Vercel reports open-weight models hit 62% of AI Gateway traffic in August

Two months ago, open-weight AI models were a minority player on Vercel’s infrastructure. Now they’re running the show, at least by volume. Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch reported on August 22 that open-weight models accounted for 62% of all tokens processed through Vercel’s AI Gateway, up from 28.4% on June 24. How fast is fast? Open-weight models held just 11% of Vercel’s token volume in April. By June they were at 29%. By late August they crossed 62%. Vercel’s AI Gateway acts as a routing and traffic management layer for AI-powered applications, meaning its data reflects real production workloads from real companies, not benchmark experiments or lab conditions. The structural thing happening here is cost. Open-weight models can run at roughly one-tenth the price of their closed-source counterparts, and enterprises have figured out that not every AI task needs a premium model to get the job done. The spending paradox Despite commanding 62% of token volume, open-weight models are not commanding 62% of the money. Anthropic’s closed models captured between 61% and 65% of total expenditure on the gateway in recent reporting periods. Claude is processing a minority of tokens but collecting...