AI's Economics Don't Make Sense
GitHub Copilot is shifting to usage-based pricing starting June 1, 2026, ending its previous model that subsidized user compute costs. This change reflects broader economic challenges across the AI industry, where companies have long operated at a loss by offering heavily discounted AI services. As AI usage grows more complex and costly, providers are forced to restructure pricing to ensure sustainability.
- ▪GitHub Copilot will adopt usage-based pricing on June 1, 2026, charging users based on actual model costs rather than fixed requests.
- ▪Microsoft previously lost over $20 per Copilot user monthly, with some users costing up to $80 per month in compute expenses.
- ▪The shift highlights a wider industry issue where AI companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic, have operated at a loss due to subsidized compute.
- ▪Critics argue that unsustainable AI pricing models could lead to reduced accessibility and higher costs for consumers and enterprises.
- ▪AI services like Salesforce’s Agentforce have introduced high usage fees, signaling a broader trend toward cost realignment in the sector.
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At |
| Canonical URL | https://www.wheresyoured.at/ais-economics-dont-make-sense/ |
| Publication time | Tue, 28 Apr 2026 16:39:53 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-04-28T16:47:47.399Z |
| Last seen | 2026-04-28T16:47:47.399Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | eLT6NKGE1B2f |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
If you liked this piece, please subscribe to my premium newsletter. It’s $70 a year, or $7 a month, and in return you get a weekly newsletter that’s usually anywhere from 5,000 to 18,000 words, including vast, detailed analyses of NVIDIA, Anthropic and OpenAI’s finances, and the AI bubble writ large. I recently put out the timely and important Hater’s Guide To The SaaSpocalypse, another on How AI Isn't Too Big To Fail, a deep (17,500 word) Hater’s Guide To OpenAI, and just last week put out the massive Hater’s Guide To Private Credit.I also just did a piece about how OpenAI will kill Oracle, and I’ve used some of the materials in today’s piece.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At.
