Enterprises Shift AI Spend to Open-Weight Models, Pressuring Closed-Model Pricing
Third-party data and company interviews cited in the report show US enterprises moving routine AI workloads off the priciest frontier models and onto cheaper open-weight alternatives. AlphaSense found mentions of "open-weight" or "open source" models on US earnings and investor calls in August–September were six times the year-earlier level; Vercel said open models handled 56% of tokens on its AI Gateway in August versus 7% in December; and Citi data cited by Reuters put OpenRouter's open-model token share at 65% in June, up from 34% in January. Examples include AT&T running roughly 40% of AI workloads on open models with plans to reach 70% within a year, Tinder and Harvey routing routine tasks to open models, and Cursor cutting the cost of building a browser from scratch from over $10,000 with GPT-5.5 alone to $1,339 using its own Composer model plus Anthropic Opus 4.8.
If open-weight models are good enough for routine work, enterprise buying shifts from "which model is strongest" to "cheapest adequate model per task", which pressures frontier labs' pricing power and business models.