Vercel Data Shows AI Models Have Six-Week Half-Life in Production

Vercel's November 2026 AI Gateway Production Index reports that production AI models have an effective half-life of about six weeks, with more than half of October's language-model requests going to models under 60 days old and most teams abandoning a model within four weeks of its peak. Decision models reached 26% of gateway requests in October at just 0.53% of spend, voice usage rose from 4% of paid teams in July to 11% in October, and Anthropic and OpenAI were nearly level at 54 and 55 of every 100 paid teams. Image and video spending hit records, with OpenAI's GPT-Image-2.5 Sunburst leading image spend and ByteDance's Seedance 2.5 leading video spend for a third month.