alt Hacker NewsTo save folks looking this up:
>At current 2026 API rates, 500 billion AI tokens would cost roughly $100,000–$750,000 depending on the model, with most flagship models in the $150–$400 per million input tokens range
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I struggle to believe that someone would find it worth that much money to have a decompiled version of a game they also commit to keeping private.
Where are you getting 150-400 per million input?
https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/pricing https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/about-claude/pricing
OpenAI and Anthropic are both 10/mil in.
https://openrouter.ai/z-ai/glm-5.3#providers https://openrouter.ai/moonshotai/kimi-k3#providers Other frontier models are like 1-3/mil in.
Also, 500 billion is 500,000 millions. At the lower end of your 140/mil estimate that's 70 million dollars. Even at my 2/mil lookup for Chinese frontier models that's one million. Show your math for 100k-750k, please.
The vast majority of these tokens are cache input tokens so even at API price the cost would be much lower.
This stuff is all done on highly subsidized subscription plans. I suspect Antropic is quite happy to sell these people $100k of compute for $4k because it boosts their growth numbers and they can tell investors once they stop subsidizing, this will grow to $100k. Despite the fact that most of this stuff simply wouldn't be done without the subsidization.