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OpenRouter's 25,000% token surge: why the chart doesn't prove an AI boom
Key Takeaways
- OpenRouter weekly token consumption rose more than 25,000 percent since January 2025, from 0.5 trillion to 126.2 trillion tokens.
- Tokens measure computation, not users or business value, so the chart overstates how much actual usage has grown.
- Reasoning models generate large volumes of internal thinking tokens, inflating counts without changing output quality.
- Unoptimized agentic AI systems burn tokens through planning, tool calls, and retries, amplifying small usage upticks.
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DT Editorial Team··via the-decoder.com