DeepSeek ends Google's 51-week OpenRouter streak with 12.6× request growth to 1.01B weekly
rohanpaul_ai · x · 2026-09-17
DeepSeek broke Google's 51-week grip on OpenRouter's weekly request lead: its requests grew 12.6× in under a year, hitting 1.01B in its first week at #1 — the first open model to top the platform. Notably, demand is fluid: after DeepSeek repriced, its weekly requests slipped 20M while another Chinese open model gained 195M — developers switch purely on economics and capability, with no loyalty.
Citing Mozilla's new 91-page report: open-weight models are now only 4 months behind the frontier; 8 of OpenRouter's top-10 models by August token volume were open-weight, 7 of them Chinese-built; yet the economics are inverted — open models handled only 20% of measured usage while the paid mix skews differently.
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