[rich_sasha]

That's rather shitty. It's one thing to disallow bypassing preferential pricing models, it's a completely different thing to castrate your model against some uses.

You can see how it goes in the future. Wanna vibe code a throwaway script? $0.20. Ah, it's for a legal document search? $10k then. Oh and we'll charge 20% of your app sales too - I can see how they are going in real time, mind you!

[throwaway277432]

Unironically yes.

I predict that costs will grow to 80% of what it would cost a human, across the board for everything AI can do.

"It's still cheaper than a human" they'll say. Loudly here on HN too.

Of course this will happen slowly, very slowly. Lets meet again in 10-20 years.

[revolvingthrow]

If openai / anthropic / google were the only game in town then yea, we’d already be paying 5x as much as we do. But local models are so close to sota that it just isn’t going to happen. If I’m a lawyer getting billed $500k/yr on $600k profit I’d rather buy a chonky server and run a model that’s 90% as good and get my money back in 2 years, then pay $5k electricity on $600k profit.

Nobody will successfully lobby for banning local models either, it just isn’t going to happen when the rest of the world will happily avoid paying 80% of their profits to some US bigco for the privilege of existing.

[cactusplant7374]

Could you really build something sophisticated with a local model? Let's say a linux kernel.

[realusername]

I'm using Codex with the Linux kernel and I discard maybe 80% of what it produces. This isn't an area which the top models have solved.

[KronisLV]

> "It's still cheaper than a human" they'll say.

The question is how much friction there will be for people to switch over to Gemini, GPT or maybe even DeepSeek or Mistral or whatever. Even if price hikes are inevitable across the board, the moat any single org has is somewhat limited, so prices definitely will be a factor they'll compete on with one another at least a bit.

[RussianCow]

> the moat any single org has is somewhat limited

I disagree. The models are going to become commodities (we're already almost there), but the tooling and integrations will be the moat. Reproducing everything Anthropic has already built with Claude Code, Cowork, and all their connectors would be nontrivial, and they're just getting started.

Anyone can implement an AI chatbot. But few will be able to provide AI that's deeply integrated into our daily lives.

[HWR_14]

How would it be nontrivial? Assuming the AI can replace a programmer "reproduce app/api/ecosystem Y" is just tokens. And a negligible amount for trillion dollar companies that have their own data centers.

[KronisLV]

> Reproducing everything Anthropic has already built with Claude Code, Cowork, and all their connectors would be nontrivial, and they're just getting started.

They're one org with presumably some specific direction. As the actual models get better, expect a large part of the dev community iterating on tools way more easily, sometimes ones that Anthropic doesn't quite have an equivalent to - for example, just recently Cline released their Kanban solution to dish out tasks to agents (https://cline.bot/kanban), OpenCode has been around for a while for the agentic stuff (https://opencode.ai/) and now has a desktop and web version as well, alongside dozens of others. Cline and KiloCode also have decent browser automation.

I will admit that everyone working on everything at the same time definitely means limitless reinvention of the wheel and some genuinely good initiatives dying off along the way (I personally liked RooCode more than both the Cline and KiloCode for Visual Studio Code, sad to see them go), but I doubt we're gonna see a lack of software. Maybe a lack of good software, though; not like Anthropic or any org has any moat there either, since they're under the additional pressure of having to do a shitload of PR and release new models and keep up appearances, compared to your average dev just pushing to GitHub (unless they want corporate money, in which case they do need some polish).

[drivebyhooting]

Didn’t Anthropic vibe code all of those integrations? If AI coding is as useful and successful as it is touted, then those integration should be no moat at all.

[GrinningFool]

> I predict that costs will grow to 80% of what it would cost a human, across the board for everything AI can do.

80% of a human's price varies greatly by region. 80% of the lowest-priced effort-of- humans in this space right now will probably not be sustainable for the sellers.

[pingou]

This is assuming there will be no competition. But why wouldn't there be? Especially since you can use open source models, which are not too far from frontier models (from now).

[vidarh]

Kimi and GLM 5.1 are already capable of handling a good chunk of my tasks. They about to lose the leverage to allow them to drastically increase prices - enough models are 6-12 months away from being good enough large proportions of their customers uses.

[stronglikedan]

I don't think costs will grow on either side in the long term. In the short term, yes, but once they get the infrastructure in place to support AI, costs will go down. Right now, they're on borrowed infra.

[mystraline]

Its not20 years. Its now. Nvidia has already said that tokens cost more than humans.

https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/cost-c...

[asdfasgasdgasdg]

Article relies on a study published in Jan 2024 and a single sentence quote from an Nvidia exec, which sounds like it might have just a little bit been taken out of context.

[2ndorderthought]

I'm not a lawyer but is this legal? It's extremely anticompetitive.

[red-iron-pine]

we're talking about american companies in the US in 2026 -- what does the the law have to do with anything that happens?

[bdangubic]

what is illegal about it?! their product, they can do whatever they want and you can choose to be a customer or not, no?

[2ndorderthought]

They are technically billing people for services not rendered without any disclaimer?

[duped]

Price discrimination for services is mostly legal

[in_cahoots]

Imagine if it were Comcast instead of Claude. Comcast gives you 750GB of data a month. Now they decide that visiting HN 'counts' as 750GB and either shut you off or bill you extra. Is that price discrimination or changing the terms after the fact?

[duped]

Depends. Comcast is able to charge you and a business for the same service at different rates. They have also tried to do exactly what you're talking about, where they bill differently based on the data being accessed (remember net neutrality?).

But that's a bad example, price discrimination for commodities is generally not legal, while discrimination for services is. Data is arguably a commodity (ianal, I'm not up to date on the law of this). "Tokens" are not.

In fact the law makes carve outs specifically for businesses that sell services to discriminate on price based exactly on how the service is used and by who. And they do it all the time.

Whether it's fair or not, up to you to decide as a consumer. If you don't like it don't pay for it.

[ac29]

Not a great example since using Anthropic subscriptions with third party applications was never allowed, they just didnt take steps to prevent it until recently.

[FireBeyond]

Look at the wedding industry. Get a bunch of quotes on floral work. Then get a bunch of quotes for the same work, but tell them the event is a wedding. Oh, hey, look, you're getting charged 30% or beyond extra.

(I am not a full-time wedding photographer, but have shot maybe 20 weddings, and heard of this multiple times.)

[p_stuart82]

Yep. They built the quote engine before they built the pricing page. "OpenClaw" in your git history is enough to kick you off quota and onto metered billing.

[dangus]

This is absolutely how it’s going work. AI loses way too much money to not be enshittified.

It’s a way less transformational technology when put in context of the real price tag.

[bugglebeetle]

Deepseek has demonstrated that there is no reason for it to actually lose money. The awful business practices and monopoly tactics of the frontier model labs in the US are the problem.

[rapind]

It'll be interesting to see what happens when OpenAI goes public. I'm expecting the executives to run away with bags of money once they offload their insane risk to the public... or maybe there's a bailout / money printer scenario in the works. I guarantee some insider adjacents are going to make a killing in a way that will never be investigated.

[fragmede]

How would they make money in a way that should be investigated? Favored insider-adjacent folk would have been able to invest in pre-IPO SPVs or whatever that will have outsized returns, assuming the IPO goes well. It's unfair, but above board (accredited investor etc) according to the SEC, so what would they investigate? Unless there's other malfeasance you're alleging.

[rapind]

No chance unless open weight models out of China discontinue. The gap right now is practically nonexistent.

[delusional]

When the consolidation phase starts, you bet your ass open weight models are going to stop.

[mitchitized]

I don't think consolidation will ever happen, the AI space is already dominated by a few whales.

Seems most of the open weight models are from outside the USA (shocker), going to be interesting to see how THAT shakes out.

[dragonwriter]

The firms training those models have costs; without monetization they are even more unsustainable than subsidized commercial models. (Effectively, they are just a heavy form of subsidy ro overcome being commercially behind.)

[HWR_14]

The CCP wants to lead the world in AI. Market forces don't apply to the Chinese models.

[judahmeek]

Market forces won't apply to American models either if the American government bans Chinese-created models due to "national security".

[dragonwriter]

AI loses money for two reasons: (1) certain uses where owning the market is expected to be a high long-term value are currently heavily subsidized (the top-level story here is about the increasing efforts of model providers to prevent exploits where people convert subsidized services to uses outside the target of the subsidy), and (2) development costs of new models to keep up with competition.

[delusional]

I mean obviously. Why would the companies that control this technology NOT charge the absolute maximum amount their customers are willing to pay?

This doesn't even have anything to do with if it loses money or not. Obviously they are going to charge as much as possible.

[rapind]

Ideally? Competition.

[andai]

So like taxes except they actually help you survive?