Peter Walker
@PeterJ_Walker
Head of Insights @OpenRouter | Data Storyteller
ex @cartainc, lover of data viz.
545 Following 23K Followers
Anthropic vs OpenAI so far in 2026
- Clearly OAI got back in the game with steady gains in spend share throughout the year
- Tokens go kinda wild with the introduction of Luna + new Haiku
- Opus 5.5 reversed the trend
Sweet, sweet competition
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OpenAI and Anthropic have both seen spending on their models rise strongly over the past 12 weeks.
The Anthropic jump corresponds to the Opus 5.5 launch while OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra kicked off their jump in early Sept.
Data from users on OpenRouter.
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To win traffic you have to focus 100% on serving the best inference.
Quality. Speed. Cost.
“The F1 of inference” - hell yea.
And just like F1, speed matters. But if you’re the fastest car but you skid in even the slightest rain, you can’t win.
Gotta optimize for more than just speed or price!
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it now only makes sense to serve frontier GPUs on openrouter because that's where you see "fast and cheap" become achievable
it's like the F1 of inference. you can't put a F3 car on the grid & still hope to be competitive
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Honestly massive improvement. Hopefully this routing change can help create the conditions for high quality inference across the board
We just shipped our biggest improvement to our provider router since the founding of OpenRouter.
Before, we prioritized mostly based on price. The new router now rewards the best quality inference for the actual cost of a request, so requests stay cheap but are also fast and reliable.
Providers that deliver more value automatically win more traffic, so every provider has a reason to keep improving. And every time a provider gets better, so does your inference on OpenRouter.
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No one anywhere ever wants to "swap notes on what we're seeing"
New: spending on Anthropic models on OpenRouter hit a new peak last week, up 47% from the summer high during the week of June 8.
Opus 5.5 was the top model by spend over the last 7 days across 20 of the 29 task categories we currently track.
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A multi model future is worth fighting for 🙏
The biggest lie in AI is that the future belongs to one winner.
Every technology wave starts with one company promising that one walled garden is all you'll ever need. And every time, market forces and creativity break the walls down.
I cofounded OpenSea and now OpenRouter around the opposite bet: humanity will refuse to be locked in.
Intelligence was never meant to belong to one lab, one model, or one gatekeeper.
The future of AI is open, plural, and yours to choose.
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Ya no one can recover from a Q3 where growth slowed...and imagine if it happened again in Q4 after that! No business could re-accelerate after that sort of double blow...
all you need to know: Anthropic ducked Q3 in its S-1.
that omission tells you all you need. demand has drop, economics haven’t gotten worse. and a company that is allegedly built around trust is trying to skirt the truth.
—-
quote is from @zerohedge
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Guys, cmon. This was all startups analyzed, not just those who had exits.
You think there were over 4,000 startups exits per year on average since 1987?
88% of VC-backed founders who exited their companies got $0. Eduardo Azevedo and Kent Smetters analysed 157,669 startups and 248,454 founders from 1987 to 2025.
Let that sink in...
The ability of bears and bulls to take new information and automatically place it in the puzzle they’ve already created is wild.
A S-1 drops and it feels like no one’s mind is changed in the slightest 😅
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Me: Opus 5.5 had a good launch! Here’s data on how much token volumes rose.
Comments: oh so you think Anthropic won? And it’s worth 2T? You absolute imbecile. You mentally challenged shill. Screw you and your family. Cry tears of guilt and shame forever.
🤷
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New from OpenRouter: 7-day average token volume for Anthropic models is up 3.6x since the launch of Opus 5.5
Sonnet 5.5 and Haiku 5.5 have also been well received.
Users on OpenRouter still do something like 4.5 million requests a day on Sonnet 4.6 and Sonnet 5.
Who can say why? 🤷
⚡ @OpenRouter tip #2#
Use ~anthropic/claude-opus-latest as your model on OpenRouter and you are always on the newest Opus. When the next one ships, your code picks it up with no change.
There are aliases like this for most model families. What a few point to today:
~anthropic/claude-opus-latest → Claude Opus 5.5
~openai/gpt-luna-latest → GPT-6 Luna
~google/gemini-flash-latest → Gemini 3.8 Flash
~moonshotai/kimi-latest → Kimi K3
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Founding is super hard and an unlikely path to money.
But not sure why a founder departing before an M&A event or IPO would result in them receiving “no payoff”. What about the vested equity? Something off here.
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Holy moly... this new paper finds that 88% of VC-backed founders receive zero exit value 🤪🤪🤪
Today we're launching the first-ever gateway Security Center.
@OpenRouter now lets you audit all your keys in one place, see which ones are safe to remove, browse keys by level of risk, and control an IP allowlist.
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hey thanks for the shoutout @JensenHuang 🙏
Blended effective price per token can keep falling for a long time even if the list prices of new models remain flat or even increase a bit.
Cache is king
Cache rates across the AI landscape have gotten markedly better in 2026.
We saw an 85% median cache rate in agentic requests across OpenRouter last month, up from 65% in the beginning of the year. And the vast majority of providers now serve agentic cache at 70% or higher.
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Over the last 7 days, Opus 5.5 is the top model in spending on OpenRouter for 20 of the 29 task categories we track
1) meme of astronauts with guns, cmon now.
2) there are way more VCs today than 10 years ago so…ya.
3) blame LPs?
4) most VCs who don’t do this get one fund and fail (as do most that follow trends, fwiw)
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More than any time in my career, VCs seem to be underwriting other investors’ interest rather than the company itself.
