SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 17 -- For three years, OpenRouter's value proposition was simple and, for developers, genuinely useful: stop betting on one AI model. The platform sat between developers and a chaotic landscape of 400-plus AI providers, letting teams swap in whatever model worked best for a task - Anthropic's Claude for complex reasoning, OpenAI's GPT-4o for speed, DeepSeek for cost - without rewriting their integration every time the landscape shifted. Its CEO Alex Atallah called it "the equivalent of Stripe for AI."

On Sunday, Stripe bought it for more than $7 billion.

The deal, confirmed by multiple outlets - TechCrunch first reported it - turns that comparison inside out. OpenRouter positioned itself as the infrastructure layer b...