$T Shifts More AI Workloads to Open-Source Models to Curb Costs

AT&T ($T) said open-source models now handle 40% of employee AI queries and expects that share to rise to 60%-70%, as the company looks to keep spending on OpenAI and Anthropic models roughly flat.
The company said routing models through LiteLLM cut AI coding costs by 56%, with only a 2% drop in performance quality. AT&T's internal AI platform now processes around 45 billion tokens per day, drawing on models including Nvidia Nemotron, Meta Llama, and Google Gemma alongside frontier models for more complex tasks.