An OpenAI flagship lost 38% of its daily usage in three days — then set three straight all-time highs

Whatstrending.ai, a service that tracks daily request counts for AI models via OpenRouter's usage feed, reports that OpenAI's flagship model gpt-5.6-luna experienced a 38.3% drop in daily usage over three days, followed by three consecutive all-time highs within the same week. The data, stored append-only in Cloudflare D1, reveals that monthly aggregates mask significant day-level volatility in model usage.

Everyone publishes AI model leaderboards. Almost nobody publishes the day-level curve — and the curve is where the actual story is. At whatstrending.ai https://whatstrending.ai/models we snapshot every model's daily request count from OpenRouter's usage feed into a database, once a day, INSERT OR IGNORE — a row can never be revised after the fact. We're 78 days in. Here is what openai/gpt-5.6-luna did over the last two weeks: | Date | Requests/day | |---|---| | Aug 04 | 162.9M | | Aug 05 | 180.8M | | Aug 06 | 193.8M | | Aug 07 | 210.8M | | Aug 08 | 222.5M ← peak | | Aug 09 | 209.6M | | Aug 10 | 171.6M | | Aug 11 | 137.3M ← floor: −38.3% off peak in 3 days | | Aug 12 | 143.2M | | Aug 13 | 157.3M | | Aug 14 | 231.8M ← new all-time high, +47.4% in one day | | Aug 15 | 237.3M | | Aug 16 | 243.5M ← third consecutive all-time high | A flagship model shed more than a third of its daily traffic in three days , then won all of it back — and more — inside the same week. Three consecutive days above the old peak as of Aug 16. Three checks, run before writing this: deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash-0731 and tencent/hy3 were setting their own highs on the same days — so this is not a provider-wide trailing-edge reporting droop.Monthly aggregates — which is what every public ranking shows — would have flattened this entire event into "usage grew". The day-level series shows real flagship usage is far more volatile than anything the leaderboards suggest: a −38% drawdown and a full recovery to new highs fit inside eight days. If you're making routing, capacity, or "which model is winning" decisions off monthly numbers, you're averaging away the actual signal. The live, daily-updated version of this curve is here: https://whatstrending.ai/models https://whatstrending.ai/models Method: daily snapshot of OpenRouter per-day request counts, 100 models/day, 78 days and counting, stored append-only INSERT OR IGNORE in Cloudflare D1.