OpenRouter

Illustration for the CrofAI model substitution story
infrastructureproducts

CrofAI served 23 of its 26 AI models with a cheaper one

CrofAI, a discount service that resells access to AI models, told users there was a literal zero percent chance its traffic reached OpenRouter. A developer publishing under kendell.dev spent two days from September 12, 2026 testing the catalogue model by model and found 23 of the 26 models checked answered with a different, cheaper model, carrying OpenRouter response IDs. CrofAI denied the finding at 1:52 AM on September 14, admitted three models one minute later and five more within ten minutes. The investigation logged both crof.ai and its beta domain still routing afterwards.

Illustration for the agent token usage story
infrastructuremoney

AI agents now burn five times more tokens than people on OpenRouter

OpenRouter usage data analyzed by the company's Peter Walker puts the seven-day average on August 10, 2026 at roughly 7.3 trillion tokens a day driven by agents against about 1.4 trillion driven by humans. Agentic traffic climbed from around 510 billion tokens on February 6 to 7.3 trillion, roughly 14x in six months, while human traffic grew 2.8x. Walker's framing: February 6, 2026 may have been the last day humans consumed more tokens than agents.