Everyone is watching for the next frontier model. The more interesting layer may be the one in front of it. Routers are becoming the control plane for AI inference. Their first role was practical: route the right request to the right model. That already matters because production AI is no longer a one-model world. A router can cut cost by deciding when a request deserves a frontier model and when an open-source or local model is enough. It can make safety policy executable by sending sensitive d...