OpenRouter spend shows frontier models still dominate revenue
thedealdirector · x · 2026-07-20
The post argues that the loud X chatter about “KIMI K3 taking over” misses the bigger picture: frontier models still dominate real-world usage, and paying users tend to spend more on the highest-end intelligence.
Using OpenRouter’s task-level dashboards, it notes that Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google capture most of the revenue even when they handle fewer tokens. The author says Moonshot has done strong work on Kimi K-series within its constraints, but each release appears to optimize for different goals rather than pure revenue dominance.
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