An OpenRouter API key exposed in a repository or .env file is a billing emergency. OpenRouter routes to dozens of models — Claude, GPT-4, Gemini, Mistral — and a key scraped from a public file will be used against your credit balance within hours. Go to openrouter.ai/keys now, delete the key, check your usage log for unexpected calls, and provision a new one with a hard spending limit.
Once you have contained the immediate damage, look at the source. AI coding agents are one of the most common vectors for .env exposure that developers do not immediately trace: the agent reads your environment to understand the project, a prompt in a file or a tool result steers it toward summarizing config, and the key surfaces in output that gets logged, cached, or sent somewhere external. OpenRouter keys are especially valuable targets because a single key unlocks the full model catalog.
AgentGuard360 intercepts credential patterns before an AI agent delivers them as output. Your sk-or-v1 key gets redacted mid-session — the LLM never sends it, the conversation log never contains it, and you get a critical alert on the dashboard and by email the moment the pattern is detected.
The key you just revoked is gone. Protect the one you are about to create.
