This is wild. Actually wild.
Three cheap AI models fused together just outperformed GPT-5.5 and Claude Opus 4.8. At half the price.
OpenRouter just launched something called Fusion.
Instead of sending your prompt to one model, it sends it to multiple models at the same time. A judge reads every response, finds what they agree on, where they contradict, and what each one missed.
Then a synthesizer writes the final answer.
The results on 100 hard research tasks:
→ Gemini 3 Flash Kimi K2.6 DeepSeek V4 Pro all budget models beat solo GPT-5.5 and solo Opus 4.8
→ That same budget panel landed within 1% of Claude Fable 5
→ At roughly half the cost
Three quarters of the boost comes from synthesis. One quarter from using models that think differently.
One API call: “openrouter/fusion”. It handles everything.
You might not need the most expensive model anymore. You might just need the right combination of cheap ones.
Introducing the Fusion API, the smartest compound model in the market.
Fusion achieves Fable-level intelligence at half the price.
How it works 👇