AI inference pricing is collapsing fast

Chinese AI models are reportedly 112x cheaper than Anthropic on a per-million-token basis.
Chamath framed the comparison as a “barrel of intelligence”: about $56 from Anthropic, $26 from OpenAI, $1.50 from Meta, $1 from xAI and Google, and roughly $0.50 from Chinese models.
That is not a small pricing gap.
It suggests AI inference may be moving down one of the steepest cost curves in modern technology.
The premium model labs are betting that trust, safety, enterprise contracts, and brand quality can hold pricing long enough for costs to catch down.
But the risk is obvious.
If intelligence becomes a commodity faster than expected, the companies spending the most on frontier models may face serious margin pressure.
For $OPENAI, $ANTHROPIC, $GOOGL, $META, and the broader AI trade, pricing power is becoming the key question.