OpenRouter's staggering token chart is the AI bubble debate in a single image
On OpenRouter, a platform developers use to plug AI models into their products, weekly token consumption has surged more than 25,000 percent since January 2025, from 0.5 trillion to 126.2 trillion tokens. Tokens are the basic unit of AI processing, like gallons of gas for a car. But this chart says less about booming AI adoption than about how inflated token metrics have become.
The surge shouldn't be confused with a matching jump in actual usage or business value . Reasoning models generate massive amounts of "thinking" tokens before producing an answer, inflating the count dramatically. A small uptick in usage can mean a huge spike in token consumption , especially from unoptimized agentic AI systems that burn through tokens at staggering rates.
OpenAI's GPT 5.6 Luna recently dominated token consumption on OpenRouter , though that doesn't necessarily mean more people are using it. The model may simply generate more tokens per prompt. On the revenue side, OpenAI's Astra leads. Chinese models like Kimi, GLM, and DeepSeek are growing fast too, with monthly spending up tenfold in 2026, though from a much smaller base. Ad Ad
AI News Without the Hype – Curated by Humans
Subscribe to THE DECODER for ad-free reading, a weekly AI newsletter, our exclusive "AI Radar" frontier report six times a year, full archive access, and access to our comment section.