Exactly.

Competitive pressure prevents a rug pull.

In a competitive race, each breakthrough gets copied or illicitly distilled or whatever. That means the frontier models are deprecating assets and the mark up tokens should get smaller and smaller.

Now bigger models are more expensive to run inference on, but today's models, or equivalent ability and size models, shouldn't go up in price.

5.5 is 4x the price, but 5.4 still exists, so its not rug pull, but a big more expensive to run and hopefully more valuable model.