Who is on each side · Part 12 · The grid
Does the frontier model still command a price?
21 voices across 1 question on The Model Is Not the Price: one row per voice, one column per question, the side each voice holds and the published claim with its date and a verified link where one exists.
The grid
| Voice | Does the frontier model still command a price? |
|---|---|
| Longriver | The frontier is still paid Reported revenue acceleration at the two leading model companies — an annualised run-rate said to go from USD 1 billion at end-2024 to USD 9 billion at end-2025 to almost USD 50 billion in May this year at Anthropic, with a similar trajectory at… |
| Tae Kim | The frontier is still paid Tae Kim anticipates a close back-and-forth for model leadership between OpenAI and Anthropic over the next six months, expects another Anthropic model release before or around its IPO, and predicts both American frontier labs should do great once… Tae Kim argues the earlier media consensus that OpenAI had fallen too far behind Anthropic was wrong, and that OpenAI pivoted resources to agentic coding after Anthropic's December lead, largely caught up by April, and arguably surpassed Anthropic… Voices that cross sides $70B of ARR at OpenAI; Huang's 80% of AI-native startups on open models. |
| Oguz Erkan | The frontier is still paid Oguz Erkan says the concentration of the LLM market is still unknown: OpenAI and Anthropic take the lion's share of token dollars but their share of token volume has been declining, so the LLM market could be far more fragmented in 3-5 years, which… Voices that cross sides The dollars with two labs, the volume leaving, fragmentation in 3-5 years. |
| Wyndo | The frontier is still paid Wyndo believes an always-on agent should run on the most capable model available, which is why they consider it fitting that ChatGPT's Dots runs on GPT-6 Astra. Wyndo recommends trying open-weight models if a user keeps hitting usage limits on Claude or ChatGPT, or wants to lower the cost of certain tasks, since some work may run well on an open-weight model while saving the subscription for tasks where… |
| Ren | The frontier is still paid What actually fell is cost per completed job rather than cost per token: against Sol, Astra finishes Terminal-Bench 4.0 tasks at roughly 9% lower estimated API cost per task and OSWorld 2.0 tasks in about 47% less time, so the relevant demand… |
| David George | The frontier is still paid They judge the switching-cost lever basically unavailable because the AI frontier is a Red Queen's Race at the model layer, with swapping between models easy down to task-by-task switching and everyone improving continuously. They say a pretty small group uses AI rampantly for everything and a somewhat larger group uses ChatGPT regularly, meaning most people have not yet been awakened as customers, and they think OpenAI understands how to do it. Open weights set the price So far, neither compute nor model advancements have been a zero-sum game: better, cheaper intelligence is accruing value to the entire ecosystem, with both older chips and models retaining substantial value well past the expiration dates the bears… Voices that cross sides Cheaper intelligence lifts all; at the model layer no edge sticks. |
| Gaetano | The frontier is still paid Criteo launched an Agentic Commerce Recommendation Service letting AI systems use Criteo's commerce intelligence to rank products, and OpenAI selected Criteo as its first advertising technology partner for ChatGPT Ads, with more than 2,000 brands… |
| Market Sentiment | The frontier is still paid Based on their capex sustainability model, Market Sentiment estimates that next year's ~$1.2T+ of AI capex should drive ~$2T of incremental revenue, which they say will only be a fraction of the total incremental revenue AI generates as a business… |
| Michael Spencer | Open weights set the price Chinese AI models captured a majority share of 57% to 67% of total token usage on the OpenRouter developer platform by September 2026, eroding OpenAI's token marketshare even as OpenAI subsidizes its new cheaper GPT-6.1 Sol model. Anthropic is far ahead of OpenAI pre-IPO, both in model quality and ARR, and that lead should only accelerate with IPO proceeds heading into its November IPO. Voices that cross sides OpenAI is in deep trouble in 2027 due to pressure in consumer AI from Meta and SpaceXAI, pressure from Chinese open-source models on cost and token marketshare, and being late to IPO while being overtaken in ARR and growth by Anthropic in… Michael Spencer argues that in 2026 Chinese open-weight models are taking serious market share from incumbents like OpenAI and Anthropic, because the Chinese labs are only a few months behind the frontier and shortening release gaps mean even… |
| Steve Eisman | Open weights set the price OpenAI's price cut on its GPT model, combined with a reported tenfold jump in usage, looks like the beginning of a price war in AI services. Steve says the AI story probably continues as long as token growth keeps rising, and identifies a price war between Anthropic, OpenAI and the Chinese models as the main risk that could change it. The filing sets the price Anthropic looks likely to file for an IPO soon, and it will want to do that while token usage numbers are still near their peak, before the picture gets less flattering. The AI trade's foundations are shaky because roughly seventy percent of the hyperscalers' AI revenue traces back to just two customers, OpenAI and Anthropic, both of which are burning enormous amounts of cash, so if either stumbles the entire… Voices that cross sides Oracle's remaining performance obligations of $664 billion are concerning because roughly 50% come from OpenAI, a company burning massive cash, making Oracle over-reliant on OpenAI's solvency. |
| Le Shrub | Open weights set the price China is gaining ground in AI, with Chinese models now accounting for 66% of token share. Voices that cross sides Chinese models at 66% of tokens; Karp's never-IPO call on OpenAI. |
| Massif Capital | Open weights set the price Under 2% of tokens to a majority. |
| Kevin Gee | Open weights set the price China is releasing open frontier models not despite state involvement, but because an open frontier is how you seed an ecosystem, win the developer base, and move the world's default tech stack onto a Chinese one, motivated by technological… |
| Deborah Folloni | Open weights set the price 100,000 leads: $7 against $3,000. |
| Charlie Hills | Open weights set the price Opus 5.5 is 60% cheaper than Astra, at $4 versus $10 per million input tokens. |
| Mia Silverio | The filing sets the price Anthropic's expected ~$2 trillion IPO valuation is not justified by its numbers, given that it would need $1.2 trillion in annual revenue within 10 years (per Aswath Damodaran) to justify that valuation while the entire current AI products and… Anthropic's customer concentration is a risk for its $2 trillion valuation: nearly a quarter of its 2025 revenue came from two customers and 47% of sales ran through Amazon and Google, which is an acceptable problem for a small company but not for… |
| Distillate Capital Partners LLC | The filing sets the price Circular financing distorts the picture: hyperscalers and NVIDIA have committed roughly $180 billion to OpenAI and Anthropic, which pledge about $1.1 trillion of compute spending back to them against far smaller revenues, and $53 billion of… |
| Michael Burry | The filing sets the price Alphabet's reported 112% Google Cloud backlog growth is suspect because a new category of unknown size — TPU system sales contracts — was added to cloud backlog in the last six months, and one of the largest TPU customers is Anthropic, in which… Aggregate purchase commitments, future leases, guarantees backing third-party debt, and various off-balance sheet potential liabilities across the hyperscalers total about $3 trillion, pointing toward a couple more years of record AI data center… |
| Warden Capital | The filing sets the price Warden Capital argues the AI investment cycle cannot earn a reasonable return absent AGI within a few years: at roughly $700 billion per year of investment, model providers would need about $1 trillion in annual end AI revenue by 2029, ramping… |
| First Pacific Advisors | The filing sets the price Global AI spending is projected to reach 2.59 trillion dollars in 2026, and to achieve even a relatively low unlevered return on investment would require 207 billion dollars in after-tax income per year starting immediately, which the portfolio… |
| Daniel Romero | The filing sets the price Although SpaceX reports AI infrastructure payback periods of less than one year, maintaining a one-year payback across the entire hypothetical 2027 buildout would require $1.9-2.28 trillion in annual compute payments, and if AI labs footed that… OpenAI's combined annualized revenue with Anthropic reached $105 billion (OpenAI $40 billion, Anthropic $65 billion) in July 2026, which is nowhere near the figure needed to support the modeled 2027 buildout, and this understates the true gap since… |
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