Two weeks ago, IBM released Granite 4.1, an 8-billion-parameter open model that reportedly matches 32B mixture-of-experts models on key benchmarks. It is the latest signal that the LLM landscape is not consolidating — it is fragmenting. If you are building on top of LLM APIs today, you probably started with one model. Maybe GPT-4, maybe Claude. Your API gateway was simple: one endpoint, one provider, one set of failure modes. But 2026 has made that architecture obsolete. Here is what actually happens when your gateway needs to route across 30+ models — and why most teams discover the problems only in production.…