An OpenAI flagship lost 38% of its daily usage in three days — then set three straight all-time highs

Everyone publishes AI model leaderboards. Almost nobody publishes the day-level curve — and the
curve is where the actual story is.

At whatstrending.ai we snapshot every model's daily request count
from OpenRouter's usage feed into a database, once a day, INSERT OR IGNORE — a row can never be
revised after the fact. We're 78 days in. Here is what openai/gpt-5.6-luna did over the last two
weeks:

A flagship model shed more than a third of its daily traffic in three days, then won all of it
back — and more — inside the same week. Three consecutive days above the old peak as of Aug 16.

Why this isn't a data artifact

Three checks, run before writing this:

1. The whole table didn't move. The all-model daily total went 3.56B → 3.66B (+2.8%) on the day luna jumped 47%, and 3.70B → 3.73B (+0.8%) on Aug 16. Luna's share moved: roughly 4.4% → 6.5%.
2. Peers didn't dip with it. During luna's drawdown (Aug 09–11), deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash-0731 and tencent/hy3 were setting their own highs on the same days — so this is not a provider-wide trailing-edge reporting droop.
3. Rows are frozen at write time. Aug 14 read 231.8M on the day we collected it and reads 231.8M today. Nothing was backfilled or revised.

Why it matters

Monthly aggregates — which is what every public ranking shows — would have flattened this entire
event into "usage grew". The day-level series shows real flagship usage is far more volatile than
anything the leaderboards suggest: a −38% drawdown and a full recovery to new highs fit inside eight
days. If you're making routing, capacity, or "which model is winning" decisions off monthly numbers,
you're averaging away the actual signal.

The live, daily-updated version of this curve is here:
https://whatstrending.ai/models

Method: daily snapshot of OpenRouter per-day request counts, 100 models/day, 78 days and counting,
stored append-only (INSERT OR IGNORE) in Cloudflare D1.