Comment by armcat

There are bits and pieces of info scattered everywhere but no coherent picture. We know from a16z report [1] that only 2% of US households pay for AI subscriptions, so most of the seat based pricing comes from business and enterprise agreements. We know that OpenAI ads business has $1 billion USD in annualised revenue run rate [2]. We know from OpenRouter data [3] that in 2025 70% of the API token spend was across all the proprietary models (Anthropic did very well in 2025, while OpenAI clawed back market share in 2026).

It all starts to look like a very low margins business, and reminds me very much of telecom industry.

[1] https://www.a16z.news/p/state-of-markets-ii

[2] https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/openais-ad-bu...

[3] https://openrouter.ai/state-of-ai