· Max Tower · Economy · 2 min read
The Rise of Artificial Stupidity
Cheaper and dumber models are accelerating past the frontier
The trend on OpenRouter is clearly favoring cheaper and dumber models. Like many other products, market share is accruing to the inexpensive commodity versions that are “good enough”.
In early January, Openrouter served 7.6T tokens. The latest Claude models at that time accounted for 16% of that amount. Opus and Sonnet v4.5 were the first and second choice of model for Openrouter users. Today, the market has completely flipped.
By late August, Openrouter is serving 115T tokens. (btw, that is insane growth) Claude models no longer crack the top 10. Opus sold 1375B and Sonnet sold 1226B. Combined, that’s now 2% share.
The most expensive model in the top 10 is GLM 5.3 which is priced at approximately $1/$4 in/out tokens. Most of the top 10 models are priced well under $1 and considered to be less capable than the frontier.
You may think Openrouter isn’t a great market snapshot since most Anthropic/OpenAI tokens are sold directly to enterprise. This is certainly true, but Luna (20c/$1.20) OpenAI’s cheapest model is the only big lab example in the top 10 on Openrouter. It only started climbing the charts after the token price was reduced by 80%.
