Priciest tokens still pull the most gateway spend

Anthropic took 65.1% of all spend routed through Vercel's AI Gateway in July 2026 while accounting for 30% of token volume, more revenue than any other lab on the platform despite charging more per token than rival providers. The figures come from Vercel's monthly gateway analysis, reported by Techradar.

At a glance

• The gateway is an API service that routes calls between LLM providers so developers can swap labs, and Vercel compiled the July figures from transactions passing through its own APIs.
• Across the whole gateway, spend rose 37% in July while the average price per token fell 13.6%, following a 20% rise in May and little change in June.
• DeepSeek passed Google in July to become the second-largest lab by volume on the gateway, confirming Vercel's earlier expectation that an open-weight provider would soon take that place.

The pattern cuts against the assumption that inference budgets follow the cheapest token. Anthropic's spend share has stayed above 60% in every edition of the report, which appears to show developers treating Claude as a default for paid work rather than a line item to be optimised down. Techradar frames the standing as Apple-like, a premium provider that keeps the revenue lead while cheaper labs move more tokens.

Anthropic has cleared 60% of gateway spend every month since December 2025

Vercel began reporting gateway spend shares in December 2025, and Anthropic has taken more than 60% of the total in every month since. The July figure of 65.1% came on 30% of all tokens sent through the gateway, an API service that routes calls between LLM providers so developers can swap AI vendors without reworking their integrations.

The data comes from transactions passing through Vercel's own APIs. Vercel is an agentic infrastructure company whose AI Gateway, according to Techradar, is used by many major companies and developers, so the July shares describe traffic routed through that one layer rather than the wider market.

The gateway's average price per token fell 13.6% in July

Total spend across Vercel's AI Gateway rose 37% in July, while the average price per token across all analysed platforms fell 13.6%. Anthropic sat at the expensive end of that field, with an average price per token 4.4 times higher than the overall average across all AI labs. The report defines price per token as total spend divided by total volume.

Token prices have not held steady across Vercel's monthly editions: the 13.6% July decline followed a 20% rise in May and little change in June. Anthropic's own average price per token was lower in July, a change the report attributes to Claude Fable 5 returning to public access after its temporary suspension.

DeepSeek passed Google into second place by volume

Vercel's report tracks volume separately from spend, and the volume ranking changed in July. DeepSeek, the Chinese AI company whose models are open-weight, passed Google to take second place by tokens sent through the AI Gateway, after growing through May and June.

Vercel had flagged the shift ahead of time. An earlier edition of the report said an open-weight lab would soon be second by volume, and the July edition records the outcome in its own words, naming DeepSeek as the lab that took the place.

We said an open-weight lab would soon be second by volume. In July, DeepSeek surpassed Google to take that place.

Mythos 5 and the next edition

Techradar links Anthropic's standing partly to recent Claude iterations and to anticipation around the gradual release of Mythos 5, though Vercel's gateway data covers spend and volume only and carries no schedule for that rollout. Whether the average price per token keeps falling after the 13.6% July decline, and whether DeepSeek holds second place by volume, will show in Vercel's next monthly report.