OpenRouter

Inception Labs' Mercury 2.5, a diffusion LLM that decodes tokens in parallel rather than sequentially, is now generally available on OpenRouter and tops its Fastest Models leaderboard among models needing no specialized hardware, with the biggest gains on code-heavy prompts.

BytePlus's Dreamina Seedance 2.5 is on OpenRouter as a joint audio-video model: up to 30 seconds per pass, extendable across rounds, with up to 50 references (30 images, 10 videos, 10 audio) and editing that can replace subjects or add and remove objects.

OpenRouter's task-level rankings, measured by real spend share rather than benchmark scores, now show DeepSeek V4 Pro leading shell execution and Kimi K3 leading tool dispatch. Both are open-weight models.

OpenRouter published a visual benchmark grid for image models: each model's output on hard prompts such as composing several inputs into one scene, showing a specific number of fingers, or removing the second cup in a row, sortable by price and generation time.

OpenRouter's New Defaults episode with Deedy Das of Menlo Ventures on inference economics: token prices down 40 percent while usage grew fourfold, why optimizing cost too early backfires, and why serious AI products end up spanning multiple models.

ori prime runs Prime Intellect's Agent against 500+ OpenRouter models without writing auth.json or models.json; the key arrives via a bundled extension scoped to the run. Ori strips leftover ANTHROPIC_API_KEY and OPENAI_API_KEY values, and /speed and /zdr persist with the session.

Instead of holding an HTTP request open for a whole batch, each prompt becomes its own Render Workflow task run, queued, retried and fanned out with compute provisioned on demand. Auto Router records the chosen model per run, and retries can double-bill, so side effects need idempotency.

Alibaba's Wan 3.0 generates 2 to 30 second videos from text, images, or references at 480p, 720p, or 1080p, priced at $0.05, $0.10, and $0.20 per second with a limited-time 15 percent discount.

Black Forest Labs' FLUX 3 is live on OpenRouter's video API: one jointly trained family spanning video, audio, image, and action prediction, with text-to-video, multi-keyframe image-to-video, video continuation, and native audio including lipsync and ambience.

Microsoft's MAI-Transcribe 2 is now served through OpenRouter's API. It handles speech to text in 60 languages with automatic language identification, code switching, speaker diarization and word-level timestamps, with pricing published on the model page.

OpenRouter's Activity dashboard adds movement-ranked trends across models, keys, users and apps, an Explore builder for arbitrary metric and dimension combinations, and a matching Analytics API with /analytics/meta for discovery. An internal agent-run cost review found a $6.2K/month misrouted key.

Grok Imagine Image 2.0 is on OpenRouter from $0.04 per image, taking up to three reference photos per request. It plans typography, layout and multi-part visuals, and adds edits that change one element without disturbing the rest of the frame.

Muse Glimmer, the first open-weights release from Meta Superintelligence Labs, is a 30B dense text and image model under Apache 2.0, built as a reliable local agent, with reported scores of 75.5 on MCP Atlas and 51.2 on SWE-Bench Pro.

The :nitro and :floor variants no longer only sort existing endpoints. :nitro now admits priority service tier endpoints into the candidate pool, competing on measured throughput, and the ~latest alias resolves to a provider's newest model, so one slug stacks all three behaviors.

Black Forest Labs' FLUX Video Upscale is available through OpenRouter's video API, upscaling to 2K or 4K in two modes: precise, which is faster and holds identity, and creative, which repairs and generates more detail.

Runway is now served on OpenRouter with Aleph 2.0 and Gen-4.5 behind one API. Aleph 2.0 edits existing footage by changing a single frame and propagating that direction across the video, while Gen-4.5 generates new video with tighter prompt adherence and motion quality.

Voyage Code 4, MongoDB's code retrieval embedding model, is now available through OpenRouter with Matryoshka embeddings at 256, 512, 1024 and 2048 dimensions and multiple quantization options, giving coding agents a tunable index size.

Recraft V4 Styles is on OpenRouter in four variants: 1K raster, 2K Pro, and editable SVG vector versions of each. Every request takes 1 to 10 reference images and generates new work in their style, matching texture, composition, color and rendering without fine-tuning.

OpenRouter explains how its Fusion compound model works: a panel of models answers in parallel, a judge maps agreement and disagreement, and the calling model synthesizes one answer. Covers the ~4-5x cost multiplier and when the quality gain justifies it.

A unified image generation API across 30+ models adds capability discovery: typed descriptors per model and per provider endpoint covering resolutions, aspect ratios, batch limits, reference-image counts, streaming and the exact billing unit, behind one normalized request shape.

DeepSeek V4.1 Flash processed 1 trillion tokens in its first 24 hours on OpenRouter, on pace for the largest 48-hour paid model launch yet, with 90% of tokens served from cache at roughly $0.006/M, about 5x cheaper than GLM-5.3 Flash.

OpenRouter's new shell server tool and Files API give any model a hosted, isolated Linux container for command execution and persistent files, compatible with OpenAI's Shell and Anthropic's Bash tool specs.

A method for regression testing agents after prompt, model, tool or retrieval changes: lock the case set, write a behavioral contract with tool-call assertions and invariants, pin concrete model slugs, and read baseline results before candidate results.

OpenRouter added a paid zero-data-retention endpoint for Inception's Mercury Decide, priced at half the list input rate with free output and cached input and a 66K context window.