DeepSeek Joins the Race for Token Share, While Anthropic Continues to Lead in Spending Volume

According to Vercel AI Gateway data, AI usage is surging every month. Overall token volume rose 20% month-over-month, and total spending rose 43%, showing that AI adoption is accelerating.

In particular, DeepSeek's growth stands out. Following the release of DeepSeek V4, DeepSeek's token share jumped from under 1% to 17% in just one month, surpassing OpenAI to take 3rd place. However, because its price competitiveness is so overwhelming (20 to 50 times cheaper than Anthropic's models), its share of total spending still remains around 1%.

Anthropic**, on the other hand, maintains overwhelming dominance in terms of spending volume. Anthropic's spending share has risen to 65%, and in particular, in high-stakes use cases such as AI app generation, back-office agents, and coding agents, it accounts for 70-80% of spending.

Recently, companies have been adopting a Smart Routing strategy for cost efficiency. The trend is to deploy cheaper models for simple tasks and high-performance models for complex tasks, thereby maximizing cost-effectiveness while increasing the overall token budget.