OpenRouter now routes 10T+ tokens daily: the multi-model distribution bet and the coming agent fraud wave
Latent Space · youtube · 2026-09-26
Latent Space podcast with OpenRouter CEO Alex Atallah and a16z's Anjney Midha on how a company dismissed as "just a wrapper" became the neutral routing layer for 10M+ developers. Key points: early bets on Llama/Alpaca/Mistral open-weight wave; labs spend billions training but fail at distribution; the Mistral price war proved the inference marketplace; focus over fine-tuning/memory side products; the MOM model-fusion experiment that failed in 2024 but works now; leaderboard as a live map of AI usage; OpenClaw, auto-routing and new agent architectures; 10+ trillion tokens per day; and why token fraud — increasingly by autonomous agents attacking valuable token flows — is becoming a defining security problem, with Stripe's fraud infrastructure strategically key.
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