I tracked which AI models people actually use for a month. The top 5 are all Chinese or open-weight.

A developer tracked OpenRouter's daily usage rankings for a month to see which AI models developers actually use in production. The top five models by token volume were all from Chinese labs or open-weight providers, led by DeepSeek V4 Flash and MiMo-V2.5. The developer notes that cheap, open models dominate when developers pay per token, with a 50x price gap versus premium models like Claude Opus.

Everyone argues about which AI model is "best" using benchmarks. I wanted to know something simpler: which models do people actually run in production, when they pay per token and can pick anything? So I started tracking OpenRouter's published usage rankings every day. OpenRouter is a neutral marketplace: developers route requests to whatever model they want and pay by the token, so the rankings are a real, money-on-the-line signal of demand. Here is what the last 7 days look like, by token volume routed per model. | Rank | Model | Provider | Tokens/wk | Price in/out per MTok | |---|---|---|---|---| | 1 | DeepSeek V4 Flash | DeepSeek | 4.72T | $0.09 / $0.18 | | 2 | MiMo-V2.5 | Xiaomi | 4.38T | $0.11 / $0.28 | | 3 | MiniMax M3 | MiniMax | 3.68T | $0.30 / $1.20 | | 4 | Owl Alpha | OpenRouter free | 3.55T | Free | | 5 | Hy3 preview | Tencent | 3.46T | $0.06 / $0.21 | | 6 | Claude Opus 4.7 | Anthropic | 2.23T | $5 / $25 | | 7 | GLM 5.2 | Z.ai | 2.20T | $0.94 / $3 | | 8 | DeepSeek V4 Pro | DeepSeek | 2.08T | $0.44 / $0.87 | | 9 | Claude Opus 4.8 | Anthropic | 1.92T | $5 / $25 | | 10 | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | Anthropic | 1.54T | $3 / $15 | The entire top 5 is a Chinese lab or open-weight. The first OpenAI model, GPT-5.5, does not show up until 12. The first Gemini is 13. Before anyone rightly objects: this is OpenRouter only. It measures the open API and router market, where developers pick a model per call. It does NOT include first-party traffic like ChatGPT, the Gemini app, or claude.ai, so the big consumer flagships are heavily undercounted in this view. So this is not "OpenAI is losing." It is something more specific, and to me more interesting: when developers route through a neutral marketplace and pay their own token bill, they overwhelmingly reach for cheap open and Chinese models. Look at the two ends of the table. DeepSeek V4 Flash is $0.09 / $0.18 per million tokens. Claude Opus is $5 / $25. That is roughly a 50x difference on output. For a chatbot you babysit, quality wins and you happily pay for Opus. But for agent loops, batch pipelines, RAG over big corpora, and anything that burns tokens at scale, a 50x price gap is the whole decision. The open and Chinese models are now good enough for those workloads and an order of magnitude cheaper. That combination is what the usage chart is showing. I update this leaderboard daily here if you want to watch it move: https://whatstrending.ai/models https://whatstrending.ai/models What are you actually routing for bulk or agent work right now? DeepSeek, GLM, MiniMax, or something you self-host? Curious how this matches what people see in production.