Bull Theory@BullTheoryio
THIS IS ABSOLUTELY INSANE.
A company's AI bill jumped 700% in a single day because Anthropic changed how it charged for AI usage.
Workato had been paying one flat monthly fee to use Anthropic's AI. In May, Anthropic moved them to pay per token pricing, where every single prompt costs real money. The bill went up 7 times overnight.
Its own CIO said AI companies had been subsidizing usage for years just to get everyone hooked, and the moment that stopped, the real cost hit all at once.
This is happening everywhere right now, not just at one company.
Amazon, Walmart, Cisco, Uber, and Meta are all now capping how much AI their own employees can use.
These are the exact companies that spent the last two years forcing AI onto every employee as fast as possible.
Uber burned through its entire 2026 AI budget by April and now caps employees at $1,500 a month.
Amazon told staff to stop using AI "just for the sake of using it" after engineers were caught running agents just to climb internal leaderboards.
JPMorgan published an internal note this month titled "AI Bills Are Out of Control." Some JPMorgan employees are reportedly spending more on AI every month than their own salary.
Here is why this is not just a cost story inside a few companies.
It is a direct threat to two trillion-dollar IPOs.
OpenAI and Anthropic both filed confidentially for IPOs this month, both targeting valuations near $850 billion or higher, and neither company is profitable. OpenAI reportedly loses $1.22 for every dollar of revenue it makes.
OpenAI's losses tell the same story from a different angle. In 2024, OpenAI lost $5.09 billion. In 2025, that loss grew to $38.5 billion, nearly 8 times higher in a single year. Costs are growing faster than revenue at exactly the moment OpenAI needs Wall Street to believe the opposite is happening.
Their entire pitch to public investors is that enterprise spending keeps climbing. The exact backlash forcing Amazon and Uber to cut back is happening at the precise moment both companies need Wall Street to believe the opposite.
OpenAI already sees the danger. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that OpenAI is weighing steep token price cuts specifically to stop losing customers to Anthropic, whose Claude Code product helped its revenue jump from $9 billion to $47 billion annualized in five months.
But cutting prices only works until someone undercuts you.
Artificial Analysis benchmarked every major AI model on identical tasks and tracked the total cost. Anthropic's flagship model cost $4,811 to run the full test.
OpenAI's cost $3,357. China's DeepSeek cost $1,071. Another Chinese model, Kimi, cost $948. China is not trying to match American AI on quality. It is making premium priced AI look completely unnecessary.
Bain surveyed nearly 1,000 companies on AI returns. 40% said their actual cost savings came in below 10%, despite everything they spent.
One investor told Axios that a CFO accidentally spent half a billion dollars on Claude in a single month before anyone even noticed.
OpenAI and Anthropic are about to ask public markets to value them like the future of software itself.
Their own biggest customers are proving in real time that they will not pay whatever it costs to get there.
