The Unsustainable AI Subsidy

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.

Google’s AI triples in price each year. OpenAI’s flagship model was seemingly subsidized for a while, before rising again. Anthropic’s AI has been the same price for a little bit & decreased for the most powerful models. Those are three very different pricing strategies. If we compare the absolutes, the data completes the picture. | Vendor | Model | Input $/1M | Output $/1M | |---|---|---|---| | Gemini 3.1 Pro | $2.00 | $12.00 | | | Anthropic | Claude Opus 4.7 | $5.00 | $25.00 | | OpenAI | GPT-5.5 | $5.00 | $30.00 | Google 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. The 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.