A widely read piece in Futurism, picked up here at RealClearMarkets, declared on April 24 that "the horrible economics of AI are starting to come crashing down." The article concludes that AI firms will not bring in enough money to cover what they cost to run, and that if they fail, the broader economy goes with them.
The article points to specific evidence, starting with pricing plans that don’t cover costs. One case illustrates the point. On April 4, Anthropic stopped allowing Pro and Max subscribers to run high-volume third-party agents on flat-rate plans, shifting that traffic to usage-based billing after some users generated ten to fifty times their covered compute costs.
That’s real. But it doesn’t mean what the article claims. The argument makes three errors—and misses what may be the bigger risk in the AI buildout: what’s funding it. Let’s take a look.
A Pricing Reset, Not a Pricing Crisis
Anthropic and OpenAI are not collapsing. They are repricing, and the cause is straightforward. Their subscription plans were priced for people typing into a chat box for a few minutes at a time. A new wave of agent tools now lets people hand off a job and walk away while the software runs on its own for hours.
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