Blog — OpenRouter Blog

How to Choose the Best AI Model (Live, in Your Editor)

There's no single best AI model, only the best model for a given task, budget, and moment. This article describes a six-step framework for choosing one, and how to run every step from your editor through the OpenRouter MCP server.

August 25, 2026

OpenRouter Video Generation API: A Code-First Guide

Every video provider has its own endpoint, job statuses, polling logic, and output format. Our async video API puts Seedance, Veo, Wan, and more behind one submit, poll, and download loop. Here's the full lifecycle in Python and TypeScript.

August 25, 2026

Image Benchmarks: See the Capabilities of Every Model

We ran 39 image models through 15 deliberately hard prompts and put every result on one page. Compare fill levels, finger counts, poster text, and edits side by side, with the price and generation time under each image.

August 21, 2026

Understand your AI usage: every agent, model, and request

See what your team spent on every model, save the charts you keep rebuilding, click any bar to land in the logs behind it, and query the same data from your terminal with the Analytics API.

August 17, 2026

OpenRouter Image Generation: A Code-First API Tutorial

Supporting more than one image provider means handling different endpoints, data formats, and billing models. Our dedicated Image API gives you one request format and one key across supported models. Here's the full prompt-to-local-file workflow in Python and JavaScript.

August 17, 2026

How to Send an Image to an LLM via API (Vision Guide)

To get a model to read a screenshot, you need the right request body. This guide shows the content-array pattern that works across every vision-capable model we support, when to use base64 instead of a hosted URL, and how to build multimodal RAG on top of it.

August 14, 2026

Tool Calling Across Any Model: Write the Loop Once, Swap the Model String

Most tool-calling tutorials cover one provider, so you rewrite the loop when you switch. This guide shows the full loop in Python, JavaScript, and cURL, then runs it against three providers by changing one string.

August 12, 2026

Live Web Search Benchmarks: Pick the Right Engine, Depth, and Model for Your Agent

We published live leaderboards grading web search configurations across four task suites. Compare engines, search depth, and models by quality, cost, and speed before your agent makes its first search.

August 12, 2026

Model Routing Powered by Wisdom of the Market

Our new Auto router is informed by the model decisions of millions of people, and it outperforms conventional task-based classifiers across a wide spectrum of tasks.

August 10, 2026

Set Up Team AI Spend Controls on OpenRouter

OpenRouter has five controls for team spend: an organization with a shared credit pool, presets that scope models per workload, per-key spend caps, guardrails that enforce per-member budgets, and the Activity dashboard that shows who spent what. This guide sets them all up in one pass, in order.

August 7, 2026

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