This week brought AI price cuts. OpenAI opened a Decisions API at $0.10 per million input tokens, with no charge for output. Perplexity halved its decision model to $0.02 per million input tokens. Anthropic’s Claude Haiku 5.5 arrived at about 75% of Haiku 4.5's price.
A price cut does not remove a cost. Someone still pays for the chips, memory, power, and mistakes. So the question for this issue is narrow: when the price of a model call fell, where did the money and the risk show up instead?
Our answer, from the week’s filings, releases and price lists: the cost rose in the layers underneath, at GPU renters, memory makers and chip suppliers, and it is increasingly carried on balance sheets as commitments, guarantees and debt rather than raised as equity.
A third cost, liability for what agents do, is starting to land on the companies that deploy them. These moved in the same week, and we don't claim one caused the other.
