AI is becoming AI's biggest customer as agentic token usage jumps 14x on OpenRouter

AI is using more and more AI. According to OpenRouter analyst Peter Walker, February 6, 2026, may have been the last day humans consumed more tokens than AI agents. Agentic token usage has grown 14x since then, while human usage is up just 2.8x. Agents increasingly work on their own over longer stretches, spinning up additional AI processes along the way. But nearly 70 percent of agent token usage comes from cached prompts, which are billed at much lower rates, so actual costs aren't rising as fast as the raw numbers suggest.

OpenRouter skews toward open-weight models, which tend to be less token-efficient than models from OpenAI or Anthropic. But the trend likely looks similar at the major labs. Token inflation already started with reasoning models, which think longer before they respond even if they shouldn't.

AI News Without the Hype – Curated by Humans

Subscribe to THE DECODER for ad-free reading, a weekly AI newsletter, our exclusive "AI Radar" frontier report six times a year, full archive access, and access to our comment section.