Chatbots aren't a money maker. Each interaction is likely to be 1-2K tokens at most. AWS Bedrock prices 11K token input and 4K output for a total of $0.184 using on-demand usage [1]. So for normal usage (occasionally asking questions) you are looking at less than $1 per month for a person.

Using the models for data processing (a lot of input/output tokens) and for role-playing will use more tokens and thus cost more. However, those use cases are not common when comparing the percentage of the user base.

The money maker is agentic coding where people get the models to perform long-running tasks. This is why Open AI and Anthropic have been pushing these hard. However, there is pushback on this, especially among businesses looking for value for money/cut costs [2] like Apple [3], [4].

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/bedrock/pricing/

[2] https://www.ibm.com/think/insights/tokenmaxxing-dead-long-li...

[3] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-11-04/apple-cut...

[4] https://9to5mac.com/2026/11/04/report-apple-reduces-employee...

> As AI grows in capability

The issue is, at some point for AI to grow more in usage it will need to decrease in cost.

We are already seeing this with some companies reducing AI usage or moving to open models due to high costs.

AI will surely boom there's no doubt on that, but it won't necessarily produce the revenue that Anthropic investors hope for.

If this is a consensus viewpoint, it'll likely be priced into the IPO.

I'm cautiously bullish on AI in general, and I wouldn't touch an AI stock with a 100m pole, because there are way too many uncautiously bullish investors in the market.

We have, for example, no idea what the long-term implications of AI effectively training on its own output is. Recursive self-improvement is not a law of nature. If anything, the opposite: the overwhelming majority of species are extinct. Evolution is as much a story of dead ends as survival of the fittest. So betting on any one narrow path of AI development to survive seems extraordinarily risky from a biological standpoint.

Depends on the price.

Do we know if current pricing is sustainable?

But will it increase by 10000X, as I back of the envelope calculated it would require to justify Anthropic's $2T valuation in the face of quickly dropping token prices?

Also, there are many who have never interacted with a chatbot.

Something like 99% of the people who have interacted with an LLM chatbot lose interest after a month.

100% of people who have to interact with an LLM chatbot taking the place of a human customer sales or service agent jump to a competitor.

Outside of the tech bubble, the LLM hype is already over.

Economic theory would state that if token prices go up people will stop offloading work onto LLMs and start doing it themselves again.

Indeed, 2026 was basically that: the LLM providers increased token costs and companies cut LLM spend to the bone. That is why Anthropic's IPO is struggling and MS and Google have failed to meet AI-related revenue targets for 3 straight years.

Or incentivize using the minimum viable model for the job instead of throwing multi trillion parameter Fable sized models at summarizing documents or classification tasks.

I now do like 90% of my routine software dev/sysadmin stuff with Luna on Medium by default, some proportion of which could itself be offloaded to a small Qwen model.

But I wonder if that offloading will happen if prices rise past a certain point and it becomes not worth it.