A new line item is coming to every business that operates on AI: the price of access to frontier capabilities, set by whoever owns the model.
Call it the intelligence tax.
Time you would’ve spent figuring out business-applicable workflows, creating the “secret sauce,” or investing in yourself and your education is now being redirected towards AI usage. And, with greater AI usage, comes greater dependency.
Once enough people are on the treadmill, the pricing model changes. The output becomes tiered, models are throttled, and a societal divide widens between those who can afford top models like Anthropic’s Claude Mythos and those who are stuck on lower-tier $20/mo models or self-hosting open source.
This isn’t going to happen today, but it may be an inevitability. Eventually, raw power and efficiency from cutting-edge models will win out. It’s a double-edged sword: your org needs AI to compete, but the more dependent you become on it, the more you become like everyone else and the more you need it in the future.
What happens when token costs go up? Or models change?
Prices at the top tier are going up, even as yesterday’s capability gets cheaper. Until December 2024, it was difficult to pay more than $20/mo for any major provider. That’s when OpenAI introduced ChatGPT Pro at $200/mo. Anthropic introduced their $100/mo and $200/mo plans in April 2025, and Google AI Ultra ($249.99/mo) launched a month later.
Fast-forward to today, May 2026, and Mythos is on the cusp. While $20/mo and even $200/mo subscriptions are justifiable and accessible for many in today’s workforce, Mythos is the first legitimate model where access will be limited.
Update, October 22, 2026: Anthropic released Claude Mythos 5 on June 9, 2026, to approved organizations only, priced per token like Claude Fable 5 at $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output tokens. Claude Mythos 5.1 followed on September 1.
We are simultaneously entering the age of the token economy (paying per unit of AI use) and the intelligence tax.
The next generation of frontier models may be even more expensive. But – if they contain more parameters, can think longer, and can provide better solutions to cutting-edge questions: can you compete without them? These types of models will excel at orthogonal and creative outcomes, which are currently areas where humans can still find advantages over AI.
If you could ask Mythos, or the model after Mythos, one question, for $100, to gain access to research and insights that your competitors couldn’t, would you?
What if that price for one prompt goes up to $1,000?
If you won’t, your competitor might. And over time, that might create the kind of competitive advantage that keeps one business afloat while another sinks.
This is the new intelligence tax. Layer it on top of the token economy, and you have two areas that will become vital for businesses to compete on.