# DeepSeek enters the fight for token volume, Anthropic continues to dominate spend By Steven Van · 2026-06-08 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. ![Stacked bar chart of monthly spend share by lab at Oct 2025, Jan 2026, and Apr 2026. Anthropic's pink dominates throughout, OpenAI's teal jumps in April. By Apr]() Monthly spend share by AI lab: Anthropic's share stays largest across Oct 2025 to Apr 2026. ![Vercel]() Vercel The platform for frontend developers — deploy, preview, and scale web apps and AI agents with zero config. [View Vercel →]() Sources [Original source]() [Read DeepSeek enters the fight for token volume, Anthropic continues to dominate spend on Creators Toolbox]() --- Canonical source: https://creatorstoolbox.com/blog/vercel-deepseek-enters-the-fight-for-token-volume-anthropic-continues-to-domi