Vercel AI Gateway shows open models dominating token volume over closed ones

Z.ai: Z.ai, also known as Zhipu AI, develops the GLM family of open-weight models and became a publicly listed company on the Hong Kong exchange in early 2026. It pursues dual listings and infrastructure scaling while advancing multimodal capabilities to narrow gaps with leading international systems. The news highlights its models as part of the open-weight group driving significant inference spend on the Vercel platform. OpenAI: OpenAI develops advanced AI models including the GPT-6 Astra family released in September 2026, along with specialized tools for law firms and voice interactions. It focuses on frontier capabilities in areas such as coding, science, and cybersecurity while releasing periodic reports on model behavior. In the news, OpenAI represents a leading closed model provider whose spend share on the Vercel platform is being challenged by open-weight alternatives. Vercel: Vercel operates the AI Gateway, a platform that routes inference traffic across numerous AI models for production applications. It publishes monthly production indexes tracking model usage and has recently integrated new voice and open-weight models. The news centers on its gateway data showing open models dominating token volume over closed ones like those from OpenAI. DeepSeek: DeepSeek builds efficient open-weight AI models, including the V4.1-Flash architecture introduced in September 2026 that uses novel encoder-decoder designs for better price-performance. The company expands availability through platforms like Amazon Bedrock and focuses on coding and agentic tasks. It appears in the news as one of the high-spend open models on the Vercel gateway, contributing to closed labs' competitive pressures. Moonshot AI: Moonshot AI is a Chinese developer of the Kimi model series, with the Kimi K3 variant released in July 2026 emphasizing strong performance at competitive costs. It serves developers, enterprises, and finance users through direct integrations and cloud partnerships. In the news, its models rank among the top spend drivers on the Vercel AI Gateway alongside other open providers. Platform Role: Vercel AI Gateway serves as a key routing and observability layer for production AI traffic across both open and closed providers. Open vs Closed Models: Open-weight models achieved the majority of token volume on the Vercel AI Gateway for the first time, surpassing closed models in usage share. Inference Spend Trends: Open models from providers including Moonshot AI and DeepSeek generated combined spend that exceeded OpenAI's position on the gateway during the reported period.