Token Thoughts – How Will Rising Open-Weight Model Adoption Impact Software?

This edition of Token Thoughts examines how rising adoption of open-weight models will impact the software industry. Open-weight models' share of tokens processed on OpenRouter has risen from ~22% a year ago to ~72% today, and on Vercel's AI Gateway from 7% in December 2025 to 63%, though spend share remains more modest. Lower-cost intelligence creates two opportunities for software incumbents: expanding the range of economically viable workflows, and increasing the value of assets the vendor uniquely controls (enterprise context, trusted data, telemetry, secure execution, transaction processing and governance). The first is available to competitors as well;