Comment by Szpadel

inference costs nothing in comparison to training (you have so many requests in parallel at their scale), for inference they should be profitable even when you drain whole weekly quota every week

but of course they have to pay for training too.

this looks like short sighted money grab (do they need it?), that trade short term profit for trust and customer base (again) as people will cancel their unusable subscriptions.

changing model family when you have instructions tuned for for one of them is tricky and takes long time so people will stick to one of them for some time, but with API pricing you quickly start looking for alternatives and openai gpt-5 family is also fine for coding when you spend some time tuning it.

another pain is switching your agent software, moving from CC to codex is more painful than just picking different model in things like OC, this is plausible argument why they are doing this.