The price for a given level of capability will fall, but the frontier has recently been getting more expensive. If you compare GPT-5 to GPT-5.5 on the Artificial Analysis benchmark, it's ~4x more expensive, but achieves a higher score. Claude 4.7 is also more expensive than predecessors because of a tokenizer change.

As the AI labs become more reliant on enterprise adoption, it makes sense to push capabilities at a cost that makes sense for businesses. Even if it prices out consumers or hobbyists.