In AI, the high token cost of using frontier models is becoming an increasingly loud part of the conversation. This week, OpenAI launched GPT-5.6 Sol at $5 input / $30 output per million tokens, half the input cost of Fable 5, which costs $10 input / $50 output. The price gap with open source is even wider. DeepSeek V4 Flash is available at $0.14 input / $0.28 output, about 36x cheaper than GPT-5.5 on input and over 100x cheaper on output. Meanwhile, China’s Z.ai released GLM-5.2, which costs about an eighth as much as Claude Opus 4.8 for certain tasks and is now the third most widely used AI system in the world.
Because China produces most of the top-performing open-source models, six of the ten models on the leading AI leaderboard were developed in China, meaning the cost pressure on US frontier labs is increasingly coming from state-backed competitors with no profit motive. Enterprises are starting to respond to the realities of token economics. It was reported this month that Uber burned through its entire annual AI budget in four months and has since implemented spending tiers on AI tools. Nevertheless, roughly 95% of enterprise AI usage still runs on frontier models, suggesting the shift to cheaper alternatives has barely begun.
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