OpenAI Gains Against Anthropic Among OpenRouter Customers

OpenAI has found a new place to fight Anthropic for developer wallets: OpenRouter, a service AI app developers use to access models from different providers from one application programming interface. (In case you’ve been under a rock, Stripe is about to buy OpenRouter for a pretty penny.)

A big chunk of OpenRouter’s business recently boiled down to getting a small cut of transactions when developers use its service to access Anthropic models in particular.

That’s not lost on OpenAI.

The ChatGPT maker, which is trying to remake itself as a business-to-business leader, recently began giving OpenRouter a special discount to offer some OpenAI models at half of the price per token that OpenAI lists on its website. Those models include GPT-5.6 Luna and GPT-5.6 Terra, which OpenAI originally released in June. OpenAI on Monday said GPT-5.6 Sol, its most capable, flagship model would also be discounted 50% on OpenRouter.

OpenRouter also offers models from many other firms, especially Chinese ones, at a big discount to the token price of the model makers’ own APIs. But it’s promoting OpenAI models above the others. (See the full list here.)

The discounts have helped boost Luna and Terra usage among more than 10 million developers that use OpenRouter to consolidate their AI model bills.

If developers don’t decide to explicitly use Luna or Terra themselves, they may be automatically routed to Luna or Terra more often if they use OpenAI’s dynamic model-routing products, which automatically send customer queries to different models, if customers set up the router to prioritize cost efficiency.

This month, Luna usage on OpenRouter exploded, racking up more than twice the token usage of Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5 and Sonnet 5. So OpenAI is at least making up some ground with Anthropic on usage, if not revenue, from OpenRouter customers.

The growth from OpenAI model sales also boosted OpenRouter’s revenue. Over the past month or so, OpenRouter’s annualized revenue grew around 15%, to $160 million, in part due to Luna and Terra usage, according to a person with knowledge of the business.

While that revenue figure sounds relatively small, remember that OpenRouter takes a tiny cut of the model calls it facilitates. That means Anthropic, OpenAI and Chinese model developers are on track to generate billions of dollars, collectively, from OpenRouter customers. (Read more about OpenRouter’s financials and its relatively small expenses here.)

Whether OpenRouter stands the test of time is anyone’s guess. Many other firms are developing similar services—router provider Vercel, for instance, also said Monday that GPT-5.6 Sol was half off the listed price for the next month. But OpenRouter has an early lead in this field and did the hard part of setting up relationships and connections with dozens of inference providers that host Chinese open source models, not to mention forging strong connections with Anthropic and OpenAI.

Developers have become wary of being too dependent on a single model provider and are trying to diversify their options. If OpenRouter continues its growth trajectory and becomes the model aggregator, Stripe’s willingness to pay a multiple of at least 50 times forward revenue will look like a relative bargain.

Here’s what else is going on…

Court Watch

Andreessen Horowitz is the target of a Justice Department antitrust probe over its board seats at competing AI companies, Bloomberg reported. The investigation, which has been going on for almost a year, started around the same time as the agency’s review of Fivetran’s acquisition of dbt Labs, a merger first reported by The Information.

Opening arguments are set to begin Tuesday in a trial in Oakland, Calif. that will assess whether Meta Platforms designed its social media products in ways that have harmed young people. In the lawsuit, attorneys generals for California, Kentucky, Colorado and New Jersey are suing Meta. The plaintiffs allege that Meta’s social media sites, including Instagram, are designed to maximize screen time, leading to addiction and other harms to users’ mental health.

Deals and Debuts

See The Information’s Generative AI Database for an exclusive list of private companies and their investors.

Nvidia, OpenAI and SB Energy confirmed plans to team up on a massive data center in southern Ohio for which Nvidia will provide credit support covering up to $105 billion and OpenAI will commit to a 20-year lease.

Google won a bankruptcy auction for its internal business data and software code of the collapsed low-cost carrier Spirit Airlines, bidding $10 million and beating a $7.5 million offer from Mercor, a company that pays contractors to train AI models for labs.

Higgsfield, a company whose software generates and edits video, images and audio from written prompts for professional creators, brands, advertising agencies and studios, raised $400 million at a $5.4 billion valuation in a Series B funding round led by DST Global.

Groq, a company that rents out computing power for running and training AI models across 13 data centers, raised $350 million in a Series A funding round led by Disruptive.

Wispr, a company whose software turns speech into properly formatted text inside any app, raised $280 million at a $2 billion valuation in a Series B funding round led by Menlo Ventures.

Gravis Robotics, a company that sells a bolt-on kit turning ordinary excavators and other heavy construction machines into self-driving ones, raised $200 million in a Series A funding round backed entirely by SoftBank Group.

Terra Industries, a company that sells autonomous security systems to governments and companies guarding power plants, mines and other critical sites, raised an additional $18 million, closing its seed funding round at $52 million.

Trajectory, a company whose software automatically customizes AI models and improves the way AI agents use outside tools, raised $40 million at a $300 million post-money valuation in a Series A funding round led by Sequoia Capital.

Palona AI, a company whose software takes customer orders and messages and handles day-to-day operations for restaurants and other bricks-and-mortar businesses, closed a Series A funding round for an undisclosed amount, bringing its total funding to $20 million.

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