DeepSeek market share this week

DeepSeek's OpenRouter share is projected above 22% for the current week. As of Tuesday, September 29, 2026, the Kalshi market for DeepSeek's OpenRouter text market share for the week beginning September 28 prices a 69% probability of exceeding 22.0% and a 42% probability of exceeding 23.0% ^[1][2]. Settlement is scheduled for October 5, 2026, based on OpenRouter's Monday 10:00 a.m. ET weekly value ^[1][2]. Separately, a Kalshi market for DeepSeek's Vercel AI Gateway request share on September 28 had only a 1% probability of exceeding 25%, with its key threshold above 16% ^[3]. The latest Tidelines snapshot, dated September 21, reports DeepSeek at 21.60% of measured OpenRouter token share across six models, a 0.29 percentage point increase over 30 days ^[4]. DeepSeek V4.1 Flash accounted for 11.67% of this, while V4 Flash 0731 represented 5.79% ^[4]. OpenRouter's own June 30 analysis indicated DeepSeek's token share grew from 9% in January 2026 to 18% by June after the V4 launch, with V4 Flash constituting 70% of DeepSeek's agentic token flow by late May ^[5]. A September 25 analysis cited 34.9% of OpenRouter token volume for the week ending September 11, but that figure is not directly comparable to consumer chatbot market share ^[6]. The market-implied central tendency for OpenRouter text share for the week of September 28 is above 22% but below 23%, though the week is incomplete and the benchmark measures routed token volume, not users or revenue ^[1][2][4][6]. No authoritative real-time "this week" chatbot market-share percentage for DeepSeek was retrieved ^[7].

DeepSeek's developer adoption contrasts with lower consumer-facing market share. Consumer-facing estimates are substantially lower, varying by methodology: a September 2026 compilation attributes roughly 3.7%–4% of global generative-AI chatbot website traffic to DeepSeek ^[8], while First Page Sage's September table shows 0.4% ^[9], and Similarweb's January 2 tracker had DeepSeek at 3.7% ^[10]. These figures should not be conflated with OpenRouter developer token share ^[8][9][10]. The dominant expert interpretation segments the market, favoring Anthropic in quality or benchmark prediction markets, while DeepSeek leads in deployment and token-volume markets due to cost-performance and open-weight economics, particularly for agentic workloads ^[6][5]. DeepSeek V4.1 Flash launched on September 10, 2026, offered at approximately $0.15 per million input tokens and $0.60 per million output tokens on OpenRouter ^[11][12]. Its low pricing, large context, multimodal/tool-use positioning, and broad provider availability are considered plausible adoption drivers ^[11][12]. Secondary commentary links DeepSeek's momentum to developer deployment, reporting approximately $1 billion annualized revenue and an approximately $7.5 billion financing target at roughly $75 billion valuation, with about 82.9% gross margin; these claims lack primary filing support and should be treated cautiously ^[6][13][14]. DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash's authors report it matches closed-source frontier models on many agentic benchmarks, completes over 95% of real-world tasks, and lowers inference cost ^[15][16]. A September 7, 2026, arXiv paper reported DeepSeek-V4 cache-reuse operating points produced 2.02–3.84x hot-artifact time-to-first-token speedups, but one dataset showed a 2.81-point F1 decrease, indicating mixed performance evidence ^[17].

DeepSeek's near-term outlook is for stable developer share, facing competition and trust concerns. A 2026 arXiv survey of 237 technology-oriented respondents found 24.5% used DeepSeek, trailing ChatGPT (66.7%) and Gemini (47.7%) but ahead of Grok (14.8%), Mistral (12.7%), and Llama (11.8%); this represents a sample adoption measure, not global market share ^[18]. DeepSeek overtook Mistral in cumulative downloads in January 2026, with 128.2 million versus 124.3 million ^[7]. Earlier, DeepSeek V3 and R1 together constituted 31.1% of OpenRouter inference tokens in January 2026, down from 75.6% in June 2025 ^[7]. Expert literature identifies adoption constraints beyond technical capability, including privacy and third-party tracking risks, technical reliability/server-connectivity complaints, and safety or alignment concerns in healthcare applications ^[19][20][21]. These factors could limit the conversion of technical gains into broad consumer market share ^[19][20][21]. A finance study found DeepSeek-derived news signals capture contemporaneous investor sentiment but lack forecasting power for future stock-market returns or macroeconomic fundamentals ^[22]. For the week of September 28, 2026, DeepSeek is more likely to maintain or modestly increase its share in open-model inference and developer/agent workloads than to regain its early-2025 peak across the entire chatbot market ^[7][15][16]. Main upside catalysts include V4.1-Flash cost/performance and agent adoption ^[7][15][16]. Downside risks stem from competition (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Qwen, and other Chinese models), plus privacy, reliability, and trust concerns ^[7][15][16]. No retrieved source supports a precise percentage forecast or a verified prediction-market price ^[7][15][16].