DeepSeek leads OpenRouter usage with roughly 25-37% of tracked tokens in recent weeks, driven by its V4.1 Flash series—including the 1017 variant released mid-October—which topped model leaderboards with tens of trillions of tokens processed. Low pricing and competitive performance in coding and reasoning tasks have drawn heavy developer demand for these open-weight large language models on the routing platform. Market-implied odds above 90% reflect this sustained edge over Z.ai, Tencent, and U.S. labs like OpenAI. A sudden surge from a rival model release or unexpected DeepSeek capacity issues could still shift the outcome before week-end resolution.