Stripe agreed to acquire OpenRouter, the gateway that routes requests across hundreds of models from dozens of providers. The strategic logic is unusually revealing: tokens are becoming an economic resource, and choosing which model should process each token is becoming a financial decision. For years, AI applications mostly hard-coded one provider. The emerging architecture looks more like a payment network or cloud scheduler: a request arrives, and infrastructure selects the best supplier based on capability, cost, latency, and reliability. That interpretation became even clearer in Stripe's accompanying investor letter. The company said it began operating on the assumption that January 1, 2026 marked 'the beginning of the singularity''not necessarily science-fiction superintelligence, but a phase change in long-term economic trends. Stripe also highlighted the extraordinary concentration of AI companies already building on its infrastructure. The language is deliberately...
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