OpenRouter rebuilds Auto Router and launches Auto Code

OpenRouter replaced its three-year-old Auto Router with a new system and added a dedicated coding router called openrouter/auto-code, sitting alongside the general-purpose openrouter/auto. The new router scores every incoming request across eleven different factors and combines that score with live data on pricing, provider health, and whether a response can be served from cache. OpenRouter says the new router beats the old one by up to four times on some benchmarks, and that the routing decision itself is three times faster at the 90th percentile in live testing, taking 0.65 seconds compared to 1.96 seconds before. For coding specifically, Auto Code matched the performance of Claude Opus 5.5 across five coding benchmarks while costing 74 percent less per task. OpenRouter's platform now handles more than 2.5 trillion tokens a month from over 100,000 users, and the company says there is no additional fee for using either router.

Why it matters

Automatic model routing that actually matches top-tier performance at a fraction of the cost could change how developers think about picking models for everyday coding work.

Source: OpenRouter