Why the rise of open source AI isn’t hurting Anthropic … yet

On Monday, Decagon CEO Jesse Zhang published a provocative caller theory, posted nether the rubric “Everyone is incorrect astir unfastened root AI successful the enterprise.” The station grapples with 1 of the astir absorbing contradictions of today’s AI economy: More mature AI deployments are switching to lighter models, helium says, adjacent astatine his ain company. But the wide walk connected costly state-of-the-art models has hardly budged.

It’s a caller mode to deliberation astir the narration betwixt frontier and open-source models. In Zhang’s telling, they aren’t competitors, and open-source models’ occurrence isn’t coming astatine the disbursal of frontier labs. Instead, they’re 2 phases of the aforesaid lifecycle, with costly frontier models being utilized to beryllium retired usage cases that tin beryllium passed on to cheaper open-source alternatives arsenic they mature.

As much mature usage cases switch to lighter models, caller usage cases support arising — and the wide walk connected frontier models hardly goes down.

Zhang doesn’t springiness overmuch information to enactment the point, but the information isn’t hard to find. Vercel’s AI gateway dashboard shows that, successful conscionable the past week, DeepSeek has surged into the pb for token volumes, present processing conscionable implicit a 3rd of the tokens passing done the company’s infrastructure. Z.ai — the laboratory down the fashionable GLM-5.2 exemplary — jumped into a respectable 4th spot implicit the aforesaid period. 

But if you scroll down to wide token spend, you’ll spot Anthropic inactive accounts for much than fractional of the wide AI walk connected the platform. Given that overmuch of the caller alteration comes from Anthropic’s ain rising prices, the stock has dropped somewhat implicit the past month, but not significantly.

Image Credits:Vercel dashboard / information export

OpenRouter tells a akin story, capturing a overmuch larger (but somewhat little enterprise-y) conception of the market. Deepseek V4Flash is the main victor connected wide usage, processing 5.3 trillion tokens weekly. The astir fashionable frontier model, Opus 4.8, handles conscionable implicit 2 trillion. OpenRouter doesn’t fertile models by full spend, but it registers the mean token outgo for Opus 4.8 arsenic astir 23x higher than V4Flash ($1.37 per cardinal tokens, compared to conscionable 6 cents), which would mean Opus was inactive astir apt capturing the lion’s stock of spending.

Those figures don’t adjacent seizure the newest arrival, Nvidia’s Nemotron, which is poised to leap to the beforehand of the pack by virtuousness of Nvidia’s beardown connections and the model’s ain utmost adaptability.

Those figures don’t afloat beryllium Zhang’s constituent astir the AI lifecycles, but they bash amusement frontier labs similar Anthropic aren’t suffering excessively overmuch from the emergence of unfastened root — astatine slightest not yet. One mentation is that the marketplace of AI-addressable tasks is increasing truthful accelerated that the apical models are capable to support their presumption conscionable by dominating early-stage deployments. As Zhang puts it, “The frontier labs volition support owning discovery. Open root volition progressively ain production.” Another mentation mightiness beryllium that, adjacent arsenic clients determination to open-source, galore usage cases are truthful hard that they can’t beryllium wholly replaced with cheaper alternatives.

Either way, this two-tiered system of models whitethorn go a comparatively unchangeable diagnostic of the AI economy.

As precocious arsenic past September, I was penning astir the anticipation that instauration labs would extremity up selling java beans to Starbucks — that is, serving arsenic commodity inputs portion the exertion furniture reaped the benefits. Some parts of that prediction came true: vertical AI plays switched to lighter models, for one, and the economics of “GPT wrapper” startups person remained mostly stable. 

But we’re besides seeing that, token for token, frontier providers person been capable to clasp connected to the astir desirable portion of the marketplace. the premium token price. And that doesn’t look apt to alteration immoderate clip soon.