Grok 4.5's Token Volume Surges on OpenRouter, Overtaking GPT-5.6 Sol and Fable 5

SpaceXAI's Grok 4.5 is seeing a sharp rise in token volume on OpenRouter, climbing into today's top 10 closed models and passing OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol and Anthropic's Fable 5 in the platform's live rankings.

• Grok 4.5 — $2 per million input tokens / $6 per million output — the cheapest of the three flagship closed models.
• GPT-5.6 Sol — $5 / $30 per million tokens, per Yellow.com.
• Fable 5 (Anthropic) — $10 / $50 per million tokens — the priciest of the three, per the same data.

Two weeks ago, the top spot on OpenRouter's token-volume leaderboard belonged not to a paid model but to Tencent's free Hy3: it processed 6.13 trillion tokens in a single week, ahead of Xiaomi's MiMo-V2.5 (5.95 trillion) and DeepSeek V4 Flash (5.22 trillion), taking the overall #1 spot, KuCoin reports. The free window closed on July 21 — Tencent Hunyuan itself summed up the run on X:

The timing lines up: as soon as free access to Hy3 ended, Grok 4.5 started climbing the rankings. OpenRouter doesn't publish a breakdown of exactly where that traffic goes, so this is a correlation, not a proven cause — but the logic holds up: developers used to running high volumes on a free tier tend to pick the cheapest option among comparable paid models once they have to pay, and among the three flagships, that's currently Grok 4.5, already flagged earlier as the most token-efficient of the bunch for coding.

This piece is informational, not a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any asset.