August 2026 Brief
Stripe Bought OpenRouter While Silver Lake Circled Workday
A payments company agreed to buy the layer that routes and meters AI tokens, Anthropic posted its first profitable quarter on $11.5B, and private equity opened talks to take Workday private at $43B while Salesforce partners reported no meaningful Agentforce revenue. Money moved into the layer that bills for inference and out of the layer that bills for seats.