OpenRouter

OpenRouter is joining Stripe. The company says the name, product, roadmap and multi-model commitment continue as before. It describes itself as the largest AI marketplace and gateway, routing more than 10 trillion tokens daily across 400+ models for 10m+ developers and businesses.

OpenRouter names its stealth model: Ox Alpha was GLM-5.3-Flash, which processed over 20 trillion tokens in six days. Hybrid sparse and linear attention keeps its 1M context usable, output caps at 131K, max reasoning is the default, and launch pricing is half off through September 9.

OpenRouter measured what a heavy discount did to GPT-5.6 demand: Luna volume up 13.8x, Terra 5.6x, Sol 1.1x. Some traffic came from older OpenAI models, but most was net new usage plus share taken from competitors, and daily volume stayed higher once the discount ended.

DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813 is live with first-party gains over the V4 Pro Preview: DeepSWE 62.7, CyberGym 83.3, NL2Repo 61.5, Terminal Bench 2.1 87.9. Independent scores are not published yet, so treat the deltas as vendor claims.

GPT-5.6 Sol is discounted 50 percent on OpenRouter through September 18, applied automatically on the openai/gpt-5.6-sol slug and extending to batch, flex, and priority tiers. Flex reaches $1.25 in and $7.50 out. OpenAI provider only, non-BYOK requests.

OpenRouter serves GLM-5.3 and points at where the gains came from: the same base model as GLM-5.2, with post-training alone moving Terminal-Bench 3.0 from 4.6 to 28.3 and DeepSWE v1.1 from 46.2 to 66.9.

Meta's Muse Spark 1.2 contributor tier is on OpenRouter at $0.10 per million input and $0.20 per million output tokens. The discount is paid for in data: prompts and outputs may be used to improve Meta products, which rules it out for sensitive work.

OpenRouter packages the Pi agent with its credentials and catalog: the model picker respects workspace guardrails, /fast routes to Anthropic's fast tier, OpenAI priority, or the highest-throughput provider, and /zdr restricts a session to zero-retention endpoints. Both toggles survive resume.

Inception's Mercury 2.5 Preview generates tokens in parallel rather than strictly left to right, quoted at 1,107 tokens per second, with tunable reasoning depth, parallel tool calls and schema-aligned JSON. It is available at preview exclusively through OpenRouter.

DeepSeek's V4 Flash Vision Exp accepts image input at standard V4 Flash pricing, holds parity with V4 Flash 0731 on text agent benchmarks, and is reported ahead of Opus-4.8 on Agents' Last Exam and ZeroBench.

Gemini 3.8 Flash is live on OpenRouter at its predecessor's intro price and beats it across the published coding, finance, legal, video and science benchmarks. Setting processing to "agentic" on a video part makes the model navigate the timeline itself, and that flag also works on earlier Flash mode

Ori DeepSeek wires DeepSeek Harness to OpenRouter in one command: it installs the harness if missing, stores the key in the harness credential store, refreshes the model catalog on every boot, and adds /fast routing plus /zdr zero-retention sessions.

OpenRouter added cost per session: the median real cost of a task in each major harness over 30 days, which folds in the token efficiency that per-token pricing hides. Rankings are published and the underlying data is queryable under CC BY 4.0.

Meta's Muse Spark 1.2 is on OpenRouter at $1.25 per million input tokens and $4.25 per million output, with global access widened across the Muse Spark line. It targets multi-file refactors and tasks that run past a single prompt.

OpenRouter now serves Claude Fable 5.1 at Fable 5 pricing, $10 per million input and $50 per million output, with prompt cache reads cut 75% to $0.25 per million. The gains are pitched at agentic coding, long-running workflows, visual code generation and analysis.

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning is a 30B hybrid MoE with 3B active parameters, distilled from Nemotron 3 Ultra and now on OpenRouter. NVIDIA claims up to 4x higher throughput and up to 30 percent faster task completion than comparable models in its class.

Thinking Machines serves Inkling (975B total, 41B active) and Inkling Small (276B/12B) on OpenRouter, free inside agentic harnesses. Open weights are Apache 2.0, context runs to 1M with text, image and audio input, and prompts are logged for training.

OpenRouter added MiniMax H3 Max, which turns the same video prompt around in roughly 30 seconds instead of 3.5 minutes and costs less per clip. It takes text or a single keyframe, produces 5 to 15 second output, and prices 480p at $0.05 per second and 768p at $0.08.

Muse Image from Meta is available on OpenRouter at $0.01 per image, grounded by search. It creates and edits complex images while preserving the regions you did not ask it to change, the pattern high-volume asset work needs.

Alibaba's Qwen3.8 Flash is now routable on OpenRouter. It is a multimodal reasoning model aimed at coding assistants and agentic workflows, with codebase and document analysis, desktop interaction, chart reading, and long video understanding.

Alibaba's Qwen3.8 Max is live with 2.4T total parameters and 95B active, built for long-horizon coding and multimodal agent work. Qwen reports gains over 3.7 Max on PaperBench (64.8 to 93.0), OSWorld-Verified (73.3 to 86.1) and Vision2Web (42.1 to 69.0). Open weights are due next week.

ori grok starts xAI's Grok Build in custom-endpoint mode and hands it an OpenRouter key scoped to that run, so no browser login happens and your Grok config is unchanged. Model list becomes your OpenRouter catalog, private endpoints included, with telemetry and trace upload pinned off.

OpenRouter now runs video generation models against shared challenge prompts and reports output quality alongside cost and generation time. Seedance 2.5 leads on physics and prompt adherence, while MiniMax H3 Max sets the speed and price bar. Custom prompts are supported.

The OpenRouter Agent SDK gained lifecycle hooks in the callModel loop for blocking destructive commands, redacting secrets, metering cost, or rewriting tool arguments before execution. Async tools add background and deferred modes, so a webhook or human review can resume a run later.