Why OpenAI is Forcing Us Back to DeepSeek

Why OpenAI is Forcing Us Back to DeepSeek In the second week of October 2026, the busiest artificial intelligence model on OpenRouter, the biggest open marketplace developers use to call these models, isn't from OpenAI. It's DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, and it chews through forty-one trillion tokens in seven days. OpenAI's best showing that week is GPT-6 Luna, way down in sixth place with about seven trillion. So yeah, a lot of us are quietly going back to DeepSeek. And honestly, OpenAI is the one pushing us there. These are the things you realize when you look at why. Let's get started.