This feels like the natural end of the subsidized tokens phase.

Once everyone tightens limits, the competition shifts from model quality to pricing strategy and usage control.

To this day, nobody has proven any subsidization is actually taking place. The only "proof" is comparing subscription with API prices, but that's comparing two very different products. Unrestricted enterprise APIs always cost more than consumer products. Sometimes a whole lot more, so API prices don't really tell you much in terms of inference costs.

And there's a reason why Anthropic cracked down on third party harnesses - prompt caching must be very effective for cost reduction, and if you look at cache hits of CC, you'll see it's very aggressive. They even said it themselves on twitter that if your limits get exhausted sooner, it's likely something with your workflow that doesn't utilize caching as well.

If any subsidization is taking place, I'd wager it's simply light users subsidizing heavy ones. But that's nothing new.