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The Great AI Repricing Isn't Going Well by David Dayen
Artificial intelligence firms initially justified their extreme capital investment—the four largest tech companies expect to spend more than $750 billion for AI infrastructure just this year—by saying that the technology would replace all human workers. They’ve since recognized what an unbelievably bad PR pitch that was, and have pivoted to promote a sunnier scenario where “we’re going to be able to keep people at the center of everything,” as OpenAI’s Sam Altman said in May.
But there’s a sobering reality underneath the rhetorical shift: AI is turning out to be more expensive for businesses than paying their workers. And that could be one of the many triggers that collapses the fragile economic edifice that the dreams of AI are propping up.
The news has mostly been relegated to the business pages, but AI firms repriced their product for business customers in recent months. Instead of a subscription fee to use OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Microsoft’s Copilot or Anthropic’s Claude, they now use token-based billing. Every time the model is queried, a small fee is charged. This is a very common technique, hooking users on a product and then charging more. But it’s thrown corporate planning for incorporating AI completely out of whack.
Companies that previously told workers to use AI in every facet of their job are now seeing how that affects the bottom line. One unnamed company reportedly spent half a billion dollars on Claude in a single month. Part of this is because AI is being used on mundane tasks like making PowerPoint presentations to “prove” rapid take-up of the technology, something highly prized on Wall Street.
Now, though, we’re seeing the snapback. Companies like Uber and Tesla and Meta and Microsoft are capping worker token usage. (For Tesla, Elon Musk’s in-house product, Grok, is exempted from the cap.) Palantir CEO Alex Karp said bluntly earlier this month that “something has gone completely wrong” with the billing model. These are some of the biggest evangelists for AI adoption out there, and some of them have AI businesses themselves; if they’re scrambling, then imagine what even somewhat more skeptical firms are thinking.
But there’s a sobering reality underneath the rhetorical shift: AI is turning out to be more expensive for businesses than paying their workers. And that could be one of the many triggers that collapses the fragile economic edifice that the dreams of AI are propping up.
The news has mostly been relegated to the business pages, but AI firms repriced their product for business customers in recent months. Instead of a subscription fee to use OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Microsoft’s Copilot or Anthropic’s Claude, they now use token-based billing. Every time the model is queried, a small fee is charged. This is a very common technique, hooking users on a product and then charging more. But it’s thrown corporate planning for incorporating AI completely out of whack.
Companies that previously told workers to use AI in every facet of their job are now seeing how that affects the bottom line. One unnamed company reportedly spent half a billion dollars on Claude in a single month. Part of this is because AI is being used on mundane tasks like making PowerPoint presentations to “prove” rapid take-up of the technology, something highly prized on Wall Street.
Now, though, we’re seeing the snapback. Companies like Uber and Tesla and Meta and Microsoft are capping worker token usage. (For Tesla, Elon Musk’s in-house product, Grok, is exempted from the cap.) Palantir CEO Alex Karp said bluntly earlier this month that “something has gone completely wrong” with the billing model. These are some of the biggest evangelists for AI adoption out there, and some of them have AI businesses themselves; if they’re scrambling, then imagine what even somewhat more skeptical firms are thinking.
https://prospect.org/2026/07/08/great-ai-repricing-isnt-going-well/
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