The cost to hire a human is highly predictable. The cost of AI isn't. I, as a human, need food and shelter, which puts a ceiling to my bargaining power. I can't withdraw my labour indefinitely.

The power dynamics are also vastly against me. I represent a fraction of my employer's labour, but my employer represents 100% of my income.

That dynamic is totally inverted with AI. You are a rounding error on their revenue sheet, they have a monopoly on your work throughput. How do you budget an workforce that could turn 20% more expensive overnight?

By continuously testing competitors and local LLMs? The reason for rising prices is that they (Anthropic) probably realized that they have reached a ceiling of what LLMs are capable of, and while it's a lot, it is still not a big moat and it's definitely not intelligence.

> The cost of AI isn't.

This is why there are a ton of corps running the open source models in house... Known costs, known performance, upgrade as you see fit. The consumer backlash against 4o was noted by a few orgs, and they saw the writing on the wall... they didnt want to develop against a platform built on quicksand (see openweb, apps on Facebook and a host of other examples).

There are people out there making smart AI business decisions, to have control over performance and costs.

The same way companies already deal with any cost.