Stripe is on a shopping spree – it is now kicking the tires on OpenRouter. What an excellent play. Don’t own the destination, but go after the road.

OpenRouter is the turnpike of AI models. They provide a unified API to get access to all AI models. I am a big fan of OpenRouter, both from what they are doing and the quality of their service. They democratize AI, freeing you up from having to choose an end vendor. Because the reality is that AI models are stateless. It does not matter that your next sentence in your chat session goes to a completely different vendor, even running a different model.

The large players, are concerned with open weight/source models, the ones available from Hugging Face and from far afield. Why? Because they are infinitely cheaper, and the real dirty secret is, that 99% of AI usage, does not require the latest and greatest frontier models. Services like OpenRouter give you access to these, without having to sign up multiple vendor contracts or attempt to host them yourself.

You do not need Fable to create your natty little React web app. What code do you think you are writing – Nasdaq? behave yourself.

We are entering model snobbery territory. It’s all nonsense. Yet that doesn’t help OpenAI and Anthropic selling monthly subscriptions. They need to convince you, you are losing out if you are not using the latest and greatest.

And of course, they are now leaning on the current administration, to consider banning such open models. Where have we heard this playbook before? Who remembers when “open source” was considered the death of the software industry. Yet here we are – still creating and making money from software.

Fortunately there are those that are not scared to read history and learn from it. Hugging Bay has been stood up, as a safe guard to allow continued access to these models incase political pressure is successful.

If the USA bans these models, the rest of the world will not. We will fall behind, and incidents such as the recent attack on Hugging Face, where they had to rely on these open models to thwart the attack from within, will become more prevalent.

Banning never works (ask the music industry who took a long time to wake up to their new reality).

Stripe is thinking further down the road than most.