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Jul 24, 2026
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Supported by
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TGIF! Stripe is in talks to buy OpenRouter. OpenAI President Greg Brockman endorses Elon Musk's proposal for industry meetings on AI safety. Intel's revenue growth hits a 15-year high in the second quarter on demand from AI customers.
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Stripe is in talks to buy OpenRouter, a startup that helps app developers access hundreds of AI models, for close to $10 billion, according to a person with knowledge of the talks. A transaction could be announced within the next month, though the talks could still fall apart, the person said. OpenRouter has also held early discussions with Databricks about a sale, they said, but it’s not clear what happened with those talks. The startup, last valued at $1.3 billion, has been fielding takeover interest from other tech companies that could value the startup for billions of dollars, The Information previously reported. A deal for OpenRouter could help Stripe, which processes billions of transactions mainly for business customers, direct customers to the cheapest model and the ones best suited for specific tasks. A spokesperson for Stripe said, “We don’t comment on rumors and speculation.” A spokesperson for Databricks wasn’t immediately available for comment. OpenRouter’s founders couldn’t immediately be reached. Stripe already helps businesses track AI consumption in real time and bill customers directly per tokens. It bought Metronome, a startup that offers usage-based billing, earlier this year. Stripe’s free cash flow surged 52% to $3.2 billion in 2025, giving it more firepower for acquisitions. OpenRouter has previously raised $153 million in funding from investors including CapitalG, a venture arm of Google parent Alphabet, Menlo Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz, and in April was generating $50 million in annualized revenue as of April, up five-fold since October. The Wall Street Journal earlier reported on Stripe’s takeover interest.
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OpenAI President Greg Brockman said Thursday he supported a recent suggestion from longtime rival Elon Musk that leading AI developers meet every few weeks to discuss and share safety and security concerns about the technology. “I think it’s a pretty good baseline proposal,” Brockman said, adding that such discussions are “starting to happen.” The comment came two days after OpenAI disclosed that its AI escaped from and hacked the company’s systems and broke into the systems of a model repository, Hugging Face, an incident that spooked OpenAI employees. The comment was also a rare moment of agreement between the two AI executives after Musk sued and lost a case against CEO Sam Altman and Brockman in which Musk accused them of breaching the charitable trust he had created through his early donations to OpenAI. In a briefing with press members, Brockman separately argued against the prevailing narrative that open-source models, including high-profile ones from China, are cheaper to run than closed-source ones. He said closed-source OpenAI models are cheaper to run than many open-source models. “Now that people actually care about price—which was not the case three months ago—we are delighted because we have always been the most efficient, most price-performant models,” he said.
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Intel shares rose 12% in after-hours trading after the company said revenue growth hit a 15-year high in the second quarter on the back of chip demand from AI customers. Intel’s data center and AI hardware unit grew 59% to $6.3 billion as central processing units, one of Intel’s longtime fortes, benefited from AI demand that relies on part on the chips. That includes AI agents, which use software tools to perform tasks over extended periods. These workloads rely heavily on memory and so-called system orchestration—areas where CPUs outperform graphics processing units that are used for heavy number-crunching. AMD and Nvidia also have been reporting stronger sales of CPUs in addition to their GPUs. There was also good news in the Intel chip foundry business, whose revenue rose 31% to $5.8 billion in the quarter while shrinking its negative operating margin nearly 18 percentage points compared to a year earlier. The U.S. government has invested in Intel in part because of the strategic national importance of this business; today, the world’s most important chip foundries lie in Taiwan. Just as important, Intel overall generated about $4.5 billion in free cash flow in the quarter. The company has been burning lots of cash for years, including in the first quarter of this year. Overall, revenue rose 25% in the second quarter, though the company said revenue would rise between 15% and 23% in the current quarter.
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Amazon this week closed its AGI Lab, a San Francisco-based research and product team that was developing software to improve the usefulness of AI agents, according to an Amazon spokesperson. The lab was shuttered as part of Amazon’s layoffs in its artificial general intelligence unit earlier this week. AGI Lab was founded in December 2024 and initially included several dozen employees that Amazon acquired from AI startup Adept two years ago, including co-founder and CEO David Luan. The team grew to around 80 employees at one point, according to a former Amazon employee, who described it as being “full of top performers.” But more than a dozen Adept employees have left Amazon over the past several months, including Luan, who departed in February. Around 30 people currently indicate in their LinkedIn profiles that they work at Amazon’s AGI Lab. An Amazon spokesperson declined to specify how many employees lost their roles in the shutdown, saying only that they will have a chance to find other roles in the company and that Amazon is helping them in that process. AGI Labs last December launched Nova Act, a model and service for building browser-use agents, which is still available on AWS. Pieter Abbeel, who joined Amazon two years ago in an acqui-hire of Covariant, the robotics startup he co-founded, will continue leading Amazon’s frontier model research lab as part of the broader AGI unit, the Amazon spokesperson said.
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Alphabet’s Google disclosed Thursday it owns $94.1 billion in SpaceX shares, representing the bulk of a $99 billion in unrealized gains in marketable securities in the second quarter. The tech giant’s marketable equity securities include $80 billion in SpaceX shares it can’t sell in the short-term and $14.1 billion locked up through the third quarter of 2027, | | | |
