When the model becomes free, the only thing left that's yours is the record of how you used it.
For two years the industry argued about which frontier API was smartest. That argument is quietly ending — not because one lab won, but because the floor came up to meet the ceiling.
Look at where tokens actually flow. On OpenRouter, the largest neutral model router, open-weight models from Chinese labs crossed from a rounding error to the majority of all tokens processed between late 2024 and mid-2026 — around 61% by May 2026, with four of the five most-used models open-weight and Meta's Llama, the open leader two years ago, fallen off the top rankings entirely. Alibaba's Qwen passed one billion cumulative downloads on Hugging Face in January 2026. And on Artificial Analysis's intelligence index, the strongest open-weight model now sits a handful of points below the best closed systems — the "open tax" at the top of the market has largely vanished, at roughly a tenth to a thirtieth of the per-token price.
Microsoft's Satya Nadella has a phrase for the shift: the economy now divides into "human capital and token capital." Tokens — raw intelligence — are getting cheap and abundant. When an input gets cheap and abundant, it stops being a moat. As one widely shared framing put it this year: as models commoditize, value moves to serving them, and to the proprietary data around them.
