Open-weight models win hearts, minds, and wallets
Open-weight models more than quadrupled their share of spending through Vercel's AI Gateway between June and September, when they processed more than seven in 10 tokens.
"In August, open-weight models processed the majority of AI Gateway token volume for the first time," the biz said.
"The money is now following.
Open weight's share of spend has more than quadrupled over the last three months, from one in twenty gateway dollars in June to nearly one in four in September." AI Gateway, like OpenRouter, acts as an intermediary that allows customers to purchase tokens from different AI providers through a common interface.
While it works with popular harnesses like Claude Code and Codex and provides access to proprietary and open-weight models, it doesn't see usage through other gateways or from customers who access AI models directly from vendors or through on-premises hosting.
While gateway spending in September was about 13x higher than recorded in December 2025, the average price per token was about 47 percent lower, according to Vercel.
At the same time, almost one in three teams changed their most-used AI provider in September, suggesting that market competition may be limiting vendor lock-in.
The most popular model in September was TypeSafe AI's Jev.
In just 14 days, it reached 35 percent of paid teams using Vercel's AI Gateway, the company said.
Its popularity didn't generate much spending due to the model's architecture – usage accounted for only 1 percent of the month’s tokens and 0.15 percent of spending.
US-based models from Anthropic and OpenAI still attract the largest portion of spending in September, with 11.03 percent going to Claude Opus 5.5, followed by GPT-6 Astra at 4.86 percent.
But models from Chinese AI providers have become more popular.
DeepSeek V4.1 Flash ranked third in spending, at 4.19 percent.
More than two-thirds of the September spending on Chinese models went to US providers serving those models, up from less than a tenth in December 2025, Vercel said.
5News aggregated this summary from the outlet’s public feed. The full article, with all the context, is on www.theregister.com — the content belongs to The Register.
