The Model Adoption Briefing
The free monthly read on where AI demand actually flows. Five conclusions and the market snapshot - the full report goes deeper.
Executive summary
Five conclusions, three minutes. What changed across model routing, economics and the European picture in August 2026.
- Asia holds the lead at 59.9% of routed tokens (-3.9 pp over four weeks) - the concentration of demand by region of origin is not easing.
- Poolside Laguna S 2.1 (free) was the month's biggest climber, up 47 places to #10.
- 12 tracked model(s) cut price this month, extending the cost gap between low-cost challengers and premium frontier models.
- 9 new model(s) entered the ranking, led by DeepSeek V4 Flash.
- Europe remains marginal at 0.05% of routed traffic; the regulatory picture is tracked in Europe Watch below.
Market snapshot
Regional share of routed tokens
| Region | Share | 4-week change |
|---|---|---|
| Asia | 59.91% | ▼ -3.90 pp |
| US | 33.73% | ▲ +3.88 pp |
| Other | 6.31% | ▲ +0.42 pp |
| Europe | 0.05% | ▼ -0.40 pp |
Region reflects where each model's developer is headquartered.
The month's biggest climbers
- Poolside Laguna S 2.1 (free) #10 +47 places
- OpenAI GPT 5.6 Luna #5 +41 places
- OpenAI GPT 5.6 Terra #17 +38 places
Top three of the full top-25 movement table in the report.
The same standard coding-agent workload runs from $4.20/month on the cheapest paid model (Google Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite) to $261 on Moonshot Kimi K3 - a 62x spread for comparable work. The full report breaks down the economics model by model.
Inside the full report
- The complete top-25 ranking, with the data-derived reason behind every move
- Provider intelligence: best mover, new models and cheapest endpoint, per developer
- Economics: best value, most expensive, and the full cost spread for the same workload
- Enterprise Watch: availability, open weights and longest context
- Europe Watch: routed share plus EU AI Act and Digital Product Passport signals
- Emerging models and the month's forward signals
- The downloadable PDF edition and the full report archive
The full Model Adoption Report goes deeper: the complete top-25 with the reason behind every move, provider-by-provider intelligence, the economics of running each model, Enterprise and Europe Watch, emerging challengers, and the month's forward signals.