Open Models Hit 78% of Vercel AI Gateway Token Volume; Moonshot and DeepSeek Spend Tops OpenAI
markjeffrey · x · 2026-09-20
Vercel AI Gateway data shows open models accounted for 78.4% of token volume that day, versus 21.6% for closed models. While spend usually tells a different story, the #3 and #4 spots that day were Moonshot AI and DeepSeek; adding Z.ai, their combined spend surpassed OpenAI (#2).
Note this is inference spend across providers (mostly in the US), not revenue going directly to the open-weight labs.
Commenter beffjezos framed it as "what the cartel fears," arguing they need to engineer a safety panic to ban and achieve regulatory capture.
Related event: Vercel Gateway Data Shows Open-Weight Models Hitting Record Token Share(6 posts)→
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