As are most phone updates. If there was a market, it would have sold.

I agree that if there was more transparency it might have prevented the token spend concerns, which feels caused by a lack of knowledge about how the models work.

Efficiency matters too. If a model is smarter so it solves the same task with fewer tokens, that matters more than $/Mtok

"Opus 4.6 often thinks more deeply and more carefully revisits its reasoning before settling on an answer. This produces better results on harder problems, but can add cost and latency on simpler ones. If you’re finding that the model is overthinking on a given task, we recommend dialing effort down from its default setting (high) to medium."[1]

I doubt it is a conspiracy.

[1] https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-4-6

not in my experience