Peter Smith
⬤ xAI's Grok Code Fast 1 is now sitting at the top of OpenRouter's reasoning model leaderboard, beating out every competitor in total token usage. The platform's massive analysis covering over 100 trillion tokens shows Grok Code Fast 1 pulling in the biggest slice of reasoning traffic. The data visualizations make it crystal clear—this model is way ahead of other major reasoning-capable options when it comes to actual real-world usage.
⬤ The numbers tell an interesting story. Grok Code Fast 1 is crushing Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro and Gemini 2.5 Flash, plus OpenAI's gpt-oss-120b, in terms of pure token volume. What matters here is that we're looking at cumulative token consumption—not some artificial benchmark scores. This represents how developers are actually using these models in production environments day after day. And here's the kicker: all free trial usage got stripped out of these numbers, so what you're seeing is genuine, paid workload from people putting real money behind their model choices.
⬤ Looking at the breakdown by company, xAI, Google, and OpenAI are basically running the show when it comes to reasoning traffic on OpenRouter. Grok Code Fast 1's lead position points to something pretty clear—developers want fast, code-focused reasoning models that can handle massive throughput without breaking a sweat. Since OpenRouter tracks usage across live applications rather than controlled lab environments, this data gives us a solid read on what developers are actually picking when they need to get work done.
⬤ The fact that Grok Code Fast 1 is leading the pack shows just how fierce the competition has gotten in the reasoning model space. Developers are zeroing in on three things: speed, scalability, and keeping costs under control. When a model tops the charts in reasoning token volume, it signals real traction in the developer ecosystem and proves it's handling practical use cases like coding assistants, automation pipelines, and agent-based systems. As reasoning workloads keep growing, watching these OpenRouter usage patterns gives us a live feed on which AI providers are gaining ground and which ones might be losing steam.
Peter Smith
