Why invest in an LLM API when you are a financial service provider?
I can’t see any obvious reason to use Stripe more because of this new product.
The only hypothesis I can think of is that AI token could be a ”currency” in the future. (Which doesn’t make sense when everyone will have local LLMs)
1.Routes the request to the appropriate provider (OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google).
2. Returns the model’s response to your application.
3. Records token usage for billing automatically.
4. Rejects requests when a customer has no credit left (when enabled for your account).
Does that mean all api calls to providers go through stripe?
Reading the justification for how much of a perfect partner stripe is for openrouter sounded made up, this makes it even better.
Models are already paying per search for gated access to higher accuracy info (this is abstracted by anthropic, chatgpt etc currently where they have cut deals w Google etc to allow their traffic through)
Models don’t currently interact with the economy directly in a real way (by eg themselves deciding to pay for a high quality information source), but they will within a few months as folks get more claw-like agents
Those transactions can happen with bitcoin…. or they can happen on stripe
At least that’s my read
Stripe wants to take a cut of as many transactions as possible. Think Visa. The more, the better.
They clearly see AI token usage as a new commodity and something that will grow and grow for a long time to come.
They want to do the same. Take a small cut from as many tokens being passed around as possible.