20VC: Will OpenRouter Sell for $10BN to Stripe? | Why Chinese Open Models Are Beating America—and What Happens Next | Why Enterprises Are More Fearful of Anthropic and OpenAI Than China | Is the Routing Layer Becoming a Commodity with Alex Atallah

Alex Atallah, founder and CEO of OpenRouter, joins to discuss the reported $10B acquisition by Stripe, the lessons he learned bootstrapping and scaling OpenSea, why the founding thesis of OpenRouter proved wrong, and whether AI model routing is being commoditized. The conversation also covers the impact of falling token prices on the business, the alarming rise of Chinese open models surpassing US counterparts, whether the routing layer will be swallowed by agent frameworks, and Atallah's perspective on the ethics of distillation.