Stripe pays $7.5B for OpenRouter, the switchboard deciding which AI model wins

Stripe will acquire OpenRouter for $7.5B

Stripe has agreed to buy OpenRouter, the startup that routes developer requests across more than 400 AI models, for a reported $7.5 billion — nearly six times its valuation from just three months earlier. OpenRouter handles over 10 trillion tokens a day for some 10 million developers. The deal hands a payments company control of the layer that decides which AI models get called, raising unanswered questions about whether its prized neutrality survives.