---
title: "Commodities want to be cheap"
subtitle: "Tokens are becoming a commodity"
description: "Frontier models are expensive to create and cheap to reproduce, so tokens are becoming a commodity. Commodities want to be cheap, and the labs know it."
author: "Pau Friedman"
kind: "essay"
published_at: "2026-09-14"
url: "https://pau.fm/blog/2026/09/14/commodities-want-to-be-cheap"
markdown_url: "https://pau.fm/blog/2026/09/14/commodities-want-to-be-cheap.md"
canonical_url: "https://pau.fm/blog/2026/09/14/commodities-want-to-be-cheap"
---

# Commodities want to be cheap

> Tokens are becoming a commodity

I came up with a phrase recently, while thinking about the price of AI tokens: **commodities want to
be cheap**.

I mean it in the neoliberal sense. Once something becomes standardized, substitutable, scalable, and
widely produced, competition starts attacking the margin. Producers can differentiate, constrain
supply, bundle, brand, regulate, or monopolize, but the underlying pressure remains. A commodity
wants to collapse toward the lowest sustainable price.

The phrase obviously inherits its structure from Stewart Brand’s “information wants to be free.” I
had always understood Brand’s line mostly as a claim about censorship: information is easy to copy
and distribute, therefore attempts to contain it eventually fail. But the original argument was more
economic. Information wants to be expensive because it is valuable, and free because the cost of
reproducing and distributing it keeps falling.

Tokens are in exactly that position. They are becoming a commodity. The expensive part is creating
the frontier model; once a capability exists, inference gets cheaper, hardware improves, models get
smaller, distillation transfers capability downward, and competitors attack whatever margin remains.
Chinese labs add another source of pressure: whatever American frontier labs spend discovering,
firms with lower costs and fewer reasons to protect incumbent margins have every incentive to
reproduce and commoditize.

This is why the current argument over slowing AI development is economically interesting. Dario
Amodei’s recent call to
[“pace the frontier”](https://darioamodei.com/post/we-must-pace-the-frontier) explicitly asks
governments to require common standards and enable coordination among frontier labs; a less
charitable reading is that the incumbents are asking the state to protect them from the economics of
their own product. Sam Altman and Elon Musk have publicly supported the proposal, which makes sense:
all three are vulnerable to the same commoditization pressure.

The labs spend enormous amounts of energy resisting this process. They differentiate models, create
switching costs, build ecosystems, control distribution, restrict access to weights, and try to
preserve technological leads. They do this for the same reason every producer resists
commoditization: tokens are a commodity, and commodities want to be cheap.