But the max 20x usage plans I am more skeptical of. When we're getting used to $200 or $400 costs per developer to do aggressive AI-assisted coding, what happens when those costs go up 20x? what is now $5k/yr to keep a Codex and a Claude super busy and do efficient engineering suddenly becomes $100k/yr... will the costs come down before then? Is the current "vibe-coding renaissance" sustainable in that regime?

The interesting question is if they are subsidizing the $200/mo plan. That's what is supporting the whole vibecoding/agentic coding thing atm. I don't believe Claude Code would have taken off if it were token-by-token from day 1.

(My baseless bet is that they're, but not by much and the price will eventually rise by perhaps 2x but not 10x.)

There any many places that will not use models running on hardware provided by OpenAI / Anthropic. That is the case true of my (the Australian) government at all levels. They will only use models running in Australia.

Consequently AWS (and I presume others) will run models supplied by the AI companies for you in their data centres. They won't be doing that at a loss, so the price will cover marginal cost of the compute plus renting the model. I know from devs using and deploying the service demand outstrips supply. Ergo, I don't think there is much doubt that they are making money from inference.

Remember "worse is better". The model doesn't have to be the best; it just has to be mostly good enough, and used by everyone -- i.e., where switching costs would be higher than any increase in quality. Enterprises would still be on Java if the operating costs of native containers weren't so much cheaper.

So it can make sense to be ok with losing money with each training generation initially, particularly when they are being driven by specific use-cases (like coding). To the extent they are specific, there will be more switching costs.