Stripe Buys OpenRouter, OpenAI vs. Anthropic & the AI Backlash

Stripe buys OpenRouter for billions, which naturally raises the question: did Stripe just buy critical AI infrastructure, or a very expensive router with great distribution? The original squad is back to debate why $7B acquisitions somehow feel normal now, whether Google already has agentic commerce won by owning your inbox, calendar, and Drive, and why Anthropic vs. OpenAI might be less about who has the best model and more about who built the right company. Sam makes the case that OpenAI pulled off the “greatest fundraising story in history,” Dave argues Grokbot might officially make AI a three-player race, and everyone tries to figure out how you price any of these companies when no lead seems to last. Plus, is AI a great investment or just a great trade, does the data center backlash actually have anything to do with data centers, have we built trillions of dollars of infrastructure before finding enough use cases for it, and, naturally in pop corner, Josh Kushner bought into the Lakers.

Chapters:

0:00 Episode trailer

1:00 Episode start

4:00 This week in AI

5:00 Stripe buys OpenRouter

8:30 Is OpenRouter actually worth billions?

11:00 The agentic commerce bet

14:00 Why Google could own the AI assistant

17:30 The DOJ investigates Andreessen Horowitz

22:00 Anthropic vs. OpenAI

26:00 Why OpenAI is struggling in enterprise

28:30 Can anyone actually price AI companies?

30:00 OpenAI’s “greatest fundraising story in history”

33:30 Is AI a great investment or just a great trade?

36:00 SpaceX, Moderna and narrative capitalism

37:30 Grok enters the AI race

41:00 AI makes software increasingly disposable

45:00 The AI data center backlash

47:30 “The backlash is that AI sucks”

48:30 Did we build too much AI infrastructure?

53:30 Josh Kushner, Thrive and the Lakers

55:30 Travis Kelce enters the NIL business

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