Open source AI's rise hasn't dented Anthropic's revenue — yet
Original: Why the rise of open source AI isn’t hurting Anthropic … yet
Why This Matters
Demonstrates that frontier AI labs can sustain revenue even as open source models dominate by volume.
Decagon CEO Jesse Zhang argues frontier and open source AI models are not competitors but two phases of one life cycle. Vercel dashboard data shows Anthropic still commands over 50% of AI spend despite DeepSeek surging to one-third of token volume in a single week.
Decagon CEO Jesse Zhang published a post titled 'Everyone is wrong about open source AI in the enterprise,' arguing that frontier and open source models occupy different phases of the same deployment life cycle. Mature use cases migrate to cheaper open source models, but new use cases continuously emerge that require expensive frontier models — keeping overall frontier spend stable.
Vercel's AI gateway dashboard supports this view: DeepSeek now handles just over one-third of all token volume on the platform, while Z.ai's GLM-5.2 climbed to fourth place. Yet Anthropic still accounts for more than half of total AI spend on Vercel, a share that has declined only slightly despite Anthropic's recent price increases.
OpenRouter data tells a similar story. DeepSeek V4 Flash leads on raw token volume at 5.3 trillion tokens per week. Anthropic's Opus 4.8 processes just over 2 trillion, but at roughly 23x the price ($1.37 vs. $0.06 per million tokens), Opus likely still captures the majority of spending. As Zhang summarizes: 'The frontier labs will keep owning discovery. Open source will increasingly own production.'