DeepSeek's 53% of OpenRouter tokens is a chart, not a market

A chart posted to r/LocalLLaMA on 4 November says DeepSeek served 53% of the 27 trillion tokens that crossed OpenRouter the previous day, and that open-weight labs together cleared 75%. Both figures hold up against the series behind the image. Neither is a market share. The thread has drawn more than 700 points.

A tracker's chart, not OpenRouter's

The post is by u/Comfortable-Rock-498 and links dirac.run, an independent tracker that reconstructs per-lab volume from what its method note calls "OpenRouter aggregate daily usage." The 53% is a third party's cut of the platform's data, not an OpenRouter publication, and it covers a single day. For 3 November, dirac lists DeepSeek at 53.17% of 26.94 trillion tokens and open-weight labs at 75.68%; for 4 November, 54.92% of 25.90 trillion. The same table puts DeepSeek at 46.30% on 2 November. A series that moves seven points in a day describes a trend, not a level.

OpenRouter's own numbers split tokens from spend

OpenRouter's own aggregates make the same distinction. In the first edition of its Inferred newsletter, weekly volume runs from 0.5 trillion tokens in the week of 13 January 2025 to 128.4 trillion in the week of 14 September 2026, roughly 250 times in 20 months. That week, open-weight models took 72% of tokens and 69% came from Chinese labs. Closed-weight models took 73% of spend in the second week of September, down from 89% the week of 5 January. Moonshot, Z.ai and DeepSeek each grew monthly spend at least tenfold between January and August and were still, together, "only in the high single digits" of all spend.

A token is not a unit of revenue

Nothing in a token count is weighted by model size, context length or price. DeepSeek's Flash builds are designed to be cheap and to be called constantly by agents that reread their own context, the workload that inflates volume fastest. OpenRouter's leaderboard for the week through 4 November has DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 first at 57.6 trillion tokens, up 46%, with Claude Opus 5.5 sixth at 6.81 trillion. Ranking by tokens and ranking by invoice are different lists, and only one of them pays for data centres.

Who the sample leaves out

The thread's objections are about the sample. "Organizations that spend millions on AI don't use openrouter," writes Tall-Wasabi5030. NoFutureBen attacks the routing instead: "they have horrible cache aware routing," saying it holds a provider choice for ten minutes while DeepSeek's own API keeps a cache for days, which makes the platform a weak proxy even for DeepSeek's traffic. OpenRouter is a reseller channel; enterprise contracts, cloud marketplaces and self-hosting sit outside it. Per-lab revenue on the platform, or an audited share series, would settle what 53% means. A count of tokens cannot.