OpenRouter rebuilds its provider router to weigh quality against actual cost

OpenRouter says it shipped the biggest improvement to its provider router since its founding. Before, it says, routing prioritized mostly by price; the new router rewards the best-quality inference for the actual cost of a request, so requests stay cheap but also fast and reliable. OpenRouter says providers that deliver more value automatically win more traffic. It describes the change in a blog post, "How we rebuilt provider routing".