{"slug": "openrouter-s-staggering-token-chart-is-the-ai-bubble-debate-in-a-single-image", "title": "OpenRouter's staggering token chart is the AI bubble debate in a single image", "summary": "Weekly token consumption on OpenRouter surged more than 25,000 percent since January 2025, rising from 0.5 trillion to 126.2 trillion tokens, according to The Decoder. The publication attributes the increase less to actual AI usage than to token-hungry reasoning models and a growing number of unoptimized AI agents that burn through tokens at staggering rates.", "body_md": "On OpenRouter, weekly token consumption has surged more than 25,000 percent since January 2025, from 0.5 to 126.2 trillion tokens. The number looks impressive, but it says less about actual AI usage than about token-hungry reasoning models and a growing number of unoptimized AI agents that burn through tokens at staggering rates.\n\nThe article [OpenRouter's staggering token chart is the AI bubble debate in a single image](https://the-decoder.com/openrouters-staggering-token-chart-is-the-ai-bubble-debate-in-a-single-image/) appeared first on [The Decoder](https://the-decoder.com).", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/openrouter-s-staggering-token-chart-is-the-ai-bubble-debate-in-a-single-image", "canonical_source": "https://the-decoder.com/openrouters-staggering-token-chart-is-the-ai-bubble-debate-in-a-single-image/", "published_at": "2026-09-17 10:24:32+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-09-17 10:55:55.136641+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "large-language-models", "ai-agents", "ai-infrastructure"], "entities": ["OpenRouter", "The Decoder"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/openrouter-s-staggering-token-chart-is-the-ai-bubble-debate-in-a-single-image", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/openrouter-s-staggering-token-chart-is-the-ai-bubble-debate-in-a-single-image.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/openrouter-s-staggering-token-chart-is-the-ai-bubble-debate-in-a-single-image.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/openrouter-s-staggering-token-chart-is-the-ai-bubble-debate-in-a-single-image.jsonld"}}