You cannot buy independence from a supplier, because the supplier selling it can be bought. Twice in the last twelve weeks, a company whose entire product was freedom from AI vendor lock-in has been acquired by a much larger platform. For any business that has been told the answer to AI vendor risk is to buy a layer that sits between you and your provider, that is the finding, and it changes what is worth paying for.
Twice in twelve weeks
In May, Palo Alto Networks completed its purchase of Portkey, a product that sold a simple promise: route your AI requests through us and stay unattached to any single provider. Portkey had announced funding to stay independent on 19 February. The deal closed on 29 May at $140 million, roughly a hundred days later.
On 19 August, Stripe and OpenRouter announced that Stripe has agreed to buy OpenRouter, much the largest product of the same kind. Neither company disclosed a price, and the transaction is not finished: OpenRouter's own announcement puts closing a few weeks out.
The buyers are the part worth staring at. A cybersecurity company and a payments company, from unrelated industries, neither with any obvious stake in a story about AI fragmentation, both paying to sit in exactly the same place between a business and the AI it runs on.
What the buyer was actually paying for
Read the acquirer's own language. Stripe's announcement is about helping businesses optimise token routing and usage, and its chief executive describes tokens as the central currency for companies building with AI before turning to spending them efficiently. That is a description of somebody's bill.
The economics underneath fit. The product takes no markup on the AI itself. It passes through what the providers charge and earns instead on credit purchases, a percentage fee on a prepaid balance sitting in front of a company's AI spending, and Stripe was already processing those payments. So what changes hands is the position between a business and its AI bill. That a payments company wants that position is evidence about how large, and how permanent, corporate AI spending is now assumed to be.
Why the thing itself is becoming free
If routing between AI models is this valuable, why are the acquisitions so thin on the ground? The most widely used open-source version is still independent and has taken nothing beyond seed funding, one competitor wound down without being acquired, and Cloudflare, Vercel, AWS, Microsoft Azure and Nvidia have each built the same capability in-house without spending anything on acquisition.
That is the finding rather than a hole in it. The routing itself is commoditising toward free, which is exactly why the largest infrastructure businesses simply built it, and why the money is chasing whichever chokepoint sits above it: the billing relationship in one case, the security policy point in the other.
The abstraction carries a cost too, and the AI providers are candid about it. Anthropic tells developers that its OpenAI-compatible endpoint is not a long-term or production-ready solution for most use cases, and warns that unsupported settings are ignored silently rather than raising an error, which is the failure that surfaces late, in production. Google tells developers who are not already committed to call its own API directly. When the providers publish warnings about the compatibility path a gateway depends on, that gateway becomes one more thing to test.
What is actually yours to own
None of this argues for building your own gateway, and it argues even less for settling on one provider out of fatigue. The point is narrower: independence is a property of what your company knows, not a product line you can procure.
The version that survives an acquisition is a written answer to a question most companies have never been asked. For every supplier sitting between your work and the AI it runs on, what changes for you the day that supplier gets a new owner, and how long would it take to route around them? Contracts, credits, roadmaps, support commitments and pricing all change hands on the same date the deal closes.
The question that outlives the vendor
If the company you bought your independence from is acquired, what inside your own business still knows whether a different provider would do the job? Somebody chose the AI your most important process runs on. It may have been a vendor, a contractor, or nobody in particular. This market has now shown you twice in twelve weeks how quickly that choice can end up belonging to a company you never picked.