Handles 790 trillion tokens monthly, 76% from AI agents: OpenRouter officially joins Stripe.

Beating AI Newsflash: Payment giant Stripe announced that AI model aggregation platform OpenRouter has officially become its subsidiary. The two parties had already announced the acquisition agreement as early as August 19, and this marks the official closing of the deal. OpenRouter acts as a unified entry point for AI models. Developers only need to integrate one API to access hundreds of models from over 80 service providers, and can select providers based on price, speed and stability, with automatic switching available when needed. This business is expanding rapidly. Official data from OpenRouter shows the platform processed 790 trillion tokens in October, a 37% increase from September, and roughly 25 times the volume recorded in January this year. Of this total, 76% of token consumption came from API keys categorized by the platform for agent use cases. The platform currently serves over 10 million developers and enterprises. Stripe, which originally focused on helping enterprises with payment collection, payment management and risk control, launched Token Billing in recent years to help AI companies bill customers based on model usage. Following the acquisition, it plans to further manage enterprises' AI spending: for instance, it will route simple tasks to cheaper models and complex tasks to more expensive ones, while tracking spending on different models. Enterprises can both collect payments from users via Stripe and control model call costs through OpenRouter. OpenRouter has pledged to retain its original brand, products and APIs, and maintain neutrality in model selection.