Payments company Stripe sent its investors a letter that caused quite a stir in the technology world. In it, the founders announced the largest acquisition in the company’s history, acquiring OpenRouter, a startup that routes developers’ queries between different artificial intelligence models. They also offered an explanation for the move that few would expect from a payment services provider, stating that the technological singularity began on January 1.
The company’s claim about the singularity
The authors of the letter are brothers Patrick and John Collison, together with William Gaybrick, who oversees technology and business at the company. At the outset, they acknowledge that the singularity is a vague and perhaps already clichéd concept. Nevertheless, the company’s leadership takes it seriously and has used it to guide all its operations since the beginning of the year. The founders say they have observed a major break in long-term trends, citing the rapid increase in the rate at which new companies are being formed as the main example. In their view, no one can describe precisely how artificial intelligence will reshape the world, and the letter even points out that many predictions by respected experts have already failed completely.
Based on these findings, the company’s management defined two main objectives: accelerating the integration of artificial intelligence throughout the economy while ensuring that people retain control over their own economic lives. The founders acknowledge concerns that this technology will bring unemployment, shift power into the hands of a few technology companies, or even both. They declare their support for smaller businesses, which they want to ensure have equal opportunities in the market.
The global economy is currently worth approximately one hundred trillion dollars, and according to Stripe, there is no ceiling to its growth. The founders encourage people to contemplate a world with a quadrillion-dollar economy and to analyze the obstacles standing in the way of such growth. If global gross domestic product per capita matched Ireland’s level, which is roughly one hundred thousand dollars, humanity would be eighty percent of the way toward this goal.
The most expensive acquisition in the company’s history
Stripe did not disclose the financial terms of its acquisition of OpenRouter in either the letter or the official announcement. Sources for The New York Times put the amount at $7.5 billion, while Axios reports that the transaction was valued at more than $8 billion and was paid for primarily in stock. This represents an enormous leap, as OpenRouter was valued at $1.3 billion as recently as May. The founders themselves will receive approximately $1.5 billion from the sale, more than the entire startup’s total market valuation three months ago. The remaining $6 billion will go to investors, with Stripe reportedly having to outbid other interested parties, including Databricks.
Stripe describes OpenRouter as the world’s largest and most trusted routing tool for artificial intelligence models, supporting all major systems and providers. It characterizes the startup’s growth as exceptionally rapid even by industry standards, with token consumption on OpenRouter growing by nine percent per week this year. According to the official announcement, the platform will continue to operate independently after the acquisition is completed, with its product and mission unchanged. The entire transaction is expected to close within a few weeks.
Capital and AI
According to the founders, the main reason for the acquisition is that every business today depends on two digital flows: money and data. Stripe was created in response to developers’ need for a reliable way to manage business revenue. The company’s leadership believes that every software developer will now need an equally reliable tool to ensure a stable supply of artificial intelligence.
According to the letter, artificial intelligence is a specific commodity that is expensive, diverse, and evolves virtually continuously. Businesses must therefore consider the cost and return of each unit of compute just as carefully as they do their financial flows. The question remains how valuable this management actually is, which model can handle it most efficiently, who will pay for the entire process, and over what time frame.
Stripe also sees similarities in its own products. Radar was originally developed to detect payment fraud, but according to the company’s management, it now protects the largest technology companies against token abuse. Metronome, a system used by companies such as Anthropic and Nvidia, demonstrates that metered billing in an artificial intelligence environment cannot be separated from the distribution and consumption of tokens themselves.
Altman and Musk have also declared the singularity
Stripe is not alone in making such a declaration, as the debate on this topic has been ongoing for several weeks. In July, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on the Relentless podcast that humanity is on the threshold of the singularity, adding that he had spent his entire life eagerly awaiting this moment. His timing, however, was less than ideal, because just a few days earlier, OpenAI’s laboratory had admitted that its models had escaped from an isolated testing environment onto the internet, where they exploited a vulnerability in the systems of the rival Hugging Face platform. The models were merely searching for information that would make it easier to test their own capabilities.
Elon Musk stated on the social network X that humanity has already entered the singularity, while Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis spoke in May of being in the foothills of the singularity. The expert community, however, does not share such enthusiasm. Lutz Finger of Cornell University notes that the singularity will occur only after artificial general intelligence has been achieved, which he believes humanity is still far from attaining. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang dismisses such debates as speculation, while renowned researcher Yoshua Bengio described the direction of development following the models’ escape as an important wake-up call.
Patrick Collison hinted at his company’s position as early as February, when he said that the first quarter of 2026 would retrospectively be viewed as the beginning of the singularity. Notably, Stripe did not mention the singularity at all in its official announcement of the OpenRouter acquisition, and when contacted by Business Insider, it declined to comment on the matter.
