Stripe reportedly buys OpenRouter for more than $7bn
Stripe has finalised a deal to buy AI gateway startup OpenRouter for more than $7bn, Bloomberg reports.
Bloomberg reports Stripe has finalised a deal to buy OpenRouter for more than $7bn Bloomberg reported the price on Sunday, citing people familiar with the matter, and said the final figure could still change. It is more than five times the $1.3bn valuation OpenRouter raised at in May, when it claimed 8 million users and access to over 400 models. The Wall Street Journal reported talks last month. Stripe said it does not comment on rumours or speculation. Source
SpaceX has closed its $60bn acquisition of Cursor Cursor confirmed it on Saturday, four months after SpaceX took an option to buy the company in April. The stated reason is compute: Cursor says it now has “access to the largest fleet of GPUs in the world.” Source
Anthropic explained how the Claude watermark works and what removes it The post says Claude hides a pattern in low-stakes word choices using Google DeepMind’s SynthID-Text approach, readable only with a key, and that light editing probably won’t strip it while a full rewrite will. Code will carry almost none of it, because working code leaves fewer arbitrary choices to encode — what survives sits mostly in comments. Source
Google made the visible watermark on its AI output optional on Friday Gemini VP Josh Woodward announced the Media Watermark toggle on X. It covers Nano Banana, Omni and Lyria generations in Gemini and Flow, with Search to follow, and invisible SynthID and C2PA metadata stay on either way. It is unavailable in countries that require a visible mark by law. One lab spent the weekend explaining why its watermark is hard to remove; the other shipped a button. Source
Dario Amodei says the AI backlash is “fundamentally a crisis of trust” Investor Gavin Baker argued on the All-In podcast that Amodei’s risk warnings had fuelled it and that he should be “a more positive advocate for his own industry”; Amodei replied on X that the fairest criticism of AI companies is that “we haven’t yet delivered on our big promises to benefit the world.” Source
Aurora and Kodiak can now test self-driving trucks on California roads The DMV has issued both companies permits under rules approved on 28 April that lifted the ban on testing driverless vehicles over 10,000 pounds, and Kodiak has already started around Mountain View. A human safety operator is still required behind the wheel and testing is limited to roads posted above 25mph. Teamsters California sued the DMV on 5 August, arguing it skipped a legally required assessment of the rules’ economic impact. Source
Claude.ai, Claude Code and Cowork went down on Sunday night Anthropic reported authentication failures at 21:58 UTC on 16 August, then degraded performance on claude.ai and platform.claude.com nine minutes later; the Console and API stayed operational. Source