Sources: Stripe recently entered exclusive talks to buy OpenRouter in a cash-and-stock deal that would value the startup for close to $10B
THE SO WHAT
If Stripe folds a ~$10B OpenRouter into its stack, the company stops being just payments infra and becomes a default AI routing and policy layer for a huge chunk of the internet. Any product that depends on model choice as a moat should assume that abstraction is getting centralized and start differentiating on data, workflow, or distribution instead.
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