AI Labs Court Startups With Credits and Discounts
Source: The Wall Street Journal (paywall)
OpenAI, Anthropic, and their competitors are essentially playing venture capitalists, using token subsidies to lock in early customer relationships before those startups scale into high-margin enterprise accounts. This mirrors the playbook of cloud infrastructure vendors like AWS—front-load customer acquisition costs via credits, then graduate winners into paid tiers—but compresses the timeline since foundation models are evolving faster than computing infrastructure did. AI labs are betting they can convert credit-subsidized usage into durable switching costs, though the strategy only works if startups actually grow and stick around rather than arbitrage the credits across multiple vendors.