tl;dr: OpenAI and Anthropic have slashed LLM prices by up to 80% over a few months, driven by tit-for-tat competition and pricing pressure from open-weight models (DeepSeek, Kimi) served by dozens of interchangeable inference providers on platforms like OpenRouter. The author argues this undermines the common claim that token prices are artificially low and will inevitably rise, since switching costs are negligible and inference margins reportedly remain healthy (~80%). The timing is curious given both companies' upcoming IPOs, though improved infrastructure efficiency (e.g., Claude Opus 5.5) may partly explain the cuts.