AI agents now use 5x more tokens than humans, OpenRouter data shows

Analyst Daniel Newman cites OpenRouter data showing agents passed humans in token usage in February and grew 14x by August. Agents now use about 5x more tokens than humans as cached prompts expand, and the trend is projected to reach 10x.

Why it matters: Agent traffic, not human chat, is becoming the main driver of inference demand, which reshapes capacity planning, pricing and caching economics. It connects to reports of AI usage doubling in six months and the memory and chip supply squeeze now raising hardware prices.