What is Model provider?
A model provider is a company that serves LLM inference over an API — OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are examples — which you access with an API key you generate and control.
A model provider hosts the actual language model and exposes it through an API. You (or the platform you use) send a request with a prompt, and the provider's API returns a completion, billing per token used.
Different providers specialize differently: some optimize for speed, some for long context windows, some for tool-calling reliability or cost. Because access is just an API key, many agent platforms let you plug in whichever provider fits your use case.
On VibeOpenClaw
VibeOpenClaw supports 13 model providers for BYOK — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Groq, xAI, Mistral, DeepSeek, Together, Fireworks, Perplexity, OpenRouter, Cohere, and NVIDIA — each with its own provider page covering strengths and how to get a key.