Open weight takes 71.5% of tokens and 23% of spend
By Steven Van ·
Vercel's October AI Gateway index covers September: gateway spend was about 13 times December's, at a price per token 47% lower.
Open-weight models now process more than seven in ten tokens on Vercel's AI Gateway (71.5%) and account for 23% of spend, according to the October 2026 edition of its monthly AI Gateway Production Index. Vercel publishes the report from anonymized routing data, with most of the figures here covering September.
Open weight
- Open weight's share of spend has more than quadrupled since June, from about one in twenty gateway dollars to nearly one in four.
- Open-weight models processed the majority of gateway tokens for the first time in August. September brought the largest monthly gains in both token share and spend share in the index's history.
- The cheapest models drive token growth and the expensive ones drive spend. DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash alone processed nearly half of September's tokens but took 2.6% of spend, at about a fifth of the open-weight average price per token.
- Models priced at least four times the open-weight average accounted for about two-thirds of the increase in open-weight spend, led by Kimi K3.
Spend, price and switching
- September's gateway spend was about 13 times December's, while the average price per token was 47% lower.
- Almost one in three teams changed their most-used lab in September, an index record.
- Nearly 70% of September's gateway spend on Chinese models went through US-based providers, up from less than 10% in December.
New model launches
Jev was the fastest-adopted model in AI Gateway history, reaching 35% of paid teams in its first two weeks. Over the same period it accounted for just 0.27% of gateway spend. Opus 5.5 took more than one in ten gateway dollars in its first two weeks, the largest spend share of any September model launch.
The report's section on frontier models is headed "Frontier spend up 900%, spend share down 22%".
