Stripe in Exclusive Talks to Buy OpenRouter for ~$10B

The Information reports that Stripe has entered exclusive talks to acquire OpenRouter — the model router that lets developers switch between hundreds of LLMs behind a single API — in a cash-and-stock deal valuing the startup at around $10 billion.

OpenRouter had been fielding takeover interest from multiple parties. The strategic logic: Stripe wants to be the rails for agentic payments — the exact layer where AI models are already being used to take actions on behalf of people and businesses.

For developers, a Stripe-owned OpenRouter would be a major consolidation point in the plumbing of the AI ecosystem.