What a difference a year makes. Since then, AI work has shifted from training to inference to, now, agents. And OpenRouter’s AI gateway has soared in popularity in response. The gateway helps enterprises and other AI users select different models for different jobs to control costs or increase reasoning and accuracy for the task at hand.

OpenRouter provides access to over 400 models, including Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, xAI, and DeepSeek, it says. It claims 8 million global users and 100 trillion tokens processed per month, or about 25 trillion per week. That’s a 5x increase from the 5 trillion tokens it was processing per week just six months ago.

OpenRouter’s success means that the AI model is increasingly becoming an invisible, swappable engine for AI tasks.

Rather than a future where startups or enterprises standardize on a model of choice — perhaps creating a single all-powerful model maker in the process — the growth of OpenRouter indicates something else. Companies have no plans to get locked into a model vendor as they did with their various SaaS providers. The multi-model future is already here.