OpenAI overtakes Anthropic on OpenRouter spend, first time since 2024
The dollar split flipped in the week of Sept 7; by token volume Chinese open models already own 8 of the top 10 — and four legacy OpenAI models die Sept 28.
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The dollar line finally crossed
In the week of Sept 7, OpenAI took just over half of the combined OpenAI+Anthropic dollar spend on OpenRouter — its first lead since Feb 2024. Anthropic held 75–80% through 2024–25 and had already slipped to the high 50s by mid-August.
Astra is the swing vote
OpenAI's summer GPT-5.6 line (Luna/Terra/Sol) plus the August Astra launch drove the move; Astra alone is ~19% of all spend. If you route through OpenRouter, that's where the crowd's budget is now — worth benchmarking Astra against your current default.
By tokens, it's a Chinese sweep
Flip to raw token volume and the picture inverts: US models fell from ~70% to ~30% of OpenRouter tokens between June 2025 and June 2026, with DeepSeek the single largest supplier at 17.6% (5.13T weekly tokens) and Qwen at 13.9%. Chinese open models now hold 8 of the top 10, Anthropic the lone US survivor — evaluate them for anything high-volume and cost-sensitive.
Heads-up: four OpenAI legacy models die Sept 28
Unrelated but time-critical: gpt-3.5-turbo-instruct, gpt-3.5-turbo-1106, and the babbage-002 / davinci-002 fine-tune bases stop responding on Sept 28 — 12 days out. OpenAI routes migrations to gpt-5.6-terra. If you still hit the completions endpoint or run fine-tunes on those bases, move now.