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Morning Edition · Tuesday, September 8, 2026Published at 2:18 AM EDT · New York
Token Prices Keep Falling and Consumption Keeps Rising Faster Than the Cuts
OpenRouter data shows agentic token volume climbing from 0.51 trillion to 7.3 trillion since February, with Chinese open-source models now accounting for more than half of the routed traffic.
The technology channel AI Post reported that token usage on the model router OpenRouter rose 25-fold in a year and doubled in a single month. Those two specific figures are not independently confirmed. The verified numbers still show the sa…
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Part of a tracked trend
The Inference-Cost Efficiency Race
Techniques that cut tokens generated and KV-cache memory per query will keep compressing the marginal cost of serving reasoning models, making inference efficiency a recurring competitive axis alongside raw capability.
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