AI bills are exploding despite costs dropping 10x every 18 months because every saving gets reinvested into more usage.
BUT:
- Today's prices are subsidized (OpenAI losing $14B in 2026, Anthropic burning $12B in one quarter, Cursor alleges that a $200/month Claude Code subscription could cost up to $5,000 in compute.)
- When subsidies end, prices reverse into a 10x larger consumption base
- That's the double squeeze nobody is modeling for
Companies building token efficiency now won't feel it. The rest will.
And Altman? Cheaper AI to run = more use cases justified = bigger market for frontier models.
Although AI assistants are now deeply embedded
in society, there has been limited empirical study
of how their usage affects human empowerment.
We present the first large-scale empirical analysis of disempowerment patterns in real-world AI
assistant interactions, analyzing 1.5 million consumer Claude.ai conversations using a privacypreserving approach. We focus on situational disempowerment potential, which occurs when AI
assistant interactions risk leading users to form
distorted perceptions of reality, make inauthentic value judgments, or act in ways misaligned
with their values.
Technology companies are adding a fourth component to engineering compensation : salary, bonus, options, & inference costs. Levels.fyi pegs the 75th percentile software engineer salary at $375k. Add $100k in inference & the fully loaded cost is $475k. That’s 21% in tokens.
Enterprise AI spending jumped 3.2× in 2025 to $37B (Gartner), while inference costs dropped 90%.
The paradox isn't new, it's cloud economics on fast-forward.
What took cloud 10 years to reveal is happening in AI in 2-3 years:
a) Low unit costs → elastic, untracked adoption
b) Agentic workflows multiply requests 10-50×
c) Cost drivers are architectural (retries, context bloat), not volumetric
d) Finance sees the bill only when it's too late to re-architect
Rigorous cost governance will be essential to realizing AI ROI.
BUT: - Today's prices are subsidized (OpenAI losing $14B in 2026, Anthropic burning $12B in one quarter, Cursor alleges that a $200/month Claude Code subscription could cost up to $5,000 in compute.) - When subsidies end, prices reverse into a 10x larger consumption base - That's the double squeeze nobody is modeling for Companies building token efficiency now won't feel it. The rest will. And Altman? Cheaper AI to run = more use cases justified = bigger market for frontier models.