The $0.13 Floor: Frontier Labs Flee General-Purpose AI

The AI market is stratifying into three tiers: commodity ($0.13-0.50/M tokens, Gemma 4 Apache 2.0), general premium ($2-12/M, Gemini 3.1 with native multimodal), and vertical premium ($25+/M, Glasswing, specialized biology AI). Anthropic's simultaneous bets on Coefficient Bio (biology), Glasswing (security), and enterprise sales ($30B ARR, 80%) reveal the strategic endgame. General-purpose AI pricing is collapsing toward $0.13/M tokens—below the margin required to fund frontier model research. The only defensible positions are vertical specialization (proprietary data + restricted capabilities command premium pricing) or compute provision (Google accepting commodity margins to sell chips). OpenAI is caught between: too expensive for commodity, not specialized enough for vertical premium.