This will be interesting. While no one cared about small models in the last few months except for the OSS community, there is a silent small model revolution with gpt luna and jev. Headless/background llm routines are cost-feasible, which will of course lead to exponential usage and cost.
My take on anthropic is that haiku 5.5 has been shelfed for a while since it is predatory against sonnet (see terra 5.6 usage), but openai went kamikaze and they are now forced to release.
Nevertheless, the elephant in the room has grown: will any of the Labs be able to profit if mass adoption lies in the highly crowded small model territory?
https://openrouter.ai/blog/insights/gpt-5-6-discounts-jevons...
> but openai went kamikaze
I don't quite understand your point here. OpenAI has a consistent history of releasing cheap/small models - first nano/mini, then luna/terra. Of course, those are now more capable than half a year ago, but I don't see a behavior change from OpenAI here.