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

AI models are now the primary consumers of tokens on OpenRouter, with agentic usage growing 14-fold since early February 2025 compared to a 2.8-fold increase in human activity. This shift signals a transition toward autonomous systems performing complex, multi-step tasks rather than simple query-response interactions. While agentic consumption currently dominates volume, nearly 70 percent of this activity relies on cached prompts, which keeps the associated infrastructure costs from scaling as rapidly as raw token counts suggest.