OpenRouter reports 9,000x increase in token usage since January 2024

OpenRouter, the unified API gateway that lets developers tap into more than 400 large language models through a single interface, has seen its weekly token usage grow by roughly 9,000x since January 2024. The platform processed about 10 billion tokens per week at the start of that year. By mid-2026, that figure had ballooned past 90 trillion. Agents are eating the platform Agentic AI workloads, meaning autonomous software agents that chain together multiple model calls to complete tasks without human intervention, saw a 14x increase in daily token consumption between February and August 2026. Daily agent usage jumped from 0.51 trillion tokens to 7.3 trillion tokens in that six-month window. By early August 2026, agents accounted for roughly 71% of all token consumption on the platform. Human usage, by comparison, grew only 2.8x during the same stretch. Chinese models flip the script Chinese open-source models, led by providers like DeepSeek, went from accounting for roughly 2% of token usage on OpenRouter in 2025 to more than 50% by mid-2026. The inverse happened to US frontier models. Their market share on the platform dropped from 70% to 30% over the past year. The business of ro...