Token pricing squeeze: buyers flee, sellers double down, builders fill the gap

Token 计量定价的挤压：买方在逃，卖方加码，缺口落在 builder 身上

Anthropic launched Claude Sonnet 5 at a promo price of $2/$10 per million tokens, rising to $3/$15 in September, while a new tokenizer adds ~30% more tokens per task—nearly doubling real cost over Sonnet 4.6. The next day Palantir's Karp called token billing “completely wrong,” arguing real value should mean outcome-based pricing. On the buy side, Uber burned its full-year AI coding budget in four months after deploying Claude Code and Cursor to 5,000 engineers, then capped per-engineer spend at $1,500/month. Microsoft cut Claude Code licenses for thousands of engineers on the last day of its fiscal year, routing them back to Copilot. GitHub Copilot's switch from flat-rate to token billing triggered a wave of cancellations as users exhausted quotas in a day or two. Sellers can't stop: OpenAI projects a $14B loss in 2026, Anthropic's monthly compute cost runs $1.25B, and Amazon shifted Anthropic payments from per-hour to per-token, pushing its own teams to distill smaller models. Builders in the middle route only 26% of requests to expensive closed-source models, add prompt caching and semantic caching to cut costs 40%–80%, and lean on open-source models whose programming traffic share has pushed Claude Opus down to 4.7%. Tokens won't disappear—they'll recede to a backend meter while front-office billing shifts to per-task, per-seat, or annual budget models.

Why it matters: Anthropic's new pricing collides with buyer flight, backed by Karp's public criticism and Uber's budget blowout — strong signal. HKR all hit, but this is industry analysis rather than a hard news event with cross-source cluster, so 82 featured.