Stripe has agreed to acquire OpenRouter for over $7 billion — a company whose CEO described it as "the equivalent of Stripe for AI." The deal puts a single payment processor in control of the routing layer that sits between developers and 400+ AI models, raising real questions about what a non-neutral router means for the model access market.
Tencent's Hy3 preview — a 295B MoE model with 21B active parameters, open-sourced under a community license — has quietly risen to the top of OpenRouter's usage rankings, outpacing Claude by over 50%. Almost nobody in Western ML circles has written about it. Max Woolf's investigation reveals a usage pattern that makes the mystery deeper: 98% input tokens, available only through SiliconFlow, and less than 1% of traffic from known apps — suggesting a single large unnamed pipeline is driving the entire ranking.