I'd suspect it's related to the rise of good/cheap Chinese models, and OpenRouter is the best way to use them without jumping through a ton of hoops.

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maxdo 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Exactly , not even small startup anywhere in us , eu or nearby will be ok to send data to China, but with open router you can create a no China provider selector with one llm call and start using Chinese llms without paying to vendors a single cent .

What’s the angle for stripe , electrify over tokens exchange is the new money flow , and stripe wants to monetize it. 5% tax on any llm token is an amazing deal

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nubg 4 hours ago | parent [-]

> but with open router you can create a no China provider selector

why on earth would you trust no data is sent to China? just because you clicked a toggle?

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dghlsakjg 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Openrouter is very transparent about where your requests are going. Every single one is logged.

You decide the routing if you want.

I trust it because there are at least 7 billion on the line. If it came out that they were violating their contract and sending company secrets to China when they promised they won’t, they would lose literal billions for basically no gain, and possible criminal charges.

Why on earth would you think they are sending data to China after you click that toggle when they have every reason not to?

	▲	zzgo 2 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		As a QA engineer with over 30 years of identifying software regressions, I would assume that data would eventually get sent to China even if you click that toggle. One ambitious intern or new hire is all it takes, especially in an age of agent-generated code and 1K+ line PRs.

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lxgr 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

By that logic, how can you trust OpenAI and Anthropic not to do the same?

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gruez 4 hours ago | parent [-]

For one, openai and anthropic are the top two AI labs and therefore have some reputation at stake. Openrouter is like aliexpress. Any fly-by night vendor can get listed on there.

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nozzlegear 3 hours ago | parent [-]

The Chinese providers also have reputations at stake

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SoftTalker an hour ago | parent [-]

Not all reputations are equal.

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nozzlegear 37 minutes ago | parent [-]

Good point, the American labs have an awful reputation, and public sentiment is so low it might as well be negative. Plus they've already broken our trust by scraping and stealing everyone's intellectual property to begin with, so they have a lot of catching up to do in terms of reputation and trust.

	▲	gruez 4 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		>Good point, the American labs have an awful reputation ... Reddit/bluesky users seething at anthropic/openai doesn't matter, because they're not the one making the purchasing decisions for AI. Moreover all the complaints you mentioned applies to chinese AI labs as well, with the extra issue that they're beholden to the CCP. Taking the side of chinese ai labs because they're the competitors of american labs is "enemy of my enemy is my friend" logic, which is just dumb. It's like those people who think the US is bad, so then go and simp for china/russia.