AI Gateway

An AI Gateway is a service that lets you call AI models from many different companies through a single door. It's like a travel power adapter: outlets look different in every country, but with one adapter you can get electricity anywhere. Normally, to use an OpenAI model you'd need a separate contract and connection with OpenAI, and the same with Anthropic for its models. But if you connect to just one gateway, you can pick and choose among the models of many companies sitting behind it as needed.

Looking at how money flows through this gateway reveals how the market actually works. Data from the gateway run by Vercel shows that Anthropic handled only 30% of total traffic but captured 65% of revenue. This means a single premium-priced model can heavily determine the gateway's overall revenue.

The gateway itself has also become something to be bought and sold. That's the context behind payments company Stripe's move to acquire OpenRouter, an AI model brokering startup, in a deal valued at over $7 billion. Since deciding which model to use and at what price is fundamentally a matter of cost and settlement, a payments company wanted to own this gateway directly.

In articles, it's used to refer to a specific company's brokering service, as in "the AI Gateway operated by Vercel" or "OpenRouter, an AI Gateway." Don't confuse an AI Gateway with a company that builds models directly—it's a channel that distributes models from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, not a model maker itself.

Visit an AI Gateway service site like OpenRouter and look at its list of models and pricing. Try asking the same question to several models to directly compare how much answer quality and price per token differ from one model to another.