Stripe has finalized an agreement to buy AI model gateway OpenRouter for more than $7 billion, Bloomberg reported Sunday, citing people familiar with the matter. Neither company has announced the deal, and a Stripe spokesperson told TechCrunch the company does not comment on rumors or speculation.
The purchase would put one of the largest marketplaces for AI inference inside a company that owns a stablecoin issuer, a wallet provider and a co-authored protocol for machines to pay each other onchain. OpenRouter reached that scale using none of it. It bills through a prepaid credit balance held on its own books, and charges less to top that balance up in crypto than in card payments processed by Stripe.
“Credits are simply deposits on OpenRouter that you use for LLM inference,” the company’s FAQ says. Users fund a balance, and OpenRouter deducts the cost of each request from it. Accounts that run negative get an HTTP 402 error until they top up again.
That design does off-chain what the Machine Payments Protocol and x402 do onchain: meter fractions of a cent per API call without settling each one individually. The settlement event at OpenRouter is the deposit, not the request. A developer spending $2,000 across millions of inference calls generates one payment.
