benmaritz

🦔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🤗

BREAKING: The Seattle Social Housing Developer has announced its first acquisition, a 150-unit apartment building near Pike Place Market in downtown Seattle, for the cost of $60.9 million. It plans to convert half the units to be affordable for low and middle-income tenants.

California's ADU reforms are successful in large part because they replaced 482 different sets of local rules with one consistent statewide standard. We should do the same thing with building safety regulations, which should be rigorous, evidence-backed and statewide.

The Senate just passed my bill to ensure people can replace drafty windows with energy-efficient windows, without cities or HOAs obstructing them from doing so. Energy bills are through the roof & people should have the tools to lower their bills. Right now, some cities & HOAs are banning people from weatherizing their windows for aesthetic reasons, or forcing them to pay dramatically more money to fabricate replica windows. SB 908 puts a stop to this practice & gives people a tool to lower their cost of living. Thank you, colleagues!