DeepSeek captured the top OpenRouter market share for the week of August 31–September 6 through sustained dominance of its V4 Flash models, which processed the highest weekly token volumes among tracked providers. Traders priced in near-certainty due to the lab’s cost-efficient MoE architecture, 1M+ context windows, and aggressive open-weight releases that excel in high-volume agentic, coding, and tool-use workloads—advantages that have driven consistent leadership in OpenRouter routing data for months. Chinese labs overall accounted for the majority of tokens amid broader price/performance shifts away from U.S. flagships. A realistic reversal would require an unexpected late-week surge from a competitor such as Tencent’s Hy series or OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 variants, or a data revision in OpenRouter’s official chart, though no such developments surfaced in contemporaneous reporting.