🦔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🤗
In 2018 I took an Uberpool across Manhattan for $1.78, less than the subway. Today the same ride is $20 and nobody is surprised. Todays equivalent is @claudeai 's 200 dollar per month plan. 3 reasons the end of free tokens is near & what to do about it: https://t.co/tNtvvxaCej
@davidbyttow that sounds wise, but is it applicable here? the AI revolution that is underway is not gradual, not abstract and is immediately threatening. We're in a Willy E Coyote moment where we are over the abyss we just haven't noticed
Yup. Almost all commercial products have an open source version equivalent that is technically great but has a terrible UI. A question is of course, do you need PhotoGIMP or will an agent native GIMP be better anyway
Un youtuber brasileño le acaba de clavar un puñal a la suscripción de Photoshop.
Se llama PhotoGIMP: un parche gratuito (GPL-3.0) que convierte GIMP en una copia casi idéntica de Photoshop.
Misma interfaz, mismos paneles, mismos atajos de teclado y muchísimo más espacio para tu lienzo. Tus manos ya saben usarlo sin aprender nada nuevo.
¿Por qué está explotando?
- $0 en vez de $276 al año
- Sin cuenta Adobe ni login
- Todo se guarda en tu PC (nada en la nube)
- Compatible con Windows, Mac y Linux
- Se desinstala borrando una carpeta (sin rastro)
Instalación ridículamente fácil: copias 9 archivos y listo. +8.8k estrellas en GitHub y traducciones de la comunidad.
Uso personal y comercial 100% permitido.
@mikebutcher it has the potential to move the "power" even more from labor to capital. if the agents manage the institutional knowledge, job safety weakens a lot
@Dan_Jeffries1 Why would the chinese models stay open, do you think? seems to me more like a late to game move, which is usually followed with a quick closing up.
@bernhardsson Is that optimistic? People liking technology having fewer children, people liking extreme religions having more children can definitely impact evolution, but is that the direction you are rooting for?
PVV got 17% of the Dutch vote. Through first-past-the-post, they win 158 of 343 districts. Through ranked-choice, 39. Under a median-voter rule, 1. Same ballots, very different countries. Democracy by another word. https://t.co/8zvXMaVwV5
@cosminnegruseri I think you see this a lot all over. We had some test that was more performative than qualitative but worked because it was proof of work. Now the AI can do the work, so the proof is gone. Same with resumes and linkedin posts being throughleadery -- ugh.
2.6B open source model generating up to a minute high quality video from one frame? That's insane! Maybe there is something to these world models after all. Can't wait to get my hands on the actual model
https://t.co/i4GVAw5sHL
well, I'm off google maps API now: https://t.co/09czPja0R9 -- it seems so weird to me that the default is that a maps API key can also be used for expensive inference and that
@Google
doesn't allow keys without billing and no budget
I wrote a post: https://t.co/v33vc7WnuR
Every LLM contains a wildly lossy “compression” of the web. Even for URLs that never existed.
I built a browser for it: the Web of Babel.
The three most valuable companies today ($NVDA, $AAPL, $GOOG) raised around 50M together. Now Anthropic raises 10x that and it barely makes the news. Interesting times. https://t.co/VYgyemT0nr /cc @Julie188
I'm going to be in SF from Wednesday on - come and hangout at https://t.co/um5wZl2JWY - I'll talk a bit about some of the new ideas about automatic wiki writing