🦔Microsoft canceled its internal Claude Code licenses this week after token-based billing made the cost untenable, even for a company with effectively infinite cloud resources. Uber's CTO sent an internal memo warning the company burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in just four months. American AI software prices have jumped 20% to 37%, and GitHub (owned by Microsoft) is dropping flat-rate plans for usage-based billing across its products.
My Take
The AI subsidy era is ending in real time. The same company that put $13 billion into OpenAI and built the Azure infrastructure powering most of Anthropic's compute just looked at the bill from a competitor's coding tool and decided it was not worth paying. That is not a productivity failure on Anthropic's end. Token-based pricing is forcing every enterprise customer to confront the actual cost of running these models at scale, and the number turns out to be far higher than the flat-rate experiments suggested.
This ties directly to my Gemini Flash post yesterday. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google all raised effective prices in the last six months. Enterprises that built workflows assuming AI costs would keep falling are now watching annual budgets evaporate in months. Two outcomes look likely from here. Either enterprises scale back AI usage to fit budgets, which slows the revenue ramp the labs need to justify their valuations ahead of IPOs, or the labs cut prices and absorb the losses, which makes the unit economics worse at exactly the wrong moment. Both paths land in the same place, the numbers stop working, and somebody has to take the writedown.
Hedgie🤗
@PiratePatriot47@TheSalonDon Why would retail consumers stop using credit cards? They get points and they get to pay for stuff on credit many of which rack up huge credit card debt. Highly doubt we see that make a difference except for B2B
I've liked Ken Griffin ever since he paid $44 million to prevent a dinosaur from leaving the US.
Wealthy foreigners were trying to buy the dino and ship it to their country. Griffin outbid them and later said: “Apex was born in America and is going to stay in America”. Apex is now in an Arkansas museum.
This is what wealthy Americans should be doing, investing, growing wealth, creating jobs, and protecting our assets.
The fact that he is now publicly standing up against Zohran's class warfare tactics is completely necessary. Zohran poked the wrong bear. The politicians say you shouldn't like him, but I don't care, I like him.
@RealJoshLong@TheSalonDon Can’t hire quality candidates when the culture is shit cuz your overloaded with crap employees. Also could be the case a well intentioned person is hired and get molded by the team to not do any real work cuz that’s the pace we work here