This week in the AI price war: OpenAI cut GPT-5.6 Luna pricing by 80% and GPT-5.6 Terra by 20%. Claude Opus 5 landed on Amazon Bedrock holding at $5 in / $25 out per million tokens with a 1M context window. Every headline says the same thing: intelligence is getting cheaper, fast.
So why does every engineering team I talk to report the same thing — the AI line on the cloud bill went up again this quarter?
Because tokens are the only part of the stack getting cheaper, and tokens are becoming the smallest part of the bill. Let's do the math.
Jevons paradox, but for tokens
In 1865, economist William Jevons noticed that more efficient steam engines didn't reduce coal consumption — they increased it, because efficiency made steam viable for things it was previously too expensive for.
