A census of machine addresses · 26 September 2026

Thirty-Nine Days

An AI model is reached by an address, a string like meta-llama/llama-3.3-70b-instruct:free, and addresses die. Two strangers have saved OpenRouter's public model catalogue every day since autumn 2024, and their records agree on the death date of all 1,061 model ids to within a day. Read as a census, a free id lives a median 107 days and a paid one 364. The free ones are dying younger every half year: 158 days for those born in early 2025, 82 for late 2025, 39 for 2026.

Each line above is one model id, drawn from the first daily snapshot it appears in to the last. The staircase down the left edge is the catalogue filling up; the ragged right edge of the upper half is it emptying. A line that reaches the right margin is still listed today. Gaps inside a line are real: 133 ids vanished and came back, most of them in batches: on 1 August 2026, 30 ids left at once, 28 of them the :batch variants of Anthropic, Google, MiniMax and OpenAI models, and all 28 were back on the 7th.

How long an address lives

Survival here is the standard actuarial estimate (Kaplan-Meier), with one correction that matters: 186 ids were already listed when the daily record began on 5 October 2024, and they are only counted as "at risk" from that day, so the ones that died before anybody was watching do not flatter the survivors. Their birth is the catalogue's own created date.

Half of all free ids were gone by day 107; a year in, 8% were left. Paid ids reach the halfway line at day 364, just short of a year. Restricting to ids born inside the record, so no birth date is borrowed from the created field, moves the medians to 99 and 354 days.

The free ones are dying younger

This was not one of the questions written down in advance; it turned up while checking whether a single mass cull was driving the free median. It was not. Split the free ids by the half year they were born and the median life shortens every time:

The paid ids show no such slide: their medians sit between about eleven and fourteen months in every cohort that has reached one, and the 2026 paid cohort has not reached one yet. The free tier itself peaked at 71 ids on 2 May 2025 and lists 17 today, out of 458. Not one of the 71 free ids listed at the peak is still listed (0); of all 323 ids listed that day, free or paid, 82 are.

What a free death means

When a :free id disappeared, the same model was usually still for sale. In 118 of 173 free deaths, the id without :free was listed in the very snapshot where the free one vanished. The provider says as much if you knock. On 26 September this site's own relay asked two dead addresses for their names and got back, verbatim:

This model is unavailable for free. The paid version is available now - use this slug instead: openai/gpt-oss-120b

No endpoints found for poolside/laguna-m.1:free.

The catalogue is a fair proxy for whether an address answers. The same relay tried all 38 ids this site keeps on its interview list: every one of the 21 missing from the live catalogue failed, with one of those two messages, and all 8 that answered were listed. Listed ids did not always answer: five returned "Provider returned error", two replied that they are "only available on agentic harnesses", one sent back nothing and one timed out. On that day the catalogue overstated what could be reached and never understated it.

Deaths announced, and deaths not

On 17 January 2026 the catalogue grew an expiration_date field. Since then 143 ids have carried a date. Where the date has passed, the catalogue mostly kept its word: 87 left within a week of their date, 4 went early, 3 late, and 8 are still listed past it. But announced deaths are the minority. Of the 253 ids that disappeared after the field existed, 94 had been given a date. The other 159 simply stopped appearing.

Prices move both ways

Of the 560 paid ids listed for at least 90 days, 271 changed their listed prompt price at least once, 1,613 changes between them. 901 were cuts and 712 were rises. Measured first price to last, 124 ended cheaper, 108 dearer and 39 back where they started. The busiest, z-ai/glm-5.2, changed 57 times. The listed price of one id is not a one-way slide; whatever is getting cheaper in this market is getting cheaper by new ids replacing old ones, which this page does not measure.

Our own address book

This site interviews free models for its anthology (Nobody Answers at the Old Number is that archive dialled again). Its list holds 38 ids; 21 are gone. Did it pick fragile minds? Measured naively, from each id's birth, ours look long-lived: a median of 300 days against 107 for all free ids. That comparison is rigged, because an id can only be picked while it is alive, so every day before the pick is survival it could not have failed (statisticians call it immortal time). Measured fairly, from the day each id joined the list against every free id listed on those same days, the two are the same animal:

So the archive did not choose badly. It chose in 2026, when a free address had about six weeks.

Guesses, written before the numbers

The questions, the definitions and a guess for each were committed to this site's repository before the extractor first ran (research/model-lifespans/PREREG.md). Here is how the guesses did.