Stripe finalizes $7B+ deal to acquire OpenRouter
Stripe has finalized an agreement to acquire OpenRouter — the startup that routes developer requests across hundreds of AI models to find the cheapest or best-performing option — for more than $7 billion, Bloomberg reports, citing people familiar with the matter. The price is roughly 5x OpenRouter's reported $1.3 billion valuation from a funding round just months ago. Bloomberg frames the deal as a sign of how central cost-optimized model routing has become to enterprise AI spend — a reminder that "which model, at what price" is now its own layer of the AI stack worth billions, not just a developer convenience.
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Anthropic's IPO valuation hinges on a $190–200B 2028 revenue forecast
As Anthropic prepares for what could be one of the largest IPOs on record, Reuters reports that bankers and investors are pricing the company off a 2028 revenue projection of roughly $190–200 billion — far beyond the $47 billion run-rate Anthropic disclosed as recently as May (itself up from a ~$9 billion run-rate at end-2025). Because current earnings don't capture the scale investors expect once heavy GPU, training, and hiring spend eases as a share of revenue, bankers are reportedly benchmarking Anthropic against forward revenue multiples of comparably fast-growing public companies — Palantir (53x this year's expected revenue) and SpaceX/Cloudflare (41.6x expected 2026 revenue) — rather than current profit. One investor quoted floated a $2 trillion valuation as plausible, while also questioning whether AI is genuinely driving enough productivity to justify it.
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