Something broke in the AI pricing market between January and May 2026.
A year ago, "frontier model" meant "expensive model." Claude Opus was $15/$75 per million tokens. GPT-4 was $5/$15. If you wanted the best coding performance, you paid the best price. The correlation between quality and cost was loose, but it existed.
That correlation is gone.
The Numbers That Changed Everything
Here's SWE-bench Verified — the benchmark that tests AI models against real GitHub issues from projects like Django, Flask, and scikit-learn — plotted against output price per million tokens:
