The multiplier table GitHub quietly updated last week is the first visible crack in a subsidy model that was never sustainable. Quick context for anyone unfamiliar: Copilot plans give you a monthly pool of “premium requests.” Each model has a multiplier that determines how fast you drain it. Until recently, Opus 4.6 had a 3x multiplier. It’s now 27x. Sonnet 4.6 went from 1x to 9x. But the multiplier table is just the symptom. The actual disease is that the AI companies have been eating the difference between what compute costs and what you pay. Anthropic is genuinely compute-constrained right now. Claude Code, agentic workflows, long-context sessions, these eat 10-100x more tokens per user than a simple chat completion. The infrastructure to serve that demand takes 18-24 months to build. Meanwhile, week-over-week compute costs for GitHub Copilot nearly doubled since January. Microsoft and Anthropic have been absorbing that gap. They’re done absorbing it. The 27x multiplier is closer to honest pricing. Millions of employees have Copilot provisioned as a corporate benefit by IT departments that have zero visibility into model-level consumption. No quota dashboard or model governance. Those employees have been running Opus on everything, code review, boilerplate, one-line completions because why wouldn’t you use the best model? On June 1, GitHub moves to full usage-based billing, the multiplier hike is just the warning shot, what comes next is actual dollar charges hitting corporate cards, traced back to individual usage patterns that nobody thought to govern. Some engineering manager is going to have a very bad Tuesday in early June explaining to finance why the AI budget is 15x over forecast. Every major provider is running the same playbook right now. OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor - the flat-rate era is being unwound in real time. The pricing structures being put in place now are designed to make heavy agentic usage reflect its true cost. If your team’s workflow depends on treating frontier model access as essentially unlimited, that assumption has an expiration date and it’s soon. The free lunch is over. Adjust your defaults before June 1! submitted by /u/Wikileaks_2412
Originally posted by u/Wikileaks_2412 on r/ArtificialInteligence
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