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The Model Adoption Briefing

July 2026

The free monthly read on where AI demand actually flows. Five conclusions and the market snapshot - the full report goes deeper.

109 models tracked · live routed traffic · published 19 Jul 2026
01

Executive summary

Five conclusions, three minutes. What changed across model routing, economics and the European picture in July 2026.

  1. Asia holds the lead at 63.5% of routed tokens (+9.8 pp over four weeks) - the concentration of demand by region of origin is not easing.
  2. OpenAI GPT 5.6 Sol was the month's biggest climber, up 25 places to #22.
  3. 2 tracked model(s) cut price this month, extending the cost gap between low-cost challengers and premium frontier models.
  4. 5 new model(s) entered the ranking, led by Tencent Hy3 (free).
  5. Europe remains marginal at 0.44% of routed traffic; the regulatory picture is tracked in Europe Watch below.
02

Market snapshot

Regional share of routed tokens

RegionShare4-week change
Asia63.46%▲ +9.76 pp
US30.48%▼ -1.88 pp
Other5.62%▼ -7.80 pp
Europe0.44%▼ -0.07 pp

Region reflects where each model's developer is headquartered.

The month's biggest climbers

  • OpenAI GPT 5.6 Sol #22 +25 places
  • Google Gemma 4 31b It #28 +13 places
  • NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra 550b A55b (free) #6 +11 places

Top three of the full top-25 movement table in the report.

Observed

The same standard coding-agent workload runs from $5.40/month on the cheapest paid model (OpenAI GPT OSS 120b) to $870 on Anthropic Claude 5 Fable - a 161x spread for comparable work. The full report breaks down the economics model by model.

03

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
Read the full July 2026 report

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.

Media and press may use the data and graphics with clear attribution to yellow3.io. The full report, historical data, CSV exports and the archive are Professional features.