Open-weight models win hearts, minds, and wallets

They handle 71.5% of Vercel gateway tokens and nearly a quarter of estimated spending

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.

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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.

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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. 

Moonshot AI, maker of Kimi, captured 3.6 percent of gateway tokens and 13.2 percent of spend in September; DeepSeek took 58 percent of tokens for just 6.6 percent of spend; and Z.ai, maker of GLM-5.3, took 7.2 percent of tokens and 4.5 percent of spend.

So efforts to ban or limit open-weight models, something considered by the current US administration, would affect American businesses serving those models and their customers.

Even if the US continues to dither on AI policy, trade barriers affecting AI models may alter market dynamics. China on Friday proposed adding 40 technology items to its export control list, 23 of them related to AI. The Associated Press notes that Moonshot’s Kimi K3 and Alibaba’s Qwen 3.8-Max are among the models that meet the parameter threshold set by Chinese authorities, though the official message did not identify affected models.

"This introduces significant uncertainty for US businesses that host or rely on Chinese models," Chris McGuire, a senior fellow for China and emerging technologies at the Council on Foreign Relations, said in a social media post. 

"Particularly given that Chinese AI labs are moving toward licensing the use of open-source models to generate revenue, the Chinese government stating that it has the ability to curtail those licensing agreements at any time should make US businesses more hesitant to rely on those models going forward."

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McGuire said the US needs to adopt a comprehensive regulatory framework governing the use of US AI technology overseas and include Chinese AI models used or hosted in the United States in its domestic AI regulations.®