AI companies may have created an affordability crisis by subsidizing their products at unsustainable levels. According to recent analysis on DSHR's Blog, customers with Anthropic's two-hundred-dollar monthly subscription can burn eight thousand dollars in tokens, while OpenAI users can spend fourteen thousand dollars — meaning the companies subsidize by forty to seventy times the actual cost. OpenAI's twenty twenty-five financials revealed thirteen point zero seven billion dollars in revenue against thirty-four billion dollars in spending, resulting in thirty-eight point five billion dollars in losses. As AI platforms shift from subsidized subscriptions to token-based pricing, businesses are discovering the real cost: according to reports this week, AI has become more expensive than hiring humans. With three major companies planning IPOs despite implausible paths to profitability, and estimated industry debt approaching three trillion dollars, the industry faces a reckoning: to service its debt, it may need to displace roughly twenty-seven percent of all US jobs.

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