Same way they’ve banned a lot of Chinese networking hardware: make it impossible for companies to use it.

For consumers they may as well buy GPUs and run local models. The cost is same over a year or two but infinite token usage, they get to keep the hardware, and local models continue to improve over that time too. I can't justify $200 on SOTA models for a personal subscription after Qwen3.8-27B. And it's only getting better from here.

People said the same about $200 a month. I think the ceiling is probably much higher. Companies regularly spend 10% or more of employee cost on offices, SaaS, equipment. I could see these costs going to 10% of white collar income.

You think these guys care about risk?

This is what I did. Hope it works out. The other benefit is you have a more natural method to avoid lock in. A lot of "improvements" to the agent harness I believe are attempts to build customer lock in.

Yup. I got an R9700 recently for exactly this reason. Figured if I'm going to spend $2400 a year I may as well have something to show for it at the end of it.

That they are expensive and climbing doesn't negate my point if the cost of the subscription over how long you plan to keep it is equally or more expensive than the GPUs. You can put together dual 5060 Ti or 5070 Ti systems to run local LLMs too. You don't need to splurge on a 5090. That's a bad option at this point.

If you've used both you know the OpenAI plans don't compare to Anthropic plans _at all_. Claude code subscriptions are probably worth 4x as much in API spend compared to the same OpenAI subscription tier.

It used to be bad, but right now with the 200$ Claude sub I find it pretty hard to blow past the session limit.

You have to do a lot of things in parallel.

OpenAI 20x wasn't 20x even before that change. I got a lot more from Claude 5x than Codex 20x...

You are painting half of the picture, perhaps on purpose? The other half is this: Opus 5.5 is significantly better than both Sol 6.1 and Astra, and with the newly increased limits across the board, it is quite difficult to run out (unless you're spamming agents at Max effort). So it is a much, much better deal than OpenAI's Pro 100.

"For antitrust reasons, it’s helpful for the US government to mediate or at least enable these discussions — they don’t need to participate, but do need to issue a narrow waiver for certain kinds of safety conversations. " - Dario a couple weeks ago.

Yes, he was talking about safety, but IMHO they're likely already IMHO pushing the boundaries of cartel type behaviour. And they will use safety as the cover to make it happen.

I suspect we'll see serious price fixing and the DOJ do nothing about it because of the inroads these people have with the Trump regime.

Whether that survives contact with Chinese open weight models is hard to say.

I just got an email telling me this isn't true. They're immediately cutting my 200, which I've had for like a year.

The subscription plans are a huge money sink, that obviously will have to go away or be priced at a ridiculous level to make sense.