The Open Layer: How Open Models, Routing, and Inference Are Reshaping Agentic Engineering

[2026 - DAY 2 - CODING AGENTS] Closed frontier models get the headlines, but the agentic revolution is being built on something more flexible and more interesting: a hybrid stack of open-weight models, intelligent routing, and high-throughput inference infrastructure. In this panel, founders building the open AI ecosystem — from fine-tuned model deployment to multi-model orchestration to optimized routing and serving — get into what ""open"" actually means in 2026, and where it falls short. We'll dig into the real engineering tradeoffs: when open models win in agentic pipelines, when they don't, how routing and inference choices shape latency and cost at scale, and what it takes to build reliable agents in this open ecosystem as always-on agents become an increasingly core part of agentic engineering. PANELISTS: Chris Clark - Co-Founder & COO, OpenRouter Dima Dzhulgakov - Co-Founder & CTO, Fireworks AI Lucas Atkins - CTO, Arcee AI Scott Breitenother - Co-founder & CEO, Kilo Code (moderator) 👉 Sign up for our "No BS" Newsletter to get the latest technical data & AI content: https://aicouncil.com/newsletter ABOUT AI COUNCIL: AI Council brings together the brightest minds in data to share industry knowledge, technical architectures and best practices in building cutting edge data & AI systems and tools. FIND US: Website: https://aicouncil.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/aicouncilconf/ X: https://x.com/aicouncilconf