The current market reflects a steep plunge from June, when open models held 41% of mapped budgets thanks to architectures like DeepSeek V4 Flash and Zhipu’s GLM-5.2. Recent deployments of OpenAI’s GPT-6 Luna, GPT-6.1 Terra, and Anthropic’s Claude Haiku 5.5 reclaimed the mid-range price points that community models briefly dominated. Beyond algorithmic improvements, proprietary developers maintain their lead by rolling out comprehensive model families supported by extensive computing clusters. Village compiled these findings by evaluating hosted API expenses across 201 budget points relative to GPT-5 through October 31, 2026.
Key points
Closed laboratories maintain a pricing edge by distilling smaller models directly from th…: Closed laboratories maintain a pricing edge by distilling smaller models directly from their flagship systems and deploying extensive model families.
Massive proprietary inference infrastructure enables top labs to consistently undercut op…: Massive proprietary inference infrastructure enables top labs to consistently undercut open-weight competitors across most spending tiers.
Open models historically capture market share in short-lived spikes after breakthrough re…: Open models historically capture market share in short-lived spikes after breakthrough releases before closed providers regain the lead.
Sources checked by our analysis pipeline: 1
Closed AI models now dominate the price-performance frontier
Village’s LLM Atlas maps the price-performance frontier: the strongest AI model at every price point.
Closed models hold almost every budget
- An open-weight model is the best buy at 3% of budgets. Nearly all of those are at the cheap end, held by Google’s Gemma 4 E4B and Xiaomi’s MiMo-V2.6-Flash.
- In June, it was 41%. DeepSeek V4 Flash alone was the best buy across nearly a third of budgets, with Zhipu’s GLM-5.2 just above it.
- Two OpenAI releases took most of that back. GPT-6 Luna in September and GPT-6.1 Terra in October now cover the budgets open models used to win, alongside Anthropic’s Claude Haiku 5.5.
Open models have led on value before
- Today’s share is the lowest we have measured. At the end of every quarter since 2024, open models held at least 6% of budgets.
- The peaks came from single releases. DeepSeek-V3.2-Exp was the best buy at nearly half of all budgets the week it launched in September 2025.
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