I see bigger problem with model inconsistency. You never know whether Anthropic will route your request to a cheaper model for the price of Opus. So you can never estimate how much a task will cost, because you might have to restart several times and pay for each attempt. Then you have to prompt models to gauge whether they are real or impostors which also adds to token usage.

I wonder what are the economics driving these pricing decisions? Are the Chinese companies just subsidizing their models to a greater degree than the US, or is this an emergent property of energy policy between countries?