Epoch AI reports 13-fold annual decline in AI costs as spending nears $1T

AI is getting cheaper at a pace that makes most technology history look sluggish. According to a new Epoch AI report, the cost of hitting a fixed level of AI performance has fallen roughly 13-fold per year since 2023. Meanwhile, the companies building AI are not saving that money. US and Chinese firms are projected to pour nearly $1 trillion into AI infrastructure this year, which is a strange way to respond to a product that keeps getting cheaper. The plunging price of thought The report, published September 22, 2026, carries the title “The Plunging Price of Thought.” It was written by Luke Emberson and David Roodman. The core finding: across the benchmarks Epoch monitors, the expense of reaching a given performance level dropped by approximately 47% per quarter. Compounded over a year, that works out to approximately 13 times cheaper. Epoch’s sharpest example comes from the GPQA Diamond benchmark. In January 2025, OpenAI’s o3 model scored 75% on it at a cost of roughly $0.30 per question. A later model, GPT-5.6 Luna, matched that same 75% score for $0.0004 per question. That is a 725-fold drop in cost for an identical result. The report also finds the decline is not uniform over ...