Insights

Analysis, reports, and deep dives.

When Zero Means Zero

Everyone has a different view on Zero Data Retention. The confusion is real, and vendors aren't rushing to clarify. Here's what ZDR actually means and how OpenRouter enforces it.

June 24, 2026

AI Governance Checklist: Your LLM Architecture Comes First

Policy language can't show who called which model or where the audit trail lives. Map your governance checklist to the three routing postures your stack can actually prove.

June 22, 2026

How to Enforce AI Data Residency Without Building Local Infrastructure

If your procurement team flagged country of origin, you don't need to build local infrastructure. For API teams, data residency is a routing constraint you enforce in a single request.

June 22, 2026

OpenRouter vs Portkey: Which LLM Gateway for Your Team?

OpenRouter routes across providers on credits you buy; Portkey governs the provider keys you already have. Here's how they compare on models, observability, compliance, and price.

June 19, 2026

OpenRouter vs LiteLLM: Which LLM Gateway Fits Your Stack?

OpenRouter is a managed gateway; LiteLLM is a self-hosted proxy. Here's how they compare on cost, data residency, routing, and latency.

June 19, 2026

Agentic AI Governance: Your API Key Is a Guardrail

Most agentic AI governance frameworks define the rules but never enforce them. Learn how the API routing layer stops runaway spend and model escalation.

June 15, 2026

How OpenRouter Model Routing Works

OpenRouter routes every request across 70+ providers, and you control how: provider order, price ceilings, and the fallback chain. Here's how each routing layer works.

June 12, 2026

OpenRouter Reliability & Automatic Failover: How Requests Keep Succeeding

Provider failover is on by default. Model fallbacks are opt-in. The two layers recover from different failures; here's how each one works and where failover stops.

June 12, 2026

Dinner is Served

Standardizing on one LLM is like everyone at the table ordering their own entree. The case for going family style with your AI, and the OpenRouter data showing teams already do.

June 11, 2026

What Is an LLM Gateway? The Missing Layer Between Your App and AI Models

Without an LLM gateway, provider outages become user-facing errors and AI spend stays opaque. Compare the best options by routing, compliance, and setup time.

June 11, 2026

A Robot is Sprinting Towards You: Do You Want it Running on Claude or Grok?

A 30-game battle royale across eleven LLMs, $482 of inference, and one finding that should change how you read model benchmarks.

June 4, 2026

GPT-5.5 Price Increase: What It Actually Costs

OpenAI doubled per-token prices with GPT-5.5 but the model is less verbose. We measured real usage to see the net cost impact.

May 4, 2026

Opus 4.7's New Tokenizer: What It Actually Costs

Anthropic changed the tokenizer in Opus 4.7. We looked at usage that shifted from 4.6 to 4.7 to measure exactly how it affects costs.

April 27, 2026

The 2025 State of AI Report

Introducing the 2025 State of AI report, in partnership with a16z. The largest empirical look yet at how developers and organizations use language models in the real world.

December 4, 2025

Is Implicit Caching Prompt Retention?

Should customers consider providers that have implicit caching as “ZDR”?

October 23, 2025