u/HatAncient1742

I've been digging into how LLM routers like OpenRouter work under the hood. When OpenRouter routes your request to, say, Fireworks or Together to serve `meta-llama/llama-3.1-70b`, what stops that provider from quietly serving a cheaper, smaller model — say a 8B instead of 70B — and pocketing the margin? As far as I can tell, OpenRouter does zero cryptographic or formal model-identity verification. The trust is entirely contractual and reputational?

or educate me please I honestly have no clue