The Tollbooth Economy
Why AI's power is migrating from models to the middle
Questions it answers
- Why are AI’s volume and revenue moving apart?
- Who gains power when buyers can switch models?
- Where does lasting value sit in the AI stack?
AI's economics are splitting in two. On OpenRouter, Anthropic takes 12% of the traffic and 46% of the revenue; on other gateways, cheap open models take a third of the tokens for under 4% of the spend. The best model is no longer the one that captures the market. The money is migrating from the model to the middle. Nvidia's purchase of Hugging Face and Stripe's purchase of OpenRouter show exactly where. Full analysis for Thinkgram members.