DeepSeek overtakes Google on volume, cost per token falls 13.6%

AI Gateway’s August 2026 Production Index, based on anonymized routing data through July, reports that token volume rose 59% and spending increased 37%, while the average price per token fell 13.6% as companies shifted workloads toward lower-cost models. DeepSeek became the second-largest lab by token volume, surpassing Google with about one-quarter of gateway tokens, largely driven by its low-cost V4 Flash model, while open-weight models reached 36% of volume and 8.6% of spending. New open-weight agent models, Moonshot’s Kimi K3 and Z.ai’s GLM 5.2, contributed most of the increase in open-weight spending by attracting higher-value workloads. Anthropic retained a dominant 65.1% share of spending despite handling about 30% of token volume, reflecting prices averaging 4.4 times those of other labs and continued strength in coding-agent workloads. Google’s token share declined sharply but its Nano Banana models overtook OpenAI’s GPT Image in image-generation volume, while ByteDance’s Seedance led video generation in both volume and spending.

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