Why the rise of open supply AI is not hurting Anthropic … but

On Monday, Decagon CEO Jesse Zhang printed a provocative new concept, posted below the title “Everyone is wrong about open source AI in the enterprise.” The put up grapples with probably the most attention-grabbing contradictions of immediately’s AI financial system: Extra mature AI deployments are switching to lighter fashions, he says, even at his personal firm. However the total spend on costly state-of-the-art fashions has barely budged.

It’s a brand new means to consider the connection between frontier and open supply fashions. In Zhang’s telling, they aren’t rivals, and open supply fashions’ success isn’t coming on the expense of frontier labs. As an alternative, they’re two phases of the identical life cycle, with costly frontier fashions getting used to show out use instances that may be handed alongside to cheaper open supply alternate options as they mature.

As extra mature use instances switch to lighter models, new use instances preserve arising — and the general spend on frontier fashions barely goes down.

Zhang doesn’t give a lot knowledge to assist the purpose, however the knowledge isn’t onerous to search out. Vercel’s AI gateway dashboard reveals that, in simply the previous week, DeepSeek has surged into the lead for token volumes, now processing simply over a 3rd of the tokens passing by way of the corporate’s infrastructure. Z.ai — the lab behind the favored GLM-5.2 mannequin — jumped into a good fourth place over the identical interval. 

However for those who scroll right down to total token spend, you’ll see Anthropic nonetheless accounts for greater than half of the general AI spend on the platform. On condition that a lot of the latest change comes from Anthropic’s personal rising costs, the share has dropped barely over the previous month, however not considerably.

OpenRouter tells the same story, capturing a a lot bigger (however barely much less enterprise-y) phase of the market. DeepSeek V4 Flash is the principle winner on total utilization, processing 5.3 trillion tokens weekly. The preferred frontier mannequin, Opus 4.8, handles simply over 2 trillion. OpenRouter doesn’t rank fashions by complete spend, but it surely registers the typical token value for Opus 4.8 as roughly 23x increased than V4 Flash ($1.37 per million tokens, in comparison with simply 6 cents), which might imply Opus was nonetheless most likely capturing the lion’s share of spending.

These figures don’t even seize the most recent arrival, Nvidia’s Nemotron, which is poised to leap to the front of the pack by advantage of Nvidia’s robust connections and the mannequin’s personal excessive adaptability.

These figures don’t totally show Zhang’s level concerning the AI life cycles, however they do present frontier labs like Anthropic aren’t struggling an excessive amount of from the rise of open supply — at the very least not but. One rationalization is that the market of AI-addressable duties is rising so quick that the highest fashions are capable of preserve their place simply by dominating early-stage deployments. As Zhang places it, “The frontier labs will preserve proudly owning discovery. Open supply will more and more personal manufacturing.” One other rationalization is perhaps that, at the same time as purchasers transfer to open supply, many use instances are so troublesome that they will’t be fully changed with cheaper alternate options.

Both means, this two-tiered financial system of fashions might turn out to be a comparatively secure function of the AI financial system.

As not too long ago as final September, I used to be writing concerning the risk that basis labs would find yourself selling coffee beans to Starbucks — that’s, serving as commodity inputs whereas the applying layer reaped the advantages. Some components of that prediction got here true: Vertical AI performs switched to lighter fashions, for one, and the economics of “GPT wrapper” startups have remained principally secure. 

However we’re additionally seeing that, token for token, frontier suppliers have been capable of maintain on to probably the most fascinating a part of {the marketplace} — the premium token worth. And that doesn’t appear more likely to change any time quickly.