DeepSeek enters the fight for token volume, Anthropic continues to dominate spend

This post introduces data from May 2026 showing a significant shift in AI model usage patterns on Vercel's AI Gateway. Key contributions include: 1. The emergence of DeepSeek V4 as a major player in token volume (17% share) due to its low cost and sufficient quality for production, particularly in coding agent use cases. 2. The continued dominance of Anthropic in spend share (65%), especially for high-stakes applications like AI app generation and coding agents, indicating a trend of cost-conscious routing where lower-cost models handle high-volume tasks and frontier models are reserved for critical workloads. 3. An overall increase in AI Gateway tokens (+20% MoM) and spend (+43% MoM), with customers paying more per token on average, driven by the growth of frontier model usage in demanding applications.