{"slug": "the-unsustainable-subsidy", "title": "The Unsustainable Subsidy", "summary": "Google's AI pricing has tripled annually, while OpenAI's flagship model rose after a period of apparent subsidy, and Anthropic held steady before cutting costs on its most powerful models. The three vendors now face tightening cash conditions and record capital expenditure, forcing price increases across the board as margins take priority over market share. Google remains the low-cost leader at less than half the price of competitors, with its Gemini 3.1 Pro costing $2.00 per million input tokens versus $5.00 for both OpenAI's GPT-5.5 and Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.7.", "body_md": "Google’s AI triples in price each year.\n\nOpenAI’s flagship model was seemingly subsidized for a while, before rising again.\n\nAnthropic’s AI has been the same price for a little bit & decreased for the most powerful models.\n\nThose are three very different pricing strategies. If we compare the absolutes, the data completes the picture.\n\n| Vendor | Model | Input ($/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-subsidy", "canonical_source": "https://www.tomtunguz.com/ai-model-inflation/", "published_at": "2026-05-20 00:00:00+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-05-29 17:36:33.687188+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "large-language-models", "ai-products", "ai-infrastructure"], "entities": ["Google", "OpenAI", "Anthropic", "Gemini 3.1 Pro", "Claude Opus 4.7", "GPT-5.5"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-unsustainable-subsidy", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-unsustainable-subsidy.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-unsustainable-subsidy.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-unsustainable-subsidy.jsonld"}}