Four of the Top Five Models Are Chinese
Router traffic shows where cheap, high-volume model calls actually go.
Based on OpenRouter data for 2 to 8 November 2026, global token volume reached 210 trillion, up 8.25% week on week, of which Chinese models accounted for 116.18 trillion and US models 13.98 trillion, down 32.4%. DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 led for a third consecutive week at 56 trillion tokens, up 17%, followed by DeepSeek V4.1 Flash at 17.6 trillion and Zhipu GLM 5.3 Flash at 13.2 trillion. One caveat matters: OpenRouter counts only traffic routed through its platform, excluding vendor APIs, cloud deployments and consumer apps.