DeepSeek leads usage, Anthropic dominates spend
vercel data shows open-source deepseek leads in token volume, yet anthropic captures over half of spending, suggesting a stable two-tier ai economy.
vercel's ai dashboard reports that open-source model deepseek now processes over a third of all tokens on the platform, surpassing proprietary rivals in volume. despite this volume shift, anthropic accounts for more than 50% of total spending on vercel, a trend reinforced by openrouter data showing frontier model costs can be 23x higher than open-source alternatives. this dynamic supports a 'lifecycle' theory where expensive frontier models are used for discovery and proving new use cases, which then migrate to cheaper open-source models for production. as a result, frontier labs are maintaining revenue growth even as open source adoption accelerates.