{"slug": "the-unsustainable-ai-subsidy", "title": "The Unsustainable AI Subsidy", "summary": "Google's AI pricing has tripled annually, while OpenAI's flagship model rose after a period of subsidy and Anthropic's most powerful models saw a price decrease. The three vendors now all face increasing costs as capital expenditure spending hits record highs, forcing a shift from market-share-focused pricing to margin-focused pricing. Google remains the low-cost provider at less than half the price of its competitors, with Gemini 3.1 Pro costing $2.00 per million input tokens compared to $5.00 for both OpenAI's GPT-5.5 and Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.7.", "body_md": "Google’s AI triples in price each year.\n\nOpenAI’s flagship model was seemingly subsidized for a while, before rising again.\n\nAnthropic’s AI has been the same price for a little bit & decreased for the most powerful models.\n\nThose are three very different pricing strategies. If we compare the absolutes, the data completes the picture.\n\n| Vendor | Model | Input ($/1M) | Output ($/1M) |\n|---|---|---|---|\n| Gemini 3.1 Pro | $2.00 | $12.00 | |\n| Anthropic | Claude Opus 4.7 | $5.00 | $25.00 |\n| OpenAI | GPT-5.5 | $5.00 | $30.00 |\n\nGoogle remains the low-cost player, increasing the price on all its models but still less than half of the competition. Anthropic had maintained a luxe pricing until late last year.\n\nThe pricing changes indicate changes in strategy : cuts when cash is plentiful & share matters. Increases when cash is tight & margins matter. The latter is the case for all three vendors now when capex spending continues to set records.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-unsustainable-ai-subsidy", "canonical_source": "https://tomtunguz.com/ai-model-inflation/", "published_at": "2026-05-29 16:17:13+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-05-29 16:47:46.616404+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "large-language-models", "ai-products", "ai-infrastructure", "ai-startups"], "entities": ["Google", "OpenAI", "Anthropic", "Gemini 3.1 Pro", "Claude Opus 4.7", "GPT-5.5"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-unsustainable-ai-subsidy", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-unsustainable-ai-subsidy.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-unsustainable-ai-subsidy.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-unsustainable-ai-subsidy.jsonld"}}