Open-weight AI models capture mainstream adoption through deployment platforms

Open-weight models (like Llama and Mistral) quadrupled their share of spending through Vercel's AI Gateway in three months. Developers are routing production traffic through uncensored, customizable models instead of defaulting to OpenAI or Anthropic. This shift redistributes economic power away from frontier labs toward cloud platforms, chip makers, and open-source maintainers while reducing lock-in costs for builders.