Announcements

Product launches, feature updates, and company news.

Introducing the Extractions API

A new API for pulling typed fields out of documents and images: name the fields, get values, spans and confidence back. Three models serve it at launch; on Cloudflare's Clairic the same request reads text and images and returns numbers, dates, lists, estimates and forecasts.

November 10, 2026

Introducing the New Auto and Auto Code Routers

The next generation of Auto Router, rebuilt on a new technical foundation, plus Auto Code, a new router specialized for coding work. Both weigh eleven factors per request against live pricing, provider health, benchmarks, and cache state to pick a model and reasoning effort from the model pool your governance policies allow.

November 6, 2026

Guardrails Now Separate Organization Limits from Workspace Defaults

Admins can now set organization-wide limits, give people different budgets and model access within them, and change each policy on its own. Existing guardrails keep working.

October 30, 2026

How we rebuilt provider routing for better, faster inference

Our default routing used to send most traffic to the cheapest provider for a model. The new routing algorithm constantly monitors the performance of every provider endpoint to optimize the balance of cost, speed, and reliability for each new request.

October 28, 2026

CSAM Screening Across OpenRouter

OpenRouter will screen all inference requests for child sexual abuse material (CSAM) as they pass through our service. Screening happens in flight, during request processing. Content flagged as potential CSAM may be retained for human review, with reporting and preservation where required by law.

October 27, 2026

Introducing Safety Retention: A Clearer Choice for AI Privacy

We’re introducing Safety Retention as a new data policy tier alongside Zero Data Retention (ZDR) and Retention and Training. It allows data to be stored exclusively for abuse prevention, without being used for model training.

October 26, 2026

Private Endpoints: Bring Your Fine-Tuned Models and Capacity to OpenRouter

Private Endpoints let Enterprise customers route their own fine-tuned models and dedicated deployments through OpenRouter, alongside the public catalog. Private endpoints are only visible within your organization, and requests go through the API your team already uses. Available by request on the Enterprise plan.

October 14, 2026

ElevenLabs is now on OpenRouter

ElevenLabs is now on OpenRouter with 9 Text to Speech and 2 Speech to Text models. Deliver speech with human-like emotion with Eleven v4, give your agent low-latency replies with v4 Turbo, and turn meetings into notes that show who said what with Scribe v2. Here's which model to pick, and one project built start to finish.

October 7, 2026

Model Router Benchmarks

We now benchmark model routers side by side across six suites. Our Router Index weighs quality, speed, and cost so you can decide if you need a router and pick the best one for your needs.

October 2, 2026

Manage and de-risk your API keys with new Security Center

We audited our own OpenRouter account and found over 1,000 active API keys for 85 employees, 168 of them hadn't been used in months. The new Security Center helps you manage and de-risk your API keys with one place to see every key, know which ones are risky and why, clean them up, and lock them to your own network.

September 28, 2026

Batch API: half-price inference by bundling requests

Send a whole workload in one POST, collect the results within 24 hours, and typically pay half the per-token price. Across 230k+ batches that completed over our two week beta period, the median finished in 7 minutes.

September 22, 2026

In-Region Routing: Route inference in the US or EU

US In-Region Routing is live, joining the EU. Send requests to us.openrouter.ai and their prompts and completions are decrypted only inside the United States and routed only to shared provider endpoints running there, across models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, NVIDIA, Thinking Machines, DeepSeek, Moonshot, and Qwen. Requests served by your own BYOK key go to your deployment's region, which you control.

September 9, 2026

Give any model a terminal and files

The shell server tool gives any model on OpenRouter a hosted Linux shell, and the Files API moves files in and out of it. Commands run in an isolated container, the model reads back stdout, stderr, and exit codes, and files the run writes can be downloaded afterward. Available today in beta on the Responses and Messages APIs.

September 8, 2026

Image Benchmarks: See the Capabilities of Every Model

We ran 39 image models through 15 deliberately hard prompts and put every result on one page. Compare fill levels, finger counts, poster text, and edits side by side, with the price and generation time under each image.

August 21, 2026

OpenRouter is Joining Stripe

Today, we are excited to announce that we are joining forces with Stripe, to power the next wave of GDP growth globally.

August 19, 2026

Understand your AI usage: every agent, model, and request

See what your team spent on every model, save the charts you keep rebuilding, click any bar to land in the logs behind it, and query the same data from your terminal with the Analytics API.

August 17, 2026

Live Web Search Benchmarks: Pick the Right Engine, Depth, and Model for Your Agent

We published live leaderboards grading web search configurations across four task suites. Compare engines, search depth, and models by quality, cost, and speed before your agent makes its first search.

August 12, 2026

Model Routing Powered by Wisdom of the Market

Our new Auto router is informed by the model decisions of millions of people, and it outperforms conventional task-based classifiers across a wide spectrum of tasks.

August 10, 2026

Ori Harness: The Best Way to Use OpenRouter with Any Harness

Using OpenRouter with your favorite harness usually means ad-hoc scripts or a wall of environment variables. Install the ori CLI, log in once, and every supported harness runs with an optimized configuration out of the box.

August 4, 2026

Ori Eval: Find the Best Model for What You're Building

Choosing the model inside your product is often decided without a systematic method. Ori Eval answers the question with proof: it runs your agent on your own prompts, checks the tools it called, and grades the answers.

August 3, 2026

Classifiers: Track What Your Agents Do and What It Costs

Define a taxonomy and a small model tags every generation in your workspace by department, task type, or agent complexity. Filter your logs and group your Activity analytics by the results.

July 24, 2026

A New Look for OpenRouter

Built from first principles and grounded in timeless Bauhaus philosophy, our new brand identity marks the beginning of our next chapter.

July 13, 2026

The OpenRouter MCP Server

Connect your coding agent to OpenRouter's live model catalog, benchmarks, docs, and test inference, all without leaving your editor.

June 25, 2026

Introducing the Unified Image API

A dedicated Image API with capability discovery across 60+ models from 12 providers. One endpoint tells your code what each model can do.

June 23, 2026

Subagent: Let Your Model Delegate the Busywork

The openrouter:subagent server tool lets a frontier model hand off self-contained tasks to a smaller, cheaper, faster worker model mid-generation. Summarize a doc, extract structured data, reformat text, all without burning frontier tokens.

June 16, 2026

Surpassing Frontier Performance with Fusion

A panel of budget models, fused through OpenRouter, outscored GPT-5.5 and Claude Opus 4.8 on 100 complex research tasks.

June 12, 2026

Advisor: Give Any Model a Lifeline to a Smarter One

The openrouter:advisor server tool lets a fast, cheap model consult a stronger one mid-generation. Run GPT-4o Mini for the routine work. Call Claude Fable when it actually matters.

June 10, 2026

May Release Spotlight

Speech and transcription APIs, Model Fusion, private models, enterprise workspace controls, and 20 new model launches including Gemini 3.5 Flash and Claude Opus 4.8.

June 1, 2026

Guardrails: Protect your Agents, Data, and Costs

Configurable security and governance tools for budget enforcement, zero data retention, model and provider restrictions, prompt injection defense, and data loss prevention.

May 29, 2026

OpenRouter Raises $113M Series B

OpenRouter has raised a $113M Series B led by CapitalG, with participation from NVentures, ServiceNow Ventures, MongoDB Ventures, Snowflake Ventures, Databricks Ventures, AMP PBC, and Pace Capital, alongside existing investors Andreessen Horowitz and Menlo Ventures.

May 28, 2026

Consistent Web Search and Fetch Across Every Model

Give any tool-calling model the ability to search the web and fetch page content on its own, with multiple search engines and fetch engines to choose from.

May 7, 2026

New Audio APIs for Speech and Transcription

Text-to-speech and transcription are now live on OpenRouter. Two new endpoints give you access to speech synthesis and audio transcription across multiple providers, under one API.

May 1, 2026

Response Caching: Zero Cost for Identical Requests

Introducing the new Response Caching header: enables caching identical API requests so responses come back in a tiny fraction of the time, at zero cost.

April 30, 2026

April Release Spotlight

Video generation, workspaces, an agent SDK, reranker models, and a wave of frontier model launches.

April 30, 2026

Create OpenRouter Accounts via CLI with Stripe Projects

Run `stripe projects add openrouter/api` to get an OpenRouter account, an API key, and Stripe billing, all from the command line. Your agents can do it too.

April 29, 2026

Introducing Workspaces

Organize your OpenRouter projects into separate environments, each with its own API keys, routing defaults, guardrails, and observability.

April 22, 2026

Announcing Video Generation

Video generation is now live on OpenRouter. One API gives you access to the top video models.

April 15, 2026

Auto Exacto: Adaptive Quality Routing, On by Default

Auto Exacto re-evaluates providers every 5 minutes across throughput, tool-call telemetry, and benchmark scores. For requests that include tools, it's on by default.

March 12, 2026

February Release Spotlight

Benchmarks on model pages, a new free model router, and improved cost transparency between providers.

February 23, 2026

OpenRouter Outages on February 17 and 19, 2026

What happened and what have we done to prevent this happening again?

February 20, 2026

January Release Spotlight

Prioritize fast LLMs, explore providers, customize the auto router, load skills in the SDK, and big performance improvements.

January 9, 2026

December Release Spotlight

Response Healing for structured outputs, chatroom notifications, long-context model rankings, and we're #1 on Brex's fastest-growing AI infra list!

December 18, 2025

Response Healing: Reduce JSON Defects by 80%+

Today we're launching Response Healing, a new feature on OpenRouter that automatically fixes malformed JSON responses from LLMs before they reach your application

December 18, 2025

Provider Variance: Introducing Exacto

Does the same model perform differently across different providers?

October 21, 2025

October 2025 BYOK platform fee update

An October 2025 update to OpenRouter's “Bring Your Own Key” (BYOK) platform fee.

October 1, 2025

The First-Ever Image Model Is Up on OpenRouter

SOTA image generation, character consistency, and multi-image outputs—now live with Gemini 2.5 Flash Image Preview.

August 26, 2025

GPT-5 is now live

GPT-5 is here on OpenRouter — long-context, built for complex reasoning and code workflows.

August 7, 2025

Audio Inputs and PDF URLs for Apps

Add voice input and send PDFs by URL, on any model.

August 4, 2025

New Privacy-Focused Provider Drop: Venice

Venice joins OpenRouter as a new provider, offering its flagship uncensored model for private, powerful, and non-restrictive AI.

July 15, 2025

Updates to Our Free Tier: Sustaining Accessible AI for Everyone

Introducing new models to sustain accessible AI inference.

July 10, 2025

New Stealth Model: "Cypher Alpha"

Try Cypher Alpha — a free, general-purpose stealth model with built-in tool-calling.

July 1, 2025

Introducing Presets: Manage LLM Configs from Your Dashboard!

Centralize your LLM logic, iterate faster, and clean up your code. Presets are now live on OpenRouter.

June 26, 2025

Dev & BYOK Updates: Uptime API + Smarter Key Management

Track model uptime via API and get more control over your BYOK setup including usage limits and testable keys.

June 25, 2025

Simplifying Our Platform Fee

We’re rolling out a simpler and more transparent platform fee structure:

June 9, 2025

GIF Prompts, Omni Search, Tool Caching, and BYOK Flags

Faster workflows, smarter tooling, and smoother image support—GIFs, provider search, Anthropic tool-call caching, and BYOK confirmation are all now live.

June 4, 2025

New Features: Reasoning Streams, Crypto Invoices, End-User IDs & More

Stream reasoning summaries, protect your rate limits, pay with crypto, and lock down your keys—now all live on OpenRouter.

May 28, 2025

Passkeys, DevEx Upgrades, and a New Guide for TypeScript Agents

Secure your account with passkeys, explore provider slugs, and build agents faster with fresh docs.

May 22, 2025

New Provider Drop: Cerebras Is Here

A provider built for speed and scale—from wafer to token. See what becomes possible when memory bottlenecks disappear.

May 7, 2025

Better Insights, Faster Metrics, and New Developer Power Tools

Deeper usage insights, sharper perf metrics, and new dev tools to speed up your workflow.

May 6, 2025

Privacy Clarity, New Providers, OAuth Upgrade, and Gemini Gets Parallel Tools

A couple quality-of-life improvements for developers!

April 28, 2025

Universal PDF Support

OpenRouter now supports PDF processing for every model.

April 23, 2025

Smarter Charts, Inline SVGs, and Live Usage Accounting

Smarter analytics, smoother previews, and instant cost visibility—all now live on OpenRouter.

April 18, 2025

Quasar Alpha and Optimus Alpha Reveal

Quasar Alpha and Optimus Alpha, which both topped the charts during testing, were early test versions of...

April 14, 2025

"Stealth" model: Optimus Alpha

Announcing our second "stealth" model Optimus Alpha

April 10, 2025

“Stealth” model: Quasar Alpha

Announcing our first-ever “stealth” model, Quasar Alpha

April 3, 2025

Never Pay for Empty AI Responses Again

Introducing Zero Token Insurance for All Models

March 25, 2025

Deep Research & Many New Models

The first deep research tool available through the OpenRouter API is live, with full citations directly in the API response.

March 6, 2025

Introducing Nitro and Floor Price Shortcuts

We're rolling out new sorting shortcuts to give you more control over how OpenRouter selects providers

February 12, 2025

Introducing Cloudflare as a new provider

Clouldflare is live now with a new to OpenRouter Gemma model + popular Llama models.

February 4, 2025

Reasoning Tokens for Thinking Models

Understand model thought processes with reasoning tokens

January 24, 2025

Introducing Web Search via the API

Bring all of your requests up to speed with the latest information by incorporating web search results.

January 23, 2025

Standardized finish reasons

Models now return standardized finish reason values, aligned with OpenAI-style conventions.

January 23, 2025

Happy New Year! Introducing a new Auto Router

To start off 2025, we have an upgrade to the Auto Router, and a partnership with NotDiamond

January 1, 2025

Holiday launches: Web Search & Price Cuts

Web search is available for free in the OpenRouter Chatroom.

December 24, 2024

Bring Your Own API Keys

Combine your provider limits and/or cloud credits with OpenRouter, and unify your analytics.

December 20, 2024

Crypto Payments API

The first way to script on-chain payments for any LLM 💸

December 20, 2024

Structured Outputs & Free Gemini Flash 2.0

Structured outputs for OpenAI 4o and Fireworks models + Gemini Flash 2.0

December 12, 2024

Price Drops and Llama 3.3 70b

Price drops and six models, and providers for Llama 3.3 70b

December 6, 2024

Author Pages & Amazon Nova

The new Nova family of models from Amazon has arrived.

December 5, 2024