AI Marketplaces Can Contribute to, and Profit From, the AI 2040 Plan: Research Directions and Strategy

Epistemic status: Draft-Quality. Partially motivated reasoning. After my “ Not Pinning Your OpenRouter Provider Might Invalidate Your Research ” post, a representative of an AI marketplace reached out to me about providers and reproducibility. I unofficially chatted with a representative there [1] about this essay, but they do not endorse this document. [2] This document is entirely human written. Particular research investigations that can be taken by researchers in AI Marketplaces are in bold . I do not currently plan to work more on this project myself, but I wanted to get the idea out so that others might consider it and build on it. Introduction AI developers are racing towards recursive self-improvement and artificial superintelligence. If this happens, most likely all of humanity loses control to the AIs or the frontier lab irreversibly concentrates their power. One faction which currently has not-insignificant power over the AI ecosystem are AI Marketplaces. These are organizations like OpenRouter which do not produce frontier models but generate hundreds of millions in revenue (OpenRouter brings in $140 million in annualized revenue , an estimated $50 million / 5% = $1 bil