Stripe
Stripe buys OpenRouter, the AI model router, for $7.5 billion
🧒 Discovery
A big Internet payments company bought a sorting station for AI messages: the one that sends each question to the right robot.
📰 Essential
Payments giant Stripe is acquiring OpenRouter, the platform that lets developers route their requests to dozens of AI models, for $7.5 billion according to the New York Times.
🔬 Expert
OpenRouter aggregates dozens of models behind a single API and arbitrates cost, latency and quality, a unique vantage point on real token consumption. For Stripe it is a building block for billing the AI economy, agents included; worth watching is whether routing stays neutral under a payments company.