Ask which AI model is best, and the answer changes before the ink dries. That's what happens in an industry where new models are released weekly. Every benchmark measures a different race, and every race crowns its own winner, but Vercel has a unique view of the industry through production workloads. serves tens of trillions of tokens across hundreds of models through real applications and agents. AI Gateway :What we're seeing This report is built on data from seven months of production traffic from AI Gateway, with usage from over 200K+ unique teams. Cost and volume rankings disagree because they measure two different workloads, even for the same customer.

By spend in April 2026, Anthropic took 61%, Google 21%, and OpenAI 12%. By token volume, the picture flipped. 38% of April traffic through AI Gateway routed to Google, 26% to Anthropic, 13% to OpenAI, and 10% to xAI. Smaller labs split the rest. Some models are positioned to win by being cheap enough per token to carry huge volume, while others are priced high enough to make sense only for quality-critical work. The different models are not competing for the same call. In aggregate the same customer base sits on both…