OpenRouter launches Extractions API alpha for typed JSON document parsing with confidence scores

OpenRouter launched its Extractions API in alpha (/api/alpha/extractions, published on 10 November 2026 and announced broadly on 11 November 2026), introducing a dedicated endpoint that pulls structured, typed JSON values directly from unstructured text, images, and PDFs without prompt-engineered JSON wrappers. At launch, the API routes across three specialised extraction providers: Cloudflare (including cloudflare/clairic, demonstrated extracting six invoice fields for $0.00011), Inception, and ScaleDown.

Nine schema field types, Unicode spans and calibrated null floors

Developers pass a document in state (or image and PDF references in assets) alongside a map of named fields across nine built-in types: text, number (with configurable decimals and units), date, time, datetime, list, duration, estimate, and multi-step forecast. Rather than returning raw strings alone, single-value extractions return per-field confidence scores, spell_confidence on OCR text read from images, Unicode code-point character spans ([start, end)) pinpointing the exact source substring on supported text models, and p_null, the calibrated probability that a requested field is absent from the document.

When p_null crosses 0.5 (or a custom per-field null_threshold), the API returns an explicit null alongside a best-effort guess value so downstream pipelines can enforce deterministic confidence floors and route only uncertain fields to human review, while estimate and forecast fields express uncertainty through mean, median, p10, and p90 distributions.