AI agents use five times more tokens than humans, OpenRouter data suggests

AI agents consumed roughly five times more tokens than humans, based on OpenRouter data. Agents accounted for 7.3 trillion tokens, while human usage reached 1.4 trillion tokens. Most agent prompts were served from cache rather than generated fresh.

As autonomous workloads grow, the difference in token volume shifts attention to infrastructure costs. Token economics, cache efficiency, memory bandwidth, and per-task cost controls are becoming board-level questions that directly affect margin calculations.

Source: https://digestai.news/