A surprising amount of companies sell exact the same product through different channels for different prices. A good example is Apple.

Multiple times a year, retailers here in Australia have co-ordinated sales on Apple products. Apple.com or their retail stores don't have these sales.

But they're clearly Apple-funded when competing retailers launch the same sales on the same days; and the margins aren't enough for retailers to take a loss.

Or it's "normal" market segmentation. OpenRouter users are more price sensitive in general, also a lot of enterprise users who can't switch easily are using the official API (or Bedrock or Azure) and you want to squeeze them as much as you can.

Literally all OEMs do this, if you go to Apple site you won't see any sales, but Amazon and other retailers will have stuff at 20% off regularly

This imbalance of exchange means that OpenAI is getting something from this deal. Question what is exactly.