OpenAI Engineer: Anthropic's Tokenizer Change Snuck a ~30% Cost Hike into Opus 4.7
stevenheidel · x · 2026-09-04
OpenAI engineer Steven Heidel amplifies Maxime Labonne's finding that Anthropic snuck a 30% cost increase into Opus 4.7 by making its tokenizer less efficient — same text, more tokens, same listed price. He adds that 'tokens' aren't a standard unit across providers or even models from the same provider: 3.8 Flash looks 13x cheaper per token, but Astra can be cheaper per task because it's far more efficient. Measure costs per task, not per token.
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