# Open-weight models surge to 29% of volume, price per token flattens

DevFeed: [Open-weight models surge to 29% of volume, price per token flattens](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/open-weight-models-surge-to-29-of-volume-price-per-token-flattens-724.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://vercel.com/blog/ai-gateway-production-index-july-2026>)

Author: Harpreet Arora

Published: 2026-07-13T07:00:00Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [Vercel News](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/vercel-news.md>)

Topics: [Artificial Intelligence](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/ai.md>), [data](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/data.md>), [anthropic](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/anthropic.md>), [deepseek](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/deepseek.md>), [OpenAI](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/openai.md>), [Google](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/google.md>)

Tags: [2026](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/2026.md>), [ai](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ai.md>), [ai-gateway](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ai-gateway.md>), [anthropic](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/anthropic.md>), [cost](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/cost.md>), [deepseek](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/deepseek.md>), [google](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/google.md>), [models](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/models.md>), [open](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/open.md>), [openai](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/openai.md>), [production](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/production.md>), [release](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/release.md>), [tokens](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/tokens.md>)

## AI overview

The July 2026 AI Gateway Production Index reports that gateway token volume grew 29% month over month in June while spending grew 27% and average token prices remained flat. Open-weight models reached 29% of token volume for under 4% of spend, while Anthropic captured 61% of spending. The report also compares model and provider leadership across text, image, and video workloads.

## Source excerpt

AI Gateway Production Index -- July 2026 Every month, AI Gateway routes tens of trillions of tokens between production applications and AI labs, giving us a view of what AI usage actually looks like in today's enterprise. We publish that view here. See the Production Index reports published in May and June. July 2026 summary The July index reports on AI Gateway data collected in June 2026. AI Gateway token volume grew 29% month over month and spend grew 27%. The price per token was flat after rising almost 20% in May. Open-weight models ran 29% of gateway tokens, up from 11% in April, on under 4% of spend. DeepSeek reached 22.6% of token volume, in third place and less than two points behind Google, and GLM 5.2 broke into the gateway's top models by volume two weeks after release. Anthropic took 61% of gateway spend on 32% of tokens, and captured 72% or more of spend in every high-stakes use case. Each modality has a different leader. OpenAI's GPT Image generated 53% of images, ahead of Google's Nano Banana at 39%. Chinese labs took two-thirds of video spend, while xAI's Grok Imagine generated 42% of videos, the most of any model. Claude Fable 5 was released June 9 and reached 22% of Opus 4.8's request volume in four days. A US export-control directive suspended access for the rest of the month. AI investment kept climbing, and the average token price went flat In June, token volume and spend grew at nearly the same rate, 29% and 27%, while the price per token remained steady. The month before, spend had grown more than twice as fast as volume, driving the average token cost up by almost 20%. The market spent more overall, but not more per token. Since April, open-weight models have climbed from a ninth of all token volume to nearly a third, at about a tenth of the average token price on the gateway. That alone should have pulled the price per token down. But as cheap volume rose in June, so too did closed-weight frontier prices, up about 12% per token. They offset e