The Artificial Intelligence tag at apis.io/tags/artificial-intelligence/ is carried by 3,517 providers and 445 APIs. Its composite is 36.0, in the emerging band, up from a previous composite of 31.8 — a 4.2-point move, the largest of any major tag this week.
3,517 providers, 445 APIs. Only 12.7% of the tag survives the trip from company to contract.
The widest inversion in the catalog
Earlier this week the Payments tag showed 1,561 providers and 933 APIs — about 60% propagation, because taking money is something an API does. The Open-Source tag ran the other way at roughly one API for every five providers, because open source is something a company is.
Artificial Intelligence is the most extreme case of the second pattern found so far. Three and a half thousand companies claim it. Four hundred and forty-five APIs carry it.
The facets say the same thing from another angle:
| Facet | Value |
|---|---|
| Frequency | 86.3 |
| Breadth | 24.7 |
| Quality lift | 26.2 |
| Cohesion | 19.9 |
Frequency 86.3, cohesion 19.9. The tag appears everywhere and the things wearing it have almost nothing in common.
What 3,517 providers actually means
There is no useful sense in which 3,517 companies are AI companies. What the number records is that in this market cycle, nearly every company describes itself using this word — the sales-enablement tool, the note-taker, the observability platform with a summarisation feature, the recruiting suite with a matching model.
Every one of those is legitimately tagged. Almost none of them exposes an AI capability as a callable, described API. The intelligence is inside the product, applied to the product’s own data, reachable through the product’s own UI.
That is not a criticism of those companies. It is a warning about the tag as a filter. Anyone using “artificial intelligence” to build a shortlist of vendors whose AI you can call will be sorting through a corpus that is 87% marketing position.
Cohesion at 19.9 is the number that makes this measurable rather than an opinion. A tag whose members resembled each other would score high; this one is close to the floor.
The 4.2-point move is real
From 31.8 to 36.0 is the largest composite movement of the tags examined this week, and it has a plausible mechanism: the AI cohort is where MCP servers, agent skills, and machine-readable agent descriptors are actually being published. Those artifacts are scored, and a tag whose members are the earliest adopters of them will rise.
Two things to hold at once. The tag is improving because a real subset of its members are shipping real agent-facing infrastructure. And a 36.0 composite is still emerging — the improvement is happening at the top of a very long tail that has not moved at all.
Takeaway
3,517 providers, 445 APIs, 12.7% propagation, and a cohesion score of 19.9. Artificial Intelligence is currently the least cohesive large tag in the catalog — a word almost every company applies to itself and comparatively few expose as something you can call. It is also the fastest-improving, because the minority that means it is publishing the artifacts that get scored.
Browse the tag at apis.io/tags/artificial-intelligence/.