Technology

The research firm purchased every subscription from the two AI providers and discovered that the approximate maximum possible spend (assuming API pricing) is far larger than what users pay every month. For example, Claude Max 20x costs $200 a month, but maximizing it would cost $8,000 a month in token spend, while ChatGPT Pro 20x, which is also $200 monthly, has a maximum possible spend of around $14,000.

Ehhh...yeah, but that alone isn't necessarily an issue. There are plenty of services that exist that rely on consumers, in aggregate, not maximizing resource usage. Residential ISPs normally oversell their service. That works because the typical user only uses a tiny fraction of their sustained maximum rate of bandwidth consumption. In theory, if a lot of users started fully saturating their lines all the time, ISPs could shift everyone to metered service, but it works well enough and enough people value not having to worry about metering more than paying the minimum per-byte cost, so the system functions.