The Economics of Reinforcement Learning
Premium Analysis
Reinforcement learning environments have emerged as AI’s newest bottleneck and biggest opportunity.
With Anthropic discussing $1B+ annual spending on RL environments and OpenAI projecting $19B in R&D compute for 2026, a new market layer is crystallizing between raw compute and model capabilities.
This analysis examines the economics, players, and strategic implications of AI’s evolution in training infrastructure.
