Runway no longer wants to be just another AI model company. It wants to become the infrastructure layer for generative media.

On Thursday, the startup launched Runway Media Router through Runway Dev, its developer platform, released earlier this month, that provides API access to a growing roster of third-party image, video and audio models alongside Runway’s own. 

The Media Router is a tool that automatically selects the best image, video, or audio generation model for a request based on whether a developer prioritizes quality, speed or cost. While model routers have become increasingly common in the world of large language models, Runway says this is the first built specifically for generative media. 

“The routing really fits into that overall promise of being the easiest one-stop shop for developers to integrate with any type of generative media model,” Anthony Maggio, Runway’s chief product officer, told TechCrunch.

The launch, shared exclusively with TechCrunch, marks another step in Runway’s evolution from an AI video startup into infrastructure for companies building with generative media. Through Runway Dev, customers including Adobe, Cloudflare, ElevenLabs, Expedia, Shutterstock, and Quora can build media generation directly into their own products using Runway’s API rather than sending their users to Runway’s own app or site.

The launch of the router comes as the number of generative media models has exploded, making it increasingly difficult and time-consuming for developers to evaluate new releases. Through the Runway Dev platform, developers can access the latest media models when they’re released. 

“Most developers are not spending the time to really understand the capabilities of each of these models and where they excel or differ based on various types of outputs across video, image, and audio,” Maggio said. “The unique proposition we’re bringing to the table is all of that intelligence around what the best model is for each different use case, and meshing that with preference you apply around the context of your business.”

Maggio noted that Chinese generative media models are becoming increasingly popular. However, many businesses building their own products might not be comfortable working with models that come out of China, so they could, he said, potentially set a preference for American model providers — a preference that may become more common as the Trump administration explores bans and sanctions against Chinese open AI models. 

That’s just one example of preferences that developers can set, though. Maggio says customers are mainly interested in routing the model to account for token pricing and quality. Token pricing has become a hot topic in 2026 as enterprises that went all-in on agentic AI felt the sting of high token bills. In the world of LLMs, model routing for token pricing has become common, so it only makes sense that routing for generative media would follow. The Media Router launch also comes weeks after Runway replaced its unlimited subscription plans with token-based pricing, a move that drew criticism from some users. 

On the quality front, deciding what models provide the best quality for any given task isn’t as easy for generative media as it is with language models, Maggio says. That’s where the router’s intelligence layer kicks in. It’s based on the expertise Runway’s in-house creative team has developed in evaluating output across every media type — things like how video models handle motion, how image models handle composition, or how voice models handle lip syncing. 

Runway had already done a lot of the work building that intelligence layer for its agent product, a conversational AI creative partner that Runway launched in May to help turn text prompts into fully edited multi-shot videos and marketing campaigns. 

The Runway Media Router, Maggio says, takes the same routing technology Runway built for its own products and packages it for outside developers to use.

Runway’s strategy today reflects how fragmented and competitive the current generative media landscape is, and how much the startup needs to expand and pivot to stay competitive. Runway’s last AI video model release — Gen 4.5 — was in December. At the time, the model topped leaderboards, outperforming similar models from incumbents like Google. In the same month, Runway released its first world model. 

Aside from an upgrade to its video editing model, Aleph 2.0, in May, Runway hasn’t dropped a new dedicated frontier video model in months. (TechCrunch has asked when the startup plans to release Gen-5.) Today, while Aleph 2.0 ranks among the leading video editing models according to Artificial Analysis, the company’s text-to-video and image-to-video models no longer lead the rankings. In the top 20 spots are models from heavy hitters like Google and China’s ByteDance and Alibaba. 

Rather than asking developers to bet on a single model staying ahead, Media Router assumes that the best model will continue to change — and it keeps Runway in the game so that it can continue to build on the frontier. If not as the best new AI model, then as the best orchestration layer. 

Anastasis Germanidis, Runway’s co-founder and co-CEO, acknowledged that the startup has been known for a long time primarily for “that end user piece,” but it had to build a full stack to get there, one that includes a developer platform, a creative tool suite, and an inference layer underneath it all. He says the company has seen increasing interest from companies for Runway to live across every part of that stack. 

“You need great models underneath, but the orchestration increasingly matters a lot because people are building entire campaigns with those models, or they’re building entire finished multi-scene generations out of those models,” Germanidis told TechCrunch. “It’s something that we increasingly had to build — that intelligence layer that comes on top of the pure pixel models. The router is one way in which the benefits of that come to users.”

Or as Maggio put it more broadly: “If you zoom out at the one thing Runway has been doing since 2018, it’s that we’re deeply focused on research, while building for where we think the space is going at the same time.”

Got a sensitive tip or confidential documents? Rebecca Bellan is reporting on the inner workings of the AI industry, from the companies shaping its future to the people impacted by their decisions. Contact her securely, and off the record, on Signal at rebeccabellan.491 or via email at rebecca.bellan@techcrunch.com from a non-work device.

OpenAI said today it is making ChatGPT Health, a feature that helps users with health-related queries, available to all U.S.-based users over 18 across all plans. The announcement comes a day after a Florida-based pastor sued the company for giving a near-fatal suggestion not to consult a doctor.

The company started testing the feature through a dedicated hub earlier in January, allowing users to integrate data from other services and their personal information from services such as Apple Health, Function, and MyFitnessPal.

At that time, OpenAI said users were asking 230 million health-related queries each week. That number has now gone up to 300 million.

Users can also integrate their medical records from hospital systems like Epic and Oracle Health, and health platforms like One Medical and Function Health.

OpenAI said earlier that users needed to use the health hub for health-related queries. Now they can choose to draw insights from connected information in the health section in all queries. The company said during the testing it observed that 70% of health-related queries took place outside the dedicated hub. Through this new feature, users can use their health information to get information on food or allergies in the general chat.

The company noted that its models have made progress in answering health-related queries. The company noted that the smallest model from its latest release, GPT 5.6-Luna, outperforms GPT 5.5 on HealthBench evaluation, an open-source benchmark developed by the company to evaluate large language models (LLMs) on health queries. OpenAI said that it doesn’t use any user data to train its model, and it works with physicians to improve its models on health queries.

Despite these performance gains, the company maintains in its terms that its services are “not intended for use in the diagnosis or treatment of any health condition.” The company cited these clauses in responses to the above lawsuit, and also told the New York Times that it is working on making health- or medicine-related answers safer. With the latest roll out, OpenAI said it wants people to verify information and take medical decisions based on professional advise.

Several studies have highlighted that AI bots are not reliable for medical advice. However, this has not deterred companies like Anthropic and Google from launching health-related AI features.

Health in ChatGPT is rolling out to logged-in U.S. users with free, Go, Plus, and Pro plans on the web and iOS this week.

Meta’s newest advertisement begins with a black-and-white shot of an eye, showing us what someone sees as they read countless panicked headlines about how AI is going to take our jobs, isolate us, and spark a global crisis.

“Some people will have you believe AI is going to make us feel less connected. That it’s going to leave us behind,” a voiceover says. “We couldn’t disagree more.”

Suddenly, the video shifts to color, and shows a cycle of different people opening their eyes and smiling. Then, we see a couple dancing on a rooftop, pointing at a rainbow; a group of teens swimming in a lake; a child frolicking in a field; friends embracing after time apart.

“Call us optimists. Call us dreamers. Call us whatever the hell you want. But we’re betting on people, and we like those odds,” the voiceover says. “The future is for everyone.”

That’s a nice sentiment — pretty convenient for a company betting hundreds of billions of dollars that AI will revolutionize humanity. But the strangest part of the advertisement is not that we’re watching these happy moments play out via Instagram posts. It’s that the soundtrack to the ad is the David Bowie song “Five Years.”

If you are not familiar with this song, I urge you to give it a listen, read the lyrics, and think about what it is trying to say. It seems clear to me, but I studied poetry in college, so as a control for this experiment, I asked my brother — a blockchain analyst who loves Claude Code and does not read for fun — if he could tell me what the song is about.

“I thought climate change at first, then zombie apocalypse, then an asteroid hitting the earth,” he told me. He is correct. It is a song about the human race panicking after learning they will die in a mass extinction event in five years.

If you’re not familiar with Bowie’s music, this track might sound happy and inspiring, matching the ad’s upbeat tone. The part of the song that is used for the advertisement was probably chosen because it uses the word “people” over and over again, and without the context of the song, it’s not clear what it’s about.

But if we look at the lines directly preceding this section:

News had just come over
We had five years left to cry in
News guy wept and told us
Earth was really dying
Cried so much his face was wet
Then I knew he was not lying

We “had five years left to cry in” and the “earth was really dying.” It’s pretty bleak.

It is not reassuring to convince people that AI is going to make the world better while playing a song about the end of the world, and yet, this contradictory musical choice seems to have sailed right past everyone at Meta, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

“Meta has always believed in giving people the power to share, connect, and shape your world in the ways you want,” he wrote alongside the video. “As we enter this next wave with AI, we continue to believe the future is for everyone. We’re focused on giving every person the tools to reach your full potential and making sure the benefits of technology are distributed to everyone.”

Then again, tech leaders are not known for their literary analysis skills. Meta’s Oculus used to give new hires copies of the science fiction novel “Ready Player One,” which is set in a dystopia in which a tech company making virtual reality products becomes overly powerful and evil. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has directly cited inspiration from the movie “Her,” which warns us about what can go wrong when we use AI for emotional support. Palantir, a company that builds AI surveillance systems for the government, is named after Palantir, a seeing stone from the “Lord of the Rings” franchise that the Dark Lord uses to spy on his enemies. Elon Musk is currently throwing a fit about the “accuracy” of Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey,” a story with such realistic elements as sea monsters, magic, and divine intervention. These guys make a great argument for the value of studying the humanities.

Meta isn’t alone in its recent promotional foibles. Instead of racing to build AGI, the top AI companies seem to be fighting over who can make the creepiest advertisement. A few weeks ago, Anthropic released an eerie video of its own. As my colleague Lucas Ropek described it:

The ad begins with a video of a burning house (not exactly a heartwarming start) before pivoting to a series of still images. These images include a crowd of people being surveilled by facial recognition, a homeless person sleeping on the street, rows upon rows of tombstones in a cemetery, and what appears to be a group of laborers toiling in a mine where (presumably) raw materials for smartphones are being dug up.

Meanwhile, a voice-over track features different people asking questions like “Can AI be trusted?” and “Who’s gonna hit the brakes if we need to?”

Anthropic is trying to convince us that it understands the risks AI poses to society, and therefore, this is the company that people can trust to develop AI responsibly. The message it actually conveys feels closer to the mood of Bowie’s “Five Years.”