Three Ways to Handle AI Model Routing in 2026 (And the Trade-offs Nobody Talks About)

Three Ways to Handle AI Model Routing in 2026 (And the Trade-offs Nobody Talks About) By Hossein Shahrokni | 2026-03-18 If you're building on top of AI models, you've probably hit the same wall: you have 400 models available and no principled way to decide which one handles which request. Defaulting to Opus on everything works, but it's expensive. Defaulting to Gemini Flash on everything is cheap but breaks on complex tasks. The routing problem is real. Here are the three patterns I see in production, with honest trade-offs for each. Approach 1: You route manually (OpenRouter / direct API) The simplest setup: you pick the model per request, or per endpoint, or per environment. OpenRouter makes this easy — one API, 400+ models, you decide what goes where. What it looks like in code: # Explicit model selection per request client = OpenAI(base_url="https://openrouter.ai/api/v1", api_key="...") response = client.chat.completions.create( model="anthropic/claude-opus-4-6", # You decide this