OpenRouter Data Showing Agents at 7.3T Tokens Against Humans' 1.4T Is Circulating, With 85% of Agent Spend Going to Cached Prompt
r/artificial (129 upvotes, 45 comments), underlying data from OpenRouter's own blog and a SaaStr interview with OpenRouter's COO·medium signal
A chart making the rounds on r/artificial puts agentic token consumption on OpenRouter at 7.3 trillion by 2026-08-10 versus 1.4 trillion human-driven, a 5x gap. Agentic usage first crossed above human usage on 2026-02-06 and has grown roughly 14x in six months, climbing past 4.5T in June and nearly 7T by mid-July. The detail that matters for cost modeling and rarely makes the headline: more than 85% of agentic token consumption is cached prompt, and cached tokens account for nearly all of the category's relative growth, meaning the raw token counts overstate the compute shift considerably.