12.5% to 10.3%; cost per token up 50% relative to market in one month
1 in 8 enterprise customers now running open-weight models in production
Claude Fable 5: reached 22% of Opus 4.8 request volume in 4 days before US export controls suspended access
Image generation: OpenAI 53%, Google 39% (duopoly, no other model >5%)
Video spend: Chinese labs 67% (ByteDance Seedance 49%, Kling, Alibaba Wan); xAI Grok Imagine 42% volume on 19% spend
Go to the source
Vercel Blogvercel.com
Publisher excerpt: AI Gateway Production Index — July 2026 Every month, routes tens of trillions of tokens between production applications and AI labs, giving us a view of what AI usage actually looks like in today’s enterprise. We publish that view here. See the Production Index reports published in and .AI…