Abdulrahman.Badahdouh

🦔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🤗

Microsoft canceling its internal Claude Code licenses this week likely has almost nothing to do with AI costs becoming untenable. Microsoft's own statement says Claude models remain accessible through Copilot CLI and Anthropic's Claude still runs inside Microsoft 365. The real story is that Microsoft's own product (GitHub Copilot) was being embarrassed by a competitor internally this is a platform strategy play, not a cost crisis call. And the post assumes token prices are rising and unsustainable but the actual data goes the other way. As Sam Altman said, a hard reasoning problem that cost X on the OpenAI API 18 months ago now costs 1,000x less. 1,000x in 18 months is just that doesn't happen very often. His stated mission is to relentlessly drive the cost of intelligence down as close to zero as possible and make it a low-cost asset available to the world. A16z separately documented a 10x cost decline per year for equivalent model performance and Nvidia's Blackwell platform delivered 4x to 10x inference cost reductions in production deployments in early 2026. Yes, Uber burned through its 2026 AI budget in four months. But look at why, 95% of engineers were using AI tools monthly, ~70% of committed code was AI-generated, and 11% of real-time backend updates were made autonomously by agents with zero human intervention. That's not an AI cost problem. That's a CFO who budgeted for a pilot and got a revolution. Also, this post ignores the Jevons Paradox, when a resource gets cheaper, total consumption rises, not falls. Tokens inferenced on platforms like OpenRouter grew 25-fold since December 2024, OpenAI’s revenue grew at roughly a 250% annual rate to around a $20B run rate, while Anthropic’s surged from roughly $9B to over $30B in just a few months. Those aren't the numbers of companies whose economics are imploding. Even Gartner projects inference on a 1-trillion parameter model will cost 90%+ less by 2030. The actual Gartner warning is that agentic AI costs more per task because agents run longer chains, that's a design and scoping problem, not a structural industry collapse.