What is a channel?

Many models are reachable through more than one channel — independent routes that serve the same model under neutral method names such as standard, direct or reverse. Pinning a channel sends your requests for that model down a specific route; by default the choice is made for you automatically.

Default: automatic routing

Without a pin, every request uses smart routing — the cheapest healthy route able to serve the model is selected per request. This is the recommended setting and needs no configuration.

Choose a channel in your dashboard

Open the Channels tab in your dashboard. Every model that offers more than one channel is listed with a live health dot per channel. Select a channel and save, or leave it on Auto (Smart Routing). Your choice is stored on your account and applied to every future request for that model.

Channel tiers

Each channel carries an access tier, shown as a badge in the dashboard picker. No badge means the channel is free for everyone. A Paid badge means it needs an active plan or subscription. A Pay-as-you-go badge means it is billed from your wallet balance per request. Pinning a channel never changes a model's price — only which route serves the request.

Discover channels via the API

Add ?channels=1 to the models endpoint to list every channel. Each one is returned as a brand-neutral pseudo-model whose group field is the base model it belongs to and whose status reflects live health — the same data the dashboard picker uses.

curl https://api.airforce/v1/models?channels=1

A trimmed response — each entry shares its base model in group, with its own live status:

{
  "data": [
    { "id": "claude-opus-4.6_standard", "group": "claude-opus-4.6", "status": "operational", "tier": "free" },
    { "id": "claude-opus-4.6_reverse",  "group": "claude-opus-4.6", "status": "operational", "tier": "paid" }
  ]
}

Fallback & health

A pinned channel is used whenever it is healthy. If it becomes unavailable, the request automatically falls back to smart routing instead of failing — so pinning a channel never makes a model less reliable than the default.