Openai · CNBC Technology
New enterprise readies charge per seat, with token consumption billed at API rates on top
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OpenAI's Nick Turley, head of ChatGPT, acknowledged on a BG2 podcast that "it's possible that in the current era, having an unlimited plan is like having an unlimited electricity plan.
Key facts
- Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has said he'd be "deeply alarmed" if an engineer earning $500,000 a year wasn't using at least $250,000 worth of compute — measuring what an engineer spends on AI instead
- Based on Anthropic's published rates for its latest model, a heavy Claude Code Max user could be paying as little as $200 a month for usage that would've cost the user up to $5,000
- Using the rates of Anthropic's latest model, one million tokens of input (prompts) costs $5, and one million tokens of output (the model's responses) costs $25
- Anthropic's most generous consumer offering, its $200-a-month Max plan, became a case study
Summary
The main demand signal for artificial intelligence looks explosive on paper, but it may be significantly overstated. Anthropic, by pricing its tools for that reality, might be the best-positioned AI company if a correction comes. Agentic AI, where models write code, browse the web, and execute multi-step workflows, burns through thousands more per session. Using the rates of Anthropic's latest model, one million tokens of input (prompts) costs $5, and one million tokens of output (the model's responses) costs $25. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has said he'd be "deeply alarmed" if an engineer earning $500,000 a year wasn't using at least $250,000 worth of compute — measuring what an engineer spends on AI instead of what they produce with it. Once companies start measuring AI adoption by volume, employees optimize for the metric instead of the outcome. " Jen Stave, executive director of the Harvard Business School AI Institute, hears the same from enterprise leaders.
Flat-rate pricing has dominated the early years of AI adoption, with fixed monthly fees for generous or unlimited AI access. Based on Anthropic's published rates for its latest model, a heavy Claude Code Max user could be paying as little as $200 a month for usage that would've cost the user up to $5,000 without a subscription. On April 4, Anthropic cut off those tools. Boris Cherny, head of Claude Code, wrote on X that the subscriptions "weren't built for the usage patterns of these third-party tools. Older Anthropic contracts included standard and premium seats — flat monthly fees with a baked-in usage allowance.