This is the real reasons Dario Amodei and OpenAI want tighter AI regulation because open models are rapidly taking over the market beneath them. Vercel’s AI Gateway data shows that open weight models now account for 78.4% of token volume, compared with only 21.6% for closed models while Open models represented roughly 40% of token volume in June, meaning their share has nearly doubled in only three months. DeepSeek V4.1 Flash alone generates 59.3% of the tokens moving through the gateway and by comparison, Claude Opus 4.8 and Claude Sonnet 5 each account for only 1.7% of token volume. However, the spending data tells a very different story. Closed models still capture a disproportionate amount of money because they charge much more per token. Claude Opus 4.8 accounts for 13.7% of spending despite representing only 1.7% of token volume while Anthropic’s five listed Claude models collectively capture 36.9% of total spending. DeepSeek V4.1 Flash has the opposite profile because it processes most of the tokens on the gateway but accounts for only 5.1% of spending, which shows how aggressively open models are competing on price. This is the threat facing closed model companies. Developers may still use expensive proprietary models for their hardest tasks but they are increasingly sending high volume workloads to cheaper open alternatives and as open models improve, developers could begin routing more premium workloads toward them as well. Open weights also give companies more control over their infrastructure. Developers can download these models, run them on different cloud providers, fine tune them for specific applications, and avoid depending entirely on one company’s API and this reduces the pricing power and customer lock in enjoyed by OpenAI and Anthropic. If open models keep closing the performance gap, OpenAI and Anthropic could lose the one thing that matters most, pricing power. If you enjoyed reading this, make sure to follow @MelvinInvests for more.