State of AI | OpenRouter
December 8, 2025
Categories: How Are People Using LLMs?Understanding the distribution of tasks that users perform with LLMs is central to assessing real-world demand and model–market fit. As described in the Data and Methodology section, we categorized billions of model interactions into high-level application categories. In the Open vs. Closed Source Models section, we focused on open source models to see community-driven usage. Here, we broaden the lens to all LLM usage on OpenRouter (both closed and open models) to get a comprehensive picture of what people use LLMs for in practice.
Source: State of AI | OpenRouter
OpenRouter is a service that unifies APIs across different large language model API providers. One thing they have is deep insight into which models are being used and how they’re being used. In this pretty detailed paper, they outline, based on the traffic they see, how different models are being used and which models are used and to what extent.
One thing I think well worth noticing here is that code generation, or use for software engineering, accounts for over 50% on a per token basis of all large language model use. And, perhaps a little bit more surprising, but not so much if you work with these technologies, Claude’s models are 60% of token usage in this category.
Other use cases fall away pretty quickly. Role play is one that got early traction but which seems to be fading somewhat as an overall percentage of token use. Although I imagine growing in absolute terms. And then other areas which gained initial early traction like marketing automation and legal applications. While they get quite a bit of attention, they get quite a bit less use than above all the software engineering use case.
