Why Are Chinese AI Models So Cheap? The Real Economics
Chinese AI models list output tokens up to 57x below US flagships. The verified economics of efficient training, cheap power and open weights as strategy.
Chronological archive · page 8 of 13
Independent analysis of the systems, prices and markets behind artificial intelligence.
Archive
Chinese AI models list output tokens up to 57x below US flagships. The verified economics of efficient training, cheap power and open weights as strategy.
Most MCP server lists are directory dumps. The tested consensus is five servers, a strict tool budget, and three catalogs worth bookmarking.
A 2026 engineering guide to the Claude Code harness: CLAUDE.md, skills, hooks, subagents, MCP and plugins, with the context cost of each layer.
The named harness engineering techniques of 2026: ratchet rules, Ralph loops, spec-driven development and evaluator agents, with the cost of each.
ZCode, Antigravity 2.0, Grok Build, Warp, and Zed all changed in 2026. Here is what actually shipped in each new agentic code editor, and what it costs.
Benchmark saturation is when top AI models bunch so close to the ceiling a test cannot rank them. Why MMLU hit this wall, and the harder replacement is next.
Claude Fable 5 returns after a US export-control suspension. Here is the $10/$50 pricing, the SWE-Bench Pro and FrontierCode scores, and what it means.
Claude Sonnet 5 ships at $3/$15 per million tokens, intro $2/$10 through August 2026. What changed versus Sonnet 4.6 and Opus 4.8, and the cost per task.
Kiro gives a free tier of 50 credits and Pro at $20 a month for 1,000. What a credit actually buys, the Auto versus pinned-model savings, and how overage works.