Every month, routes tens of trillions of tokens between production applications and AI labs, giving us visibility into what AI usage actually looks like, separate from leaderboards and benchmarks. We publish the data monthly in the AI Gateway production index. AI Gateway Last month, headlines about blown token budgets dominated tech news: its annual Claude Code budget shortly after Q1 and Amazon to curb unproductive tokenmaxxing. While runaway cost is a real problem, this month’s report shows that spend on production use cases still increased. Uber burned throughshut down KiroRank Two insights emerged from AI Gateway data in May: From February to April, volume distribution across labs on AI Gateway changed slowly, but in May, DeepSeek V4's launch completely shifted token share.

The low-cost end of the market that barely existed in April became AI Gateway’s third-largest provider by volume in May, without a significant impact on overall spend. In April, DeepSeek accounted for less than 1% of AI Gateway tokens and less than 0.2% of spend. In May, its volume share jumped to 17% of tokens, putting it in third place, ahead of OpenAI. Almost all of the volume comes from two models: and…