Could but hasn't. What exactly is xAI's USP compared to the others?

The other thing OpenRouter gets you is: Access to loads of models via a common API/sign-up/prepayment mechanism.

I want to know which vendor/model does best at my extracting-facts-from-text task? Which does best at my OCR-a-text-document task? Which can deal with a safe-for-work beach photo without a censorship system false alarm?

OpenRouter lets me run my tests against openai and anthropic and google and x and bytedance and qwen and llama, with a single sign-up and a single payment.

Nobody would trust one of the labs that have their own models with this. They’d assume they’re taking all the data, and biasing the routing to favour themselves. xAI would probably be the least trusted, but the same would apply for any of them.

Everyone could reproduce this on a weekend...

xAI just not in the game, never was.