OPINION The future of AI is unwritten, but the writing is on the wall – your margin is my opportunity.Amazon founder Jeff Bezos said as much more than a decade ago in support of the e-souk's low-price, low-margin sales strategy. That opportunity exists in the AI training and inference business. But perhaps not for long.
Two leading American AI companies, Anthropic and OpenAI, are not actually profitable at this point, but their pitch to investors is something along the lines of "just hang in there a few more years and keep sending cash."
Given reports that Claude Code subscribers paying $200 a month can potentially consume $5,000 worth of tokens and that OpenAI is also losing money on subscriptions, it starts to become a bit clear why Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft have already started pushing customers toward metered usage pricing. AI revenue needs to go up for frontier model makers to survive. And then AI adoption needs to grow.Government agencies and large corporations that don't keep a close eye on fees may be terrified enough of AI-enabled exploitation to pay a premium for models like Anthropic's Mythos and OpenAI's GPT-5.5.But more price-sensitive folk may shop for cheaper tokens. And they're likely to find them.Benedict Evans, among the more astute industry observers, expects AI models will be commoditized. In his recently updated presentation, "AI eats the world," he suggests that the AI supply/demand imbalance will ease and the pricing power of leading AI labs will dissipate.He argues that models will become commodity infrastructure and that innovation and pricing power will have to move up the stack. That's already evident in Anthropic's efforts to keep developers interacting through its own tools like the Claude Code CLI and desktop app, and through services that sit atop its models like Claude Cowork, Claude Design, and Claude for Creative Work.But it's more apparent in US companies lobbying for regulatory intervention as a defense against competition from China, some of which has taken the form of copying AI models via a process called distillation.Zilan Qian, a research associate at the Oxford China Policy Lab, recently explored how software developers in China are acquiring AI tokens for pennies on the dollar. She writes that despite the fact that leading US model makers try to prevent people in China from using US models, everyone who wants access can get it through API proxies.
