“I think everyone in the industry is starting to realize that the music is stopping and the musical chairs, and they have to take a seat at some point and make the business model work. And so there's going to be a lot of pressure on that. And that's also showing up in things like the licensing of models. A lot of those open-weight models have seen their licenses get more restrictive over time as companies realize, well, maybe we don't want someone competing with us with this thing that we've made.”

The Register Kettle · November 2026

Context

The discussion was about whether inference costs will keep falling and whether Anthropic's pricing power holds. Tom argues that commodity inference pricing is pushing the whole industry to find real margins, and that it shows up in tightening model licenses.

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Transcript

The Register Kettle Around 11:09 into the episode

Tobias Mann

…that period over the next year, which is definitely not going to happen. they're they're they've already said they're going to keep making compute contracts. So this number just keeps getting more absurd the the further out you go, unless inference magically gets dirt cheap, which we haven't seen.

Brandon Vigliarolo

…ATT, right? Anyone who's not those big three in the United States is operating a virtual network that piggybacks on someone else's infrastructure. And when that infrastructure is busy, you get less priority. You know, Yeah. so I mean we could see them run into a similar situation there, I imagine.

Tom Claburn

Yeah, th there's an interesting trend that there's another piece I'm working on later today that that touches on this. That's apparently s some of the the AI open AI or the the AI gateways like open router are now starting to move away from sort of just focusing on pricing price metering and looking towards things like, you know, times you know, fastest time to tokens and all the sort of quality of service metrics in terms of the way that they price and deliver the models, because the inference pricing is such as sort of has become very commodity in terms of what they're dealing with. they're not necessarily s serving all the frontier models at very high prices. They're dealing with a lot of open weight models. And if you just focus on the lower end of the market, it's there's not a lot of margin there. So it makes sense to go, well, you know, maybe if we deliver this faster or we, you know, have better better reliability or service we can move up the price and get a little profit. And I think that everyone in the industry is starting to realize that the music is stopping and you know the musical chairs and they have to take a seat at some point and you know make the pro the business model work. And so there's a I there's gonna be a lot of pressure on that. And that's also…

Brandon Vigliarolo

Yeah, Mistral, yeah, that reminds me of Mistral just released the open weight version of what is it? I think Large Four. and they're yeah, Le

Tobias Mann

Let's try.

Tom Claburn

Yeah.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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