OpenRouter adds hosted shell tool and Files API in beta

OpenRouter has added a shell that a model can use without the developer running any execution environment. In its beta announcement, OpenRouter says any model on the platform can now run commands in a hosted Linux container through a server tool named openrouter:shell, and that a new Files API moves files into and out of that container.

The post calls it a stateful server tool. OpenRouter's shell tool documentation, read in October, explains what that means. The commands run in an isolated container that, per the page, is not on OpenRouter's own infrastructure or the caller's machine. A container can be ephemeral or kept and reused across requests. It goes to sleep after five minutes idle, and files saved in its home directory can be listed afterwards. The same page says containers have no outbound internet access by default, a command times out after 120 seconds by default with 300 as the maximum, and sandbox time is billed at $0.0001 per second. It also says the tool works on the Responses and Messages APIs but not Chat Completions, and that the API may still change while it is in beta.

Only the opening post of the announcement was collected, and its demo video could not be transcribed, so anything the rest of the thread added is not reflected here. Six days later OpenRouter posted a second thread on the same tool, showing the one-line tool declaration for a Responses API request.