Anthropic Holds Over 50% of Vercel AI Spend as DeepSeek Tops One-Third of Tokens
Updated
Updated · TechCrunch · Jul 7
Anthropic Holds Over 50% of Vercel AI Spend as DeepSeek Tops One-Third of Tokens
1 articles · Updated · TechCrunch · Jul 7
Summary
Vercel data show Anthropic still captures more than half of AI spending on the platform even after open-source models surged in usage, with its share only slightly lower over the past month.
DeepSeek now processes just over one-third of tokens on Vercel, and Z.ai has climbed to fourth place, suggesting enterprises are shifting mature workloads to cheaper models without abandoning premium ones.
OpenRouter points the same way: DeepSeek V4Flash handles 5.3 trillion weekly tokens versus just over 2 trillion for Anthropic's Opus 4.8, but Opus costs about 23 times more per million tokens—$1.37 versus $0.06.
Decagon CEO Jesse Zhang argues that split reflects an AI lifecycle in which frontier models dominate early discovery and open-source models take over production, allowing overall frontier-model spending to stay resilient.
The pattern suggests a durable two-tier AI market, with frontier labs preserving premium pricing even as open-source gains share in high-volume deployment.