Anthropic charges $50 per million output tokens.
DeepSeek charges 34 cents for the same million. Both numbers sit on the companies’ own price sheets, in public, right now.
Last weekend Anthropic’s chief executive published an essay asking the industry to slow down building the most capable models. Sam Altman agreed with him.
The whole thing read as safety-first and responsible, and every headline covered it that way.
I put it to Hans this morning. He runs income trading here and follows this space closer than anyone I know, so I expected a safety answer.
He said it’s smoke and mirrors, and then he told me what the fight is actually about.
Once you see it, you’ll understand why Anthropic is racing to get an IPO out the door in three weeks.
Right after everybody agreed to slow down, Elon announced three models coming that beat anything you’ve seen and Altman said something big was cooking. Nobody slowed down for an afternoon.
“There is no slowdown. It’s not happening. It’s all smoke and mirrors,” Hans told me. “They feel threatened by these open source models, and they want regulation. They want to be able to block.”
Forget tokens for a second and think about what a business actually spends.
“If I don’t have to spend two grand on a task and I can only spend 50 bucks on it, people are going to do that,” Hans said. “The data is very strong. People are switching.”
Two thousand dollars against fifty. That’s the gap, and you can verify it yourself in a minute. Anthropic’s published rates put their top tier at $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output. DeepSeek’s own page lists V3.2 at 23 cents and 34 cents.
Different models, different capabilities, and that is the entire point. Most of what a business runs does not need the frontier, and those last few points of performance are costing 20 to 50 times more per token.
So what happens to a company whose entire product is tokens?
“They are not going to make money selling tokens at thousands of times the cost of what you can pay elsewhere,” Hans said. “Are these companies going to be able to continue to thrive in a world where the very product that they’re making is being completely commoditized and quite frankly, going to zero?”
Which tells you what the safety push is really buying.
Regulation is the moat. You cannot out-price an open-weight model, meaning one whose underlying code is published so anyone can run it on their own hardware. You can try to make it impractical to deploy at enterprise scale.
There’s an irony sitting on top of that. The Chinese labs are the ones giving their models away, and the American labs are the ones keeping theirs locked up. The open economy is running the closed system.
Now, what it means for your money.
If the model companies are getting commoditized while every security headline pushes enterprises to keep their AI inside their own building, the money isn’t in the labs. It’s one layer down in the hardware. Dell builds the servers and storage those companies need to run AI on their own premises, and that business gets paid the same whether a token costs $50 or 34 cents. Hans has liked it all year, since around $160.
Rates are the other half of it. This buildout keeps them high and sticky, because memory costs climb and because the people who wire a data center have priced accordingly. An electrician can make a fortune right now, and that cost goes into the same concrete the servers sit on. Hans’s read on the 10-year is blunt: there’s nothing about that chart that says buy me.
Anthropic comes public at the beginning of October, and now you know why the calendar matters to them.
An IPO like this one trades in three distinct phases. The window before it prices. The 30 days immediately after. Then the 30 days after that, once the lock-ups start coming off and the early investors and insiders are finally allowed to sell.
Each phase behaves differently and each one needs a different approach.
I’m walking through all three on Wednesday.
What each phase looks like, what moves in it, and how to be positioned before it does.
Your only option,
Mark Sebastian
P.S. You’re probably thinking you can’t get an allocation on an IPO like this, and you’re right, almost nobody can. That isn’t what Wednesday is about. Every one of the three phases plays out in the market that’s already trading, and the first one starts before the stock exists.