When you use an AI to write code, you pay for tokens — chunks of text the model reads and writes. Until recently, AI coding tools did exactly that — one expensive model did the thinking and all the typing. AI workers burn 69–90% of all tokens, but planners dominate the bill, because their price per token is so much higher. Cursor is spending phase one of that advantage on price, to win seats. Anthropic has had to get to over $70 billion in ARR to get to a fragile and possibly temporary profitability.