AI is becoming AI's biggest customer as agentic token usage jumps 14x on OpenRouter
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According to OpenRouter analyst Peter Walker, February 6, 2026, may have been the last day humans consumed more tokens than AI agents. Since then, agentic token usage on OpenRouter has grown 14 times, from 0.51 trillion to 7.3 trillion tokens, while human usage has only increased 2.8 times. The article notes that agents often work autonomously for longer stretches and can spin up additional AI processes. However, nearly 70 percent of agent token usage comes from cached prompts, which are billed at lower rates, so actual cost growth is slower than raw numbers suggest. OpenRouter's data skews toward open-weight models, which tend to be less token-efficient than models from OpenAI or Anthropic, but the trend is likely similar at major labs. Token inflation was already seen with reasoning models, which tend to think longer before responding, even when unnecessary.
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