One year of OpenRouter:
who actually won.

Punch-weight · token share vs dollar share

Last 4 weeks. Positive gap = premium pricing, below-weight on tokens. Negative gap = volume play, below-weight on dollars.

• Chinese labs
  0 → dominant.

  Twelve months ago, Chinese labs made up 15% of tracked flow — almost all of it DeepSeek and a little Qwen. Today they're 52%. In absolute tokens that is 1.02T → 39.9T — roughly 39× growth. Xiaomi alone went from nonexistent to 13% share in under a year.
• Western incumbents
  Absolute growth, relative collapse.

  Google and Anthropic didn't lose volume — both grew several-fold. But the market grew faster around them. Google's share fell from ~37% → ~13%. Anthropic from ~25% → ~12%. Meta, Mistral, and Microsoft vanished from the top-9 entirely. OpenAI held roughly flat at ~10% share. Losing the market and making more money are the same thing here.

The short answer is no, and the longer answer has three parts.

1 · The market is stratifying, not choosing. Claude Opus 4.6 is the #1 model on our inverted leaderboard by dollar spend — $25M/month across 24 apps — because it is priced at $5/$25 per million. But it is only ~4th by token volume (2.4T), and Anthropic as a vendor is ~12% of total tokens, down from ~25% last year. Both things are true at once: the premium lane still pays Anthropic real money, and the commodity lane has moved decisively elsewhere.

2 · It is following price, not quality. The vendors gaining share (Qwen, Xiaomi, MiniMax, DeepSeek, Z.ai, StepFun) share one property: aggressive open-weight pricing, often sub-$1/M blended. On the inverted model leaderboard, Qwen3.6 Plus is in 27 of 30 apps and MiMo-V2-Pro handles 5.5T tokens at ~$1.50/M blended — a tiny fraction of what a comparable Claude Opus run would cost.

3 · Benchmark-to-spend correlation is weak, and inverted at the top. Among models with both token volume and a published benchmark score, the relationship between benchmark rank and market share is closer to anti-correlated. Premium models capture most of the dollar spend because they're priced 10–30× higher; they do not capture tokens. Agents — when given a free choice through a router — route most tokens to “good enough and 20× cheaper” rather than “best and 20× more expensive”.

This cuts two ways. It says benchmark leaderboards overstate real-world adoption for frontier models. It also says the market may be under-weighting quality in agentic workflows where a wrong answer is expensive — we do not yet have the data to distinguish “efficient routers” from “cheap routers paid for by downstream users”.

• Data source.
  openrouter.ai/rankings RSC stream. 53 weeks of vendor-level tokens, 77 weeks of model-level. Captured 2026-04-14.
• Top-9 slice.
  OpenRouter charts the top-9 vendors each week and rolls the rest into “Others”. Vendors that fall out of top-9 show 0 in weeks where they were below 9th.
• Chinese labs.
  Qwen, DeepSeek, MiniMax, Xiaomi, Z.ai (Zhipu), StepFun, MoonshotAI, TNG Tech. NVIDIA Nemotron and Microsoft Phi counted as Western.
• Dollar weighting.
  Per-vendor blended $/M computed from the live OpenRouter catalog weighted by the real usage mix in our app-level breakdown. Historical weeks are priced at the current rate.