DeepSeek enters the fight for token volume, Anthropic continues to dominate spend
Quick Answer
DeepSeek's V4 Flash model surged to 17% of token volume in May, significantly impacting the market with costs 20-50x lower than Anthropic's models.
Quick Take
Despite this, Anthropic maintained a dominant 65% share of spending, indicating a split in budget strategies as teams increasingly route workloads based on cost and quality.
Key Points
- DeepSeek's token share rose from under 1% to 17% in May.
- Anthropic's spending share increased from 61% to 65% in the same period.
- DeepSeek V4 Flash costs $0.14 input / $0.28 output per million tokens.
- Teams are optimizing model routing for cost efficiency amidst rising overall spend.
- B2B applications cost 60% more per token compared to B2C applications.
Source Excerpt
Every month, routes tens of trillions of tokens between production applications and AI labs, giving us visibility into what AI usage actually looks like, separate from leaderboards and benchmarks. We publish the data monthly in the AI Gateway production index. AI GatewayLast month, headlines about blown token budgets dominated tech news: its annual Claude Code budget shortly after Q1 and Amazon to curb unproductive tokenmaxxing.
While runaway cost is a real problem, this month’s report shows that spend on production use cases still increased. …
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