DeepSeek enters the fight for token volume, Anthropic continues to dominate spend
By Steven Van ·
Vercel's May 2026 AI Gateway data shows DeepSeek's token share jumping from under 1% to 17% while Anthropic's spend share climbed to 65%.
DeepSeek broke into the token-volume rankings on Vercel's AI Gateway in May 2026, according to the platform's latest production index. The launch of DeepSeek V4 pushed the lab's share of tokens from under 1% in April to 17% in May, making it the gateway's third-largest provider by volume, ahead of OpenAI, while its share of spend stayed near 1%.
Total tokens routed through the gateway grew 20% month over month, and total spend grew 43%, as customers paid almost 20% more per token on average than in April. Anthropic's share of that spend grew from 61% to 65%, and it held 70-80% of spend across every high-stakes use case Vercel tracks: AI app generation, back office agents, and coding agents.
Vercel frames the two trends together as smarter routing rather than runaway cost: teams sent more low-stakes work to cheaper new models while keeping high-stakes work on Anthropic's models, and overall spend on production use cases kept rising.
