Frontier AI faces pricing reckoning as token volume explodes 25-fold — mid-tier models deliver 90% of flagship capability at one-sixth the cost | Tom's Hardware

AI development might not be the wild west it was when ChatGPT burst onto the scene a few years ago, but it's still very much a frontier, with no clear boundaries and few yardsticks. But for AI developers on the frontier, they're pulling hard towards dual goals of ever greater intelligence and ever cheaper per-token pricing, and it's leading to a real back-and-forth of who's truly ahead, with some winners only holding the top spot for a few hours.

Although Anthropic's Claude Fable and Opus models have been consistently competitive at the very top of the intelligence charts, they're also some of the most costly to use. For more general use, some are paying closer attention to the "Pareto Frontier," where peak intelligence and minimal cost reach the pinnacle, and there the competition is fierce and ever-changing.

Hot off the screeching reversal of companies' tokenmaxing plans earlier this year, this increased focus on getting the cost of AI down has left us running headfirst into Jevons paradox again, too. As token costs for high-intelligence models have come down, token usage has exploded over 25 times in the past year, and doubled in the past month alone.

People may not want to spend more on AI, but they appear to be using a lot more of it when they can afford to.

Long live the King(s)

Despite its radical and rapid ascension, the big winners in the AI industry haven't changed much since its inception. It may have had a few penny drop, "Deepseek moments," where there's been a frenzied scramble by everyone to get ahead of some new threat, but by and large OpenAI and Anthropic have been scuffling at the top of the intelligence pile, Google and Meta have been bouncing around the more efficient and cost-effective middle, and xAI's Grok has been there in the background, grabbing headlines for all the wrong reasons.

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That's largely still the state of play in September 2026. Although benchmarks are gamed during model design and real-world use is more representative of actual real-world use, Anthropic's best are still considered by most to be the smartest. Fable 5.1, Fable 5, and Claude Opus all rank in the top four of ArtificialAnalysis' Intelligence Index test, as does OpenRouters and BenchLM even have them take all the podium spots.

While ahead, though, Anthropic's models don't hold an enormous lead. Fable 5.1 might score a 66 on ArtificialAnalysis' benchmark, but OpenAI's GPT 5.6 Sol (max) manages a 61. Grok 4.6 (high) and Kimi K3 (max) are capable of scores above 60, and the new Meta Muse Spark 1.3 (max) can hit 62 - though we don't have cost comparison pricing for it yet.

The same is true across other benchmarks from other companies.

But where the top models nudge each other back and forth with light tweaks and slight bumps in capability, there's much greater distinction in the mid-range. And not on intelligence, but on price.

Even With Cost Cuts, Frontier Models are Very Expensive

Major AI developers know they have a pricing problem. Following the jump to per-token pricing earlier this year, budgets were blown, and even the AI CEOs started talking publicly about making AI more affordable. How that will help them ever reach profitability remains to be seen, but the writing is absolutely on the wall.

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And even then, the top AI models are absurdly expensive compared to the models on the Pareto frontier.

Claude Fable 5.1 comes with a 75% cut in the cost of its cache write pricing, and Artificial Analysis still clocked it at $3.69 per task on its Intelligence Index test. That comes from much more expensive answers and reasoning, because while Fable 5.0 has more expensive cache write costs, it's $3.14 per benchmark task. But that's 50% more expensive than Claude Opus 5 on the same task, which is double again the cost of GPT 5.6 Sol.

Then costs really start to crater, especially when you consider the intelligence of the more affordable models.

Google's Gemini 3.8 Flash (high) is a powerful model, able to score a 59 on the Intelligence Index test. But it costs a mere $0.58 per task on the Index test - less than 1/6th the price of Claude Fable 5.1, with just a 10% drop in intelligence scoring. OpenAI's GPT 5.6 Sol (high) costs $0.43, with an intelligence score of 57.

Chinese competition is right there in the mix, too. The daunting Kimi K3 (max) can manage a 60 on the intelligence benchmark, with a per-task cost of $0.84, while its Kimi K3 (low) variant offers a 48 score on intelligence at just $0.24 per task. Deepseek V4 Pro is arguably one of the most impressive, with a 53 and $0.27, respectively.

At the time of writing, Meta's Muse Spark 1.3 (xhigh) holds the Pareto frontier title, with a score of 61 and a per-task cost of just $0.55. It stole that top spot from Google's Gemini 3.8 Flash, which wore the crown for just 3.5 hours.

Get in, we're going token shopping

The perspective and approach of the business community to AI use has been equally terrifying and fascinating. While we've all felt the fear of AI invalidating skills we've spent years acquiring, business leaders have swung massively between demanding AI use at a grand scale and then quickly following it up with, "oh god, no, not that much."

Uber famously blew through its annual AI budget in just a few months, and tokenmaxxing leaderboards saw one unnamed company eat through half a billion dollars worth of tokens in just a few weeks. But while everyone is certainly taking costs a lot more seriously than they once were, that's not slowing AI usage. Indeed, as more effective intelligence has become more affordable, token usage is exploding.

One of OpenRouter's engineers published a chart showing that overall paid token use had increased 25 times in the past year, and doubled over the past month alone.

This increase appears to be coming from some of those middle-of-the-pack, affordable intelligence models. According to OpenRouter's LLM rankings, the most used model for the past month was OpenAI's GPT 5.6 Luna, with close to 12 trillion tokens. With its intelligence score of 52 and a per-task cost of just $0.05, it's right on the Pareto line at the cheapest end of the spectrum.

Right behind it, though, is Chinese developer Z-Ai with its GLM 5.3 Flash. It's at 11.4 trillion tokens in the past month, a more than 1,000% increase month to month. Its intelligence-to-price ratio is 57 to $0.09. Deepseek v4 Flash is right there with it, and other Chinese, intelligent-enough but very-affordable models round out the pack.

In comparison, the major, expensive models are barely being used at all. Fable 5's monthly use is in the low billions of output tokens, and even OpenAI, with its massive user base, is only cracking 1.8T monthly tokens with its 5.6 Sol.

Jevons strikes again

Besides the bonkers business model for many of those involved, there are intriguing patterns emerging in AI usage. People can find ways to use lots of tokens, but they are only willing to pay so much for them. They want intelligence at as low a price as possible, and there is a crossover point where one becomes more important than the other.

While cynics argue that benchmarks are gamed, and boosters are still heralding the coming of their AI savior, the actual economics of the industry paint a much clearer picture. Intelligence has a price, but it's much lower than some of the frontier model developers are able to build it for. As models become ever more efficient and the hardware for inference grows ever more powerful, we may reach a point where what large language models can do effectively is affordable enough that anyone can use it as much as they want.

What that means for the major companies who spent hundreds of billions of dollars to get us to that point, very much remains to be seen.