Stripe says singularity started 8 months ago, gets serious and buys OpenRouter

Stripe told investors it has treated 1 January 2026 as the start of the singularity. The claims comes around the same time as it is buying OpenRouter possibly to accelerate AI use.

In Short

• Investor letter said Stripe has operated on this view since January
• Executives set two goals around faster AI adoption and economic control
• Sam Altman and Elon Musk also recently said the singularity arrived

Stripe told investors on Wednesday in a letter obtained by Axios that it had decided the singularity began on 1 January 2026, about eight months ago, and that it had been operating on that basis since then. On the same day, the payments company confirmed that it was buying OpenRouter. Singularity refers to a state where AI becomes smarter than humans and it can also improve and get smarter and better without human intervention.

In the letter, which is being widely circulated on social media, Stripe chief executive Patrick Collison, president John Collison, and president, technology and business, William Gaybrick said that the company had spotted a major change in long-run trends, leading them to believe that singularity had officially arrived, reiterating that it was time to get serious and adapt accordingly. They said Stripe now had two goals: to speed up AI adoption across the economy and to ensure that AI deployment gave people more control over their economic lives.

"It's a fuzzy and perhaps already overworked term, but we decided that January 1st marked the beginning of the singularity, and we have since been operating on that basis," the executives wrote in the letter. They added, "The singularity is often invoked alongside millenarian forecasts, but, in our case, we simply saw a large inflection in long-run trends (for example, a huge increase in the rate of new firm creation), and we decided that we ought to take the phase change seriously."

The letter makes the Stripe leaders the latest technology executives to say the singularity has already arrived. OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman said in July that "we're in the singularity", adding, "I've been waiting for this my whole life, and I think it's going to be incredible, hugely positive, awesome for the world." In January, Tesla chief executive Elon Musk said on X, "We have entered the Singularity."

Stripe said, "The singularity appears to be accelerating our core business," and added that its revenue for the first half of the fiscal year rose 41 per cent year-on-year. The letter also said, "Stripe is, of course, a private company today. We view this as a growing advantage as we venture into the vicissitudes of the singularity." It added, "The world is becoming harder to predict and we expect that deft helmsmanship will be required of every company. We're fortunate to have a corporate structure that helps us steer the right long-term course."

Stripe claims 88 per cent of the Forbes AI 50 are using its products. The list includes top AI companies including OpenAI and Anthropic. The company confirmed its OpenRouter acquisition on Wednesday, although it did not disclose the deal value. Reports suggest the deal was worth $7.5 billion, a price far above OpenRouter's $1.3 billion valuation in May. OpenRouter founders, Alex Atallah, Chris Clark and Louis Vichy, will reportedly receive $1.5 billion from the sale and investors will receive the remaining $6 billion.

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