I don't know why they need to claim to be open. Their job is to connect you to providers on the basis of price and various metrics they track. Open or close would makes no difference to me.
I always interpreted it as "open" as in "open market".
It's a frictionless marketplace connecting inference providers and customers, creating a more competitive market. Or a more open market if you play a bit fast and loose with terminology
It's in the name. Why not name themselves ModelRouter or something similar?
If they lead the market, they'll extract value in lots of ways that an open company could at least be compelled not to. Plus there won't be competition.
They're probably selling your data to LLM companies and you don't even see what they're doing.
Without competition, they'll raise their rates.
If they were open, you could potentially run the offering on-prem. You could bolt on new providers or use it internally for your own routing.
I think it's just called OpenRouter because the founder previously started OpenSea (an NFT marketplace), and also probably to sound a bit similar to OpenAI. It's like companies calling their products "natural" or "organic" or "artisan" when they can get away with it, just a marketing strategy of using words that conjure up vaguely positive connotations in your mind.
They can't raise their prices much because providers have the upper band, so users will always be able to go directly to the source. I use openrouter and openai, anthropic, google, etc.
Is it just the API client bindings that are open and the core routing service is closed!