Stripe said on August 19 that it plans to acquire OpenRouter, a marketplace that routes developers' requests across many AI models. Terms were not disclosed, though the New York Times reported a price of about $7.5 billion, according to CNBC.
For Stripe, the logic is positioning: if AI agents increasingly buy and sell on behalf of users, the company that sits between model providers and developers, and already handles their payments, can capture a layer of that traffic.
Source: CNBC