- The use of chatgpt increased to 78.3 billion tokens when schools returned in September 2025
- Openrouter data show a strong contrast between the academic year and summer packages
- Students are still an important driver of Chatgpt’s daily traffic, confirm studies
In news that will probably not a great surprise for anyone, Chatgpt has seen a strong increase in use as schools reopen in the West, with the generation of tokens rising to record levels.
The new Openrouter data said that on September 18, the Hugely popular Openai chatbot registered 78.3 billion tokens, the highest since the summer deceleration.
The increase occurs after months of lower activity during school holidays, in June 2025, when many schools came out, daily use fell to an average of 36.7 billion tokens, compared to May 2025, which averaged almost 80 billion tokens per day, coinciding with the exams and finals.
Patterns of change of use of AI
Openrouter figures, which track the use of their 2.5 million users, provide a detailed vision of how patterns change throughout the year.
Although the data only represents a platform, it has become a widely cited resource for researchers and investors that analyze the adoption of LLM.
The numbers make it clear that the students are behind a large part of the daily activity of Chatgpt.
As Futurism The previous studies, including one from the University of Rutgers, found strong links between academic calendars and use peaks. Looking at Openrouter’s interactive graph, that connection seems quite undeniable.
The breaks such as spring and summer are constantly aligned with the falls in the interaction, which reinforces the previous observations that the chatgpt traffic falls during the holidays and recovers with the school year.
Among the models measured by Openrouter, ChatgPT 4.1 Mini was ahead of the rest, generating 26.9 billion tokens on September 18, before the newly released GPT-5, which represented 18.7 billion tokens on the same day, with other models such as GPT-4o Mini and GPT-5 Mini that also contributed to the remarkable actions.
When observing the data, it is clear that the AI tools are increasingly used in educational establishments, with the students who depend on the OpenAi chatbot to write, collect information and support from the study.
Of course, it is not necessarily bad, and many teachers and researchers will see value in students who learn to work with these systems in a responsible way.
As with any new technology, younger generations will inevitably be among the first to completely embrace AI as part of their daily lives.
The debate is not whether students should use AI, but how you can guide, teach and balance in a way that supports learning instead of replacing it.
