I’m a technologist with a software studio. AI is in nearly everything my agency builds and most of how we work. But when our Anthropic bill recently skyrocketed, I was happy about it.
The price we pay for AI is a lie. The longer the lie continues, the more dangerous AI is to the future of human expertise and human teams. The sooner businesses start paying up, the better.
Let’s start with the math. In 2025, OpenAI booked around $13 billion in revenue and posted a roughly $21 billion operating loss, spending close to $1.60 for every dollar it took in. That isn’t an accident or a rough patch. The frontier labs are deliberately pricing below what it costs to serve you, to win the market before the market figures out what it’s worth. Venture capital and the cloud giants are covering the gap. They will, eventually, want it back. Most analysts expect API prices to climb once the subsidy race winds down.
So when AI feels absurdly cheap, that’s because it is—temporarily, and on someone else’s dime.
Here’s why I’m glad the bill is coming. A subsidized price lies to you about one of the most pressing calls we’re all making right now: human or machine? At today’s fake-low rate, the machine wins arguments it has no business winning. Move the price to where it actually sits, and a lot of those “obviously cheaper to automate” decisions quietly flip back to the human side.
What worries me isn’t AI getting expensive. It’s what we’ll do before it does.
We’re being invited to make permanent decisions based on a temporary price. If you clear out your writers, your support team, and your analysts now, while AI is on sale, you don’t just trim a line item. You lose the people, the relationships, the institutional memory, and the human judgment that AI frankly still can’t touch. You can re-sign a software contract. You can’t always rehire a relationship.
We’ve seen this movie enough times to know how it ends.
Amazon undercut local retail on price and convenience until the alternatives thinned out; 90% of independent retailers said it hurt their revenue. Once the competition was gone, Amazon had the leverage to dictate terms to the sellers who remained. Google and Meta absorbed the ad dollars that used to fund local newspapers—a court found Google illegally monopolized ad tech and “substantially harmed” publishers in the process. The shops didn’t reopen. The newsrooms didn’t refill.
The pattern is always the same three steps: subsidize or undercut, capture the market, then set the terms.
Knowledge work is the next thing in line. And the companies positioned to capture it are OpenAI, Anthropic, and a handful of others—who are, to be clear, my own vendors. I’m not standing outside this. I’m in it, writing the checks.
When a few companies own the operations your business runs on, you pay what they decide, when they decide it. Ask anyone who built their entire funnel on a social platform and woke up to a new algorithm and a higher ad rate. Now picture that, except it’s not your marketing on the meter. It’s your analysis, your code, your writing, your actual thinking.
That’s the “can we afford it” question, and it has two meanings on purpose. Can we afford the bill when it lands? And can we afford to have gutted the human capacity that would have been our fallback?
To be fair to the optimists: Inference costs have been dropping fast, and it’s possible AI just keeps getting cheaper and the reckoning never fully arrives. But you don’t bet your company’s entire human side on “maybe the subsidy lasts forever.” That’s not a strategy.
None of this makes me anti-AI. I’d be out of business, and I’d be lying about how much I enjoy the work. We use it everywhere. But I treat it like a brilliant intern who’s working for free this year and might want 10 times more next year. You lean on that intern for leverage, not for replacement. You keep your people pointed at the things that compound: relationships, taste, judgment, the calls someone has to actually be accountable for. And you stay smarter than the tool, because you’re the one in charge. Human expertise has to be running the show no matter what AI costs.
So I’m okay with the bill. Let AI cost what it costs. The sooner it does, the sooner we stop confusing “subsidized” with “better,” and remember that the humans were never the expensive option. They were the resilient one.
The only real question is whether we figure that out before we let them go—or after.
Lindsey Witmer Collins is founder and CEO of WLCM App Studio and Scribbly Books.