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Why payment company Stripe is betting big on OpenRouter

After months of takeover talk, reports say Stripe has agreed to buy AI inference routing service OpenRouter for more than $8 billion. OpenRouter connects developers and companies to multiple AI models through a single API and interface. Bankless writer David Christopher said the deal can be viewed through the lens of growing payment demand from AI agents. OpenRouter charges a 5.5 percent fee when users top up credits and had annualised revenue of about $140 million as of late July.