Claim LD11-HQ-C14 (v1.1)
OpenRouter and a16z report that open-weight models reached approximately one-third of token usage on OpenRouter by late 2025; an NBER working paper using OpenRouter and Microsoft Azure usage data reports a lower open-source share of OpenRouter tokens, about 25% by December 2025 after a peak near 45% in August.
Provenance and status
- Claim type
- ESTIMATE (as printed: “ESTIMATE”)
- Publication status
- ELIGIBLE (QUALIFIED) (as printed: “ELIGIBLE WITH QUALIFIER”)
- Verification state
- CONTENT_VERIFIED_PRIMARY (as printed: “CONTENT VERIFIED”; verified by: UNKNOWN)
- Does not license
- Global model share, enterprise production share or infrastructure independence
- Source (field 6, as printed)
- OpenRouter/a16z, State of AI: 100 Trillion Token Study; Demirer, Fradkin, Tadelis & Peng, “The Emerging Market for Intelligence: Pricing, Supply, and Demand for LLMs,” NBER Working Paper 34608, December 2025
- Source type (field 7)
- PREPRINT, WORKING_PAPER (as printed: “Platform telemetry / preprint; Academic working paper”)
- Institutional position
- Platform + investor; Academic + industry (authors affiliated with Microsoft and Amazon)
- Maturity (claim evidence / publication maturity)
- EMERGING (as printed: “EMERGING”)
- Recorded date
- 2026-10-13
- Currentness / correction
- This is the current version. No correction or concern relation is recorded on its Sources.
Version
Pinned version v1.1 (entry LD11-HQ-C14--v1.1) — this page never floats to newer evidence.
This pinned version is also the current version.
What changed in this version
This version supersedes LD11-HQ-C14--v1.0, which stays available unchanged.
- Changed fields
- 2 PUBLIC-FACING CLAIM; 6 SOURCE; 7 SOURCE TYPE; 8 INSTITUTIONAL POSITION; 9 SCOPE; 11 SAMPLE / DATASET; 14 MAIN RESULT; 18 LIMITATIONS; 19 CONTRADICTORY / SUPPORTING SOURCES; 25 RECORDED DATE
- What changed
- The claim now reports, beside the OpenRouter/a16z figure, the lower open-source token share that Demirer, Fradkin, Tadelis & Peng (NBER Working Paper 34608, December 2025) report from OpenRouter data, and cites that paper as a second source. The OpenRouter/a16z figure is unchanged.
- Why
- A literature check on 13 October 2026 found a second analysis of the same platform, by academic authors with Microsoft and Amazon affiliations, that reports about 25% open-source share by December 2025, not about one-third. Version 1.0 cited only the platform's own report, so a reader could take one-third as settled. The figures were read from the NBER paper by AI agents, not by a person, to the same standard as the rest of this ledger (primary-text reading by AI, no named human expert).
Pinned Sources (field 6, version-specific)
- “OpenRouter/a16z, State of AI: 100 Trillion Token Study” → SRC-LD11-OPENROUTER-A16Z-100T-TOKEN-STUDY--v1.0 — OpenRouter/a16z, State of AI: 100 Trillion Token Study; class PREPRINT (explicit public provenance pin)
- “Demirer, Fradkin, Tadelis & Peng, “The Emerging Market for Intelligence: Pricing, Supply, and Demand for LLMs,” NBER Working Paper 34608, December 2025” → SRC-SL-DEMIRER-FRADKIN-TADELIS-PENG-NBER-34608--v1.0 — Demirer, Fradkin, Tadelis & Peng, “The Emerging Market for Intelligence: Pricing, Supply, and Demand for LLMs,” NBER Working Paper 34608, December 2025; class WORKING_PAPER (explicit public provenance pin)
Read the originals
- SRC-LD11-OPENROUTER-A16Z-100T-TOKEN-STUDY: open the original
- SRC-SL-DEMIRER-FRADKIN-TADELIS-PENG-NBER-34608: open the original
All 25 canonical Claim fields (raw values and normalized values)
| # | Canonical field | Canonical value (verbatim) | Normalized (Claim Value Vocabulary v1.0.2) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | CLAIM ID | LD11-HQ-C14 | — |
| 2 | PUBLIC-FACING CLAIM | OpenRouter and a16z report that open-weight models reached approximately one-third of token usage on OpenRouter by late 2025; an NBER working paper using OpenRouter and Microsoft Azure usage data reports a lower open-source share of OpenRouter tokens, about 25% by December 2025 after a peak near 45% in August. | — |
| 3 | CLAIM TYPE | ESTIMATE | base_types: ESTIMATE |
| 4 | RESEARCH STRAND | C — Foundation-model market structure | — |
| 5 | MATURITY | EMERGING | states: EMERGING |
| 6 | SOURCE | OpenRouter/a16z, State of AI: 100 Trillion Token Study; Demirer, Fradkin, Tadelis & Peng, “The Emerging Market for Intelligence: Pricing, Supply, and Demand for LLMs,” NBER Working Paper 34608, December 2025 | source_ids: SRC-LD11-OPENROUTER-A16Z-100T-TOKEN-STUDY, SRC-SL-DEMIRER-FRADKIN-TADELIS-PENG-NBER-34608 |
| 7 | SOURCE TYPE | Platform telemetry / preprint; Academic working paper | classes: PREPRINT, WORKING_PAPER |
| 8 | INSTITUTIONAL POSITION | Platform + investor; Academic + industry (authors affiliated with Microsoft and Amazon) | — |
| 9 | SCOPE | OpenRouter routed tokens; global platform traffic; 2024–2025 (OpenRouter/a16z); January–December 2025 (Demirer et al.) | — |
| 10 | DESIGN | Observational telemetry | — |
| 11 | SAMPLE / DATASET | 100+ trillion tokens (OpenRouter/a16z); OpenRouter and Microsoft Azure API usage data (Demirer et al.) | — |
| 12 | MODEL / TOOL / VERSION | Multiple open/proprietary models | — |
| 13 | COMPARATOR | Proprietary models | — |
| 14 | MAIN RESULT | Open weights reached ~one-third of weekly token volume by late 2025 (OpenRouter/a16z); open-source token share rose from about 25% in January 2025 to 45% by August and fell to 25% by December 2025 (Demirer et al.) | — |
| 15 | INFERENTIAL TARGET | Model-vendor counterpower on a large developer-oriented platform | — |
| 16 | DOES NOT LICENSE | Global model share, enterprise production share or infrastructure independence | — |
| 17 | VERIFICATION STATE | CONTENT VERIFIED | state: CONTENT_VERIFIED_PRIMARY · verified_by: UNKNOWN |
| 18 | LIMITATIONS | Single platform; developer/cost-sensitive selection; both sources are positioned (OpenRouter/a16z is the platform and an investor; Demirer et al. disclose Microsoft employment, equity and consulting and Amazon employment among the authors); the two analyses of the same platform disagree for late 2025 and the reason is not established; Demirer et al.'s introduction states the open-source share stays below 30%, while its Section 6.1 reports a 45% August peak | — |
| 19 | CONTRADICTORY / SUPPORTING SOURCES | Demirer et al. (NBER WP 34608) report a lower late-2025 open-source share from OpenRouter data; Menlo enterprise open-source measure is a different population | — |
| 20 | GEOGRAPHY / LANGUAGE | Global platform / English-dominant | — |
| 21 | DISTRIBUTIONAL LEDGER | Lower-cost/open-weight choices expand developer options | — |
| 22 | R01 / FIELD-MAP LINKS | D1, L-B, R-2, LD-11 | — |
| 23 | WHAT WOULD CHANGE THIS CLAIM? | Independent multi-platform telemetry | — |
| 24 | PUBLICATION STATUS | ELIGIBLE WITH QUALIFIER | state: ELIGIBLE · qualifiers: QUALIFIED |
| 25 | RECORDED DATE | 2026-10-13 | — |
Field 22 references resolved against Field Map v0.2: D1 (DOMAIN); L-B (LENS); R-2 (LENS); LD-11 (LIVING_DEBATE)
Research-of-record provenance
Materialized by sociolens-materializer 0.6.0 at 2026-09-28T20:00:00.000Z; normalization contract SocioLens — Claim Value Vocabulary v1.0.2 — Pre-Spike Materialization Contract (v1.0.2). Content seal SHA-256 048bb2df4b92a77599b2a305229e742ec4cb7b1d3a36f1cca592b36ebfe2f00b.
Repository-authored inputs (not Drive exports)
- SocioLens claim revision — LD11-HQ-C14 v1.1 (v1.1) — written in the SocioLens repository by Project Lead (Claude, AI) on 2026-10-13; no Drive identity exists. Authority: AGENTS.md "Authority" (the Project Lead decides research content within the research-integrity rules) and docs/PROJECT.md "Research revisions" (a published claim changes only through a new version that states what changed and why). Block “ENTRY 14 — LD11-HQ-C14” SHA-256
8bc1aafb6cded0d9477ce7c2a8fe73f6bc260c273f540c959379a81e6e0a812d; fixturefixtures/authored/claim-revisions/LD11-HQ-C14--v1.1.
Builder decisions (not Drive data)
- VERSION = v1.1 — basis: Claim version taken from the repository-authored revision fixture version (SocioLens claim revision — LD11-HQ-C14 v1.1); a new version of LD11-HQ-C14 v1.0, which stays routable (AGENTS.md research integrity rule 3)
- CURRENT_POINTER = true — basis: repository-authored revision "SocioLens claim revision — LD11-HQ-C14 v1.1" (Project Lead (Claude, AI), 2026-10-13); basis: AGENTS.md "Authority" (the Project Lead decides research content within the research-integrity rules) and docs/PROJECT.md "Research revisions" (a published claim changes only through a new version that states what changed and why)
- FIELD_6_SOURCE_REFERENCE = SRC-LD11-OPENROUTER-A16Z-100T-TOKEN-STUDY--v1.0 — basis: field 6 of ENTRY 14 — LD11-HQ-C14 cites "OpenRouter/a16z, State of AI: 100 Trillion Token Study"; the first field-6 segment of this ClaimVersion's repository-authored ledger block; the same Source record LD11-HQ-C14 v1.0 cites.
- FIELD_6_SOURCE_REFERENCE = SRC-SL-DEMIRER-FRADKIN-TADELIS-PENG-NBER-34608--v1.0 — basis: field 6 of ENTRY 14 — LD11-HQ-C14 cites "Demirer, Fradkin, Tadelis & Peng, “The Emerging Market for Intelligence: Pricing, Supply, and Demand for LLMs,” NBER Working Paper 34608, December 2025"; the second field-6 segment of this ClaimVersion's repository-authored ledger block; the NBER working paper added by this revision.
- SOURCE_PROVENANCE_PIN = SRC-LD11-OPENROUTER-A16Z-100T-TOKEN-STUDY--v1.0 — basis: explicit version-pinned public provenance of this ClaimVersion (Amendment v1.2 §6): the pinned field-6 Source record "OpenRouter/a16z, State of AI: 100 Trillion Token Study".
- SOURCE_PROVENANCE_PIN = SRC-SL-DEMIRER-FRADKIN-TADELIS-PENG-NBER-34608--v1.0 — basis: explicit version-pinned public provenance of this ClaimVersion (Amendment v1.2 §6): the pinned field-6 Source record for NBER Working Paper 34608.