DeepSeek V4 doubled its OpenRouter token share, and the bill it displaced was ~130x bigger

Agentic requests burn about 15 times the tokens of a human request, according to OpenRouter's own data ^[12], and that multiplier is the mechanism behind everything else. On a blended million in and million out, V4 Flash's cheapest endpoint runs about $0.27 against roughly $35 for GPT-5.5, a gap of about 130x ^[2]; on output alone it is closer to 167x ^[1]. The ratio does not change when a workload turns agentic, but the absolute money does, because the same gap is applied to fifteen times the tokens ^[5]. Anything that runs in a loop and calls tools stops being a model choice and becomes a procurement decision about price per token.

Inside DeepSeek's own traffic the two populations behaved differently, which is the more useful evidence. Human sessions stayed on V3.2 through the first five months of the year ^[14], so this is not a broad swing in taste; it is agent loops shopping on cost. Hobbyists now route close to a third of their tokens to DeepSeek models ^[7], and OpenRouter says users at AI-native companies and large organisations also sent considerably more traffic there in early June than they did in January ^[8].

Two things temper the read. The volume jump did not produce a matching jump in share of spend ^[10], so the table DeepSeek now tops is the one denominated in the cheapest unit available. And the segmentation carrying the agentic argument is OpenRouter's own: a seven-signal weighted composite scored at the API key level, with tool call rate, turn count and gap timing among the inputs ^[11]. That is a reasonable proxy rather than an observation of what those keys were doing, and the party publishing it sells routing. The same post puts DeepSeek at nearly 20% at the start of June ^[5] and at 18% in its January-to-June comparison ^[4], so treat the figure as a band.

The country arithmetic is the number worth writing down. If American models held about three quarters of tokens through 2025 ^[16] and Chinese models passed them in early June ^[17], Chinese share moved from no more than roughly a quarter to above half: a swing of at least 25 percentage points in under eighteen months, on a base that was itself growing ^[4]. The named Chinese gainers alongside DeepSeek were Xiaomi, Minimax and Tencent, and OpenRouter attributes the offsetting losses to Google and OpenAI ^[6]. Read plainly, buyers substituted on price at the precise moment their workloads began consuming fifteen times more of the product.