Stripe Nears Deal to Buy AI Firm OpenRouter for Over $7 Billion
THE SO WHAT
If Stripe is paying $7B+ for OpenRouter’s model-routing layer, they’re betting that payments and AI inference will converge into a single transaction fabric. For any API business, the bar just moved from “we expose a model” to “we arbitrate cost, latency, and quality across many models as a core primitive.”
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