The End of the AI Subsidy Era and the Real Cost of Compute — 2026-05-22#

Highlights#

The artificial intelligence ecosystem is hitting a harsh economic reality as the era of heavily subsidized API access comes to a rapid close. Rising operational costs and untenable token-based billing are forcing enterprises to reckon with evaporating budgets, while ongoing debates over transparency and the true resource footprint of frontier models expose the growing friction between open science and corporate secrecy.