Meta is developing a competing service to OpenRouter within its internal AI products and tools incubator, AAI Labs, The Information reported on July 21 citing internal documents.

A July internal memo said AAI Labs has already secured approval for about 200 projects spanning consumer products, developer tools and internal infrastructure.

One of them is the Switchboard AI model router. Switchboard scores the difficulty of a user or AI agent request and decides which model will handle it. It sends simple requests to smaller, cheaper models, similar to OpenRouter's Auto Router. Meta said the Switchboard project is still at an early stage and may not be released as a product.

A Meta team may use Switchboard to cut internal costs or make it available to organisations that operate AI coding agents at scale, The Information reported citing internal documents.

Meta expects to spend $145 billion this year on AI infrastructure and other areas. That would be more than double last year.

The model routing market is also drawing attention in the AI sector as OpenAI, Databricks and Palantir release products. OpenRouter was valued at $1.3 billion as of April, and scenarios in which it is acquired by big tech companies have recently been discussed.