Every month, billions of tokens quietly change hands between AI labs. The flows reveal who is winning developer demand — and who is being substituted away.
There is a comfortable story that the AI market has settled into a stable oligopoly. The usage data on OpenRouter — the largest neutral router of LLM traffic — tells a different one. Share is moving, fast, and in a consistent direction.
Vendor share of OpenRouter tokens (%, 7-day average)
The lines cross. That is the whole point. A market in equilibrium produces flat, parallel bands; this one produces a reshuffling. Over the window, Deepseek added +19.6pp of share while Minimax shed -12.7pp.
The substitution is directional
Share shifts are not random churn. When you rank vendors by net change, the market splits cleanly into two camps — and the gainers' rise tracks the losers' decline almost day for day.
Net share shift over the window (percentage points)
Who is taking whose lunch
Pairing vendors by anti-correlated share trajectories surfaces the cleanest substitutions — one rises precisely as the other fades:
x-ai-5.2pp → deepseek+19.6pp(corr -0.83)
google-12.2pp → deepseek+19.6pp(corr -0.74)
x-ai-5.2pp → tencent+11.1pp(corr -0.73)
qwen-2.2pp → xiaomi+11.6pp(corr -0.63)
google-12.2pp → xiaomi+11.6pp(corr -0.57)
anthropic-8.0pp → xiaomi+11.6pp(corr -0.53)
The numbers are abstract; the pictures are not. Each panel overlays one rising vendor on one
fading vendor — the same share, changing hands:
Deepseek rising as X-Ai falls · corr -0.83Deepseek rising as Google falls · corr -0.74Tencent rising as X-Ai falls · corr -0.73Xiaomi rising as Qwen falls · corr -0.63Xiaomi rising as Google falls · corr -0.57Xiaomi rising as Anthropic falls · corr -0.53
The pattern is not subtle: cheaper, open-weight challengers are absorbing the volume that incumbents like Google and Anthropic once took for granted. Volume is the leading indicator; revenue is the one that moves last.
Inside each lab, an upgrade treadmill
Zoom into any single vendor and a second migration appears — between its own models. Usage doesn't sit still on a version; it climbs the release ladder. Each band below is one model; watch how the newest release swells as the prior one thins.
Anthropic runs mostly on Claude Sonnet 4.6 today (19% of its volume).Google runs mostly on Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite today (15% of its volume).Deepseek runs mostly on DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 today (43% of its volume).Openai runs mostly on GPT-5.6 Luna today (56% of its volume).Xiaomi runs mostly on MiMo-V2.5 today (93% of its volume).Minimax runs mostly on MiniMax M3 today (89% of its volume).Z-Ai runs mostly on GLM 5.2 today (91% of its volume).X-Ai runs mostly on Grok 4.5 today (73% of its volume).Tencent runs mostly on Hy3 today (99% of its volume).
This is the incumbent's consolation prize: in-family migration is retention, not churn. A user moving from Opus 4.6 to 4.7 still pays the same lab. The danger is the other chart — when the next upgrade a developer reaches for carries a different logo.
What to watch
The volume curve, not the dollar. Spend share is a lagging indicator; the cheap-model volume line moves first.
Default models inside agent apps. A handful of coding agents route most of the tokens — their defaults are kingmakers.
The slope, not the level. Anthropic still leads on revenue; the question is the direction of its share, and right now it points down.