On paper, AI costs should have collapsed by now.


The same frontier-level task that cost $30 per million tokens at GPT-4's launch in 2023 costs $1.25 today with GPT-5. A 96× drop in three years, across named models with published prices.
By any normal rule, enterprise AI bills should be cratering. Instead, average Fortune-500 AI budgets went from $7M in 2024 to $19M in 2026. Nearly 3× in two budget cycles.
The reason: cheap tokens don't get saved, they get weaponized. A chatbot fires tokens once and stops. An agent doing real work runs 5 to 30× more for the same task, and once inference is that cheap you point it at everything. Every price cut unlocks more usage than it saves.
The cost center didn't shrink. It moved from the model layer to the infrastructure underneath it. That's where the real bill is being written, and most companies haven't opened it yet.
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