The Token Revolt Goes Mainstream: Palo Alto CEO Demands 90% AI Price Drop

Eight days ago it was Palantir's Alex Karp going ballistic on live television about the "effing insane" economics of renting intelligence by the token. On Thursday it was Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora's turn, and while his delivery was calmer, his number was not: Arora told CNBC that AI token prices need to fall as much as 90% before enterprise adoption can actually scale.

So the chief executive of one of the largest cybersecurity companies in the world - that buys this stuff at industrial scale - telling the frontier labs, on their favorite network, that their pricing model is broken by roughly an order of magnitude.

90% Or Bust

Arora wants token costs at roughly one-fifth of current levels within the next 12 months, and down 90% by the year after that. Arora joins a growing list of executives - Karp most loudly among them - calling out runaway token costs, and that the bill shock is already pushing corporate buyers toward cheaper open-weight alternatives, including Chinese models that are rapidly closing the capability gap with the American labs. Regular readers will recognize that migration: we have documented Coinbase cutting its internal AI spend nearly in half by defaulting engineers to Chinese open-weight models, Microsoft weighing a hosted DeepSeek variant for its own agentic tools, and OpenRouter data showing Chinese models capturing - in some periods - north of 60% of global token consumption among top models.

Palo Alto CEO Arora says AI pricing needs to fall 90% as token costs skyrocket | Samantha Subin, CNBC

Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora warned that token costs need to drop as much as 90% to promote large-scale artificial intelligence adoption.

"I think 54% is a good start,"… pic.twitter.com/tMVMd9Eeuf

— Owen Gregorian (@OwenGregorian) July 10, 2026

Altman Blinks First

The timing was not accidental. Arora's comments landed the same day OpenAI shipped its new GPT-5.6 family, with Sam Altman telling CNBC the latest model is 54% more token-efficient on agentic coding - a spec sheet line that doubles as a confession about what customers have been screaming at him for months. Asked about it, Arora offered the faintest of praise, calling the efficiency gain a good start before adding: "I think we probably need another turn at it."

Translation: nice 54%, now do it again. Twice.

None of this should surprise regular readers, who know OpenAI has been weighing drastic price cuts to claw enterprise customers back from Anthropic - the start of a classical deflationary race to the bottom - the opposite of what an industry burning tens of billions a year, and hoping to grow into trillion-dollar public valuations, actually needs. Altman himself conceded in June that cost had gone from a non-issue to a major one for customers. A month later, the "drastic cuts" are arriving dressed up as efficiency gains.

Meta Rising?

Also on Thursday, Meta launched Muse Spark 1.1, its first serious run at the agentic coding market that made Claude Code a phenomenon. Per Reuters figures cited by TechCrunch, Meta is charging $1.25 per million input tokens and $4.25 per million output tokens - parked right alongside the budget tiers of its rivals, Anthropic's Claude Haiku 4.5 and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Luna. Meta AI chief Alexandr Wang described the pricing as "very aggressive and attractive," and every new API account starts with $20 in free credits.

The launch was apparently important enough that Mark Zuckerberg posted on X for the first time in three years - his last post came in July 2023 - to pitch Spark as "a strong agentic and coding model at a very low price." Read that again: the CEO of a company spending well north of $100 billion a year on AI infrastructure, a company Wall Street is openly pressing for evidence of AI returns, broke a three-year social media silence to advertise that his product is cheap.

Meta also shipped its Muse Image generation model Tuesday, SpaceXAI dropped a new Grok, and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 family all landed inside the same 48 hours. 

The Math Has Not Changed

Arora's admission is the latest wake-up call - from the tokenmaxxing fiasco and the $500 million mystery Claude bill, to Uber capping AI coding spend after torching its 2026 agentic budget in four months, to UBS checks finding token costs are now a live issue for roughly 60% of enterprise customers - including one that got its first AI invoice and heard leadership respond, flatly, "we don't have the money for this."

And we aren't the only ones concerned about how this will go... As JPMorgan noted one month ago: falling prices do not automatically fix the customer's problem, but they absolutely wreck the seller's. Gartner's own work suggests that even a 90% collapse in inference costs may not shrink enterprise AI bills, because agentic consumption grows faster than prices fall and providers do not pass the savings through. Meanwhile Apollo's chief economist Torsten Slok has laid out the mirror-image problem: if token prices converge toward zero, there is not enough revenue to support the hyperscaler buildout even in a world where compute demand keeps surging. Arora's 90% is the customer's survival number. It may also be the vendor's extinction number.

Meanwhile, the buildout is not slowing down to wait for the answer. Amazon raised $25 billion in debt this week to fund AI infrastructure, a month after SpaceX's $25 billion bond sale - while this very morning, SK Hynix pulled off the largest US listing ever by a foreign company, a $26.5 billion raise that saw its ADRs open 14% above the offer price. The pattern could not be cleaner: the companies selling the shovels are booking record raises at record valuations, on the same tape where the companies selling the tokens are being told to cut prices 90%.

All of which lands at a delicate moment for the two firms the price war is actually about. OpenAI has already pushed its IPO into 2027, and Anthropic's headline $47 billion ARR - a figure we treated with some skepticism when it was paraded ahead of the IPO filing - now faces its first print in a world where the customers have read their invoices and the competition includes Meta at $1.25 per million tokens.

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The Token Revolt Goes Mainstream: Palo Alto CEO Demands 90% AI Price Drop

Apple Sues OpenAI Alleging Trade Secret Theft In Blockbuster AI Hardware Case

Apple has filed a major lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California accusing OpenAI, io Products, and former Apple executives of misappropriating trade secrets to fast-track AI hardware development.

The complaint details a months-long scheme involving former Apple employees now at OpenAI. Key defendants include Tang Tan (OpenAI hardware lead and ex-Apple VP of product design) and Chang Liu (former Apple senior electrical engineer). Apple alleges they directed recruits to share confidential details on unreleased devices, components, manufacturing processes, and suppliers.

Specific claims, according to the WSJ, include Tan instructing interviewees to bring physical Apple hardware parts for review, retaining and distributing an internal Apple "Need to Know" departure security document, and using stolen supplier information to trick partners into using proprietary techniques. Liu is accused of downloading over a thousand pages of confidential files post-departure via a retained laptop and maintaining improper contacts at Apple for ongoing updates. (MacRumors)

“This case is about Apple’s former employees stealing Apple’s trade secrets for the benefit of OpenAI. Apple brings this suit to put a stop to it.”

Apple describes the conduct as “the tip of the iceberg” and states that OpenAI’s hardware efforts are “rotten to its core” due to reliance on misappropriated information. The company first contacted OpenAI in February with concerns but received no response. (9to5Mac)

In a response to inquiry by MacRumors, Apple said: 

“At Apple, our teams are constantly developing breakthrough technologies to create the best products and services in the world, and protecting their work and intellectual property is something we take very seriously. Recently, significant evidence has emerged suggesting individuals employed by OpenAI wrongfully took Apple’s secret and confidential information regarding our unreleased technologies, processes, and products. We will always defend our teams’ hard work and innovations, and we are taking all appropriate steps to do so.”

Apple seeks an injunction barring use or disclosure of the information, plus damages. The suit targets Tan and Liu for breach of contract but does not name Jony Ive or Sam Altman. It notes the Siri/ChatGPT partnership is not at issue and highlights that over 400 ex-Apple employees now work at OpenAI. 

This development occurs amid previously reported tensions, with OpenAI reportedly considering its own legal action against Apple over integration expectations. OpenAI is advancing hardware projects, including potential devices tied to its acquisition of Ive’s io startup. 

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Apple Sues OpenAI Alleging Trade Secret Theft In Blockbuster AI Hardware Case

Myth Busted: U.S. Much Safer Than Many Peer Nations

Authored by John R. Lott Jr. via RealClearInvestigations,

Conventional wisdom holds that the United States is the most violent and dangerous nation in the developed world. This dark view is frequently invoked by conservatives to demand stronger penalties for crimes and by progressives to argue for stronger gun laws.

At the same time, other nations point to crime as an Achilles heel of the American system. These include two peer nations with some of the most restrictive gun laws in the world - Australia and Canada. In 2025, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported that "the U.S. generally sees higher violent crime rates than many other countries." Last year, the Canadian Press similarly reported that "the number of police-reported violent crimes for every 100,000 people continue to be higher in the United States than in Canada."

The data, however, undercuts this narrative. While the United States still leads in some categories, on the whole it has significantly less violent crime per capita than those two nations.

Regarding homicide, the most heinous crime of all, it's true that in 2025, the U.S. murder rate was about four per 100,000 people - roughly twice Australia's and Canada's 2024 homicide rate. Yet it's also true that homicides account for only a tiny fraction of violent crime. In 2024, homicides represented just 0.21% of violent crimes in the U.S., based on National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) estimates of rape/sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault, and simple assault. Murder comprises an even smaller fraction of crimes in Australia and Canada.

Murders in the U.S. are usually highly concentrated geographically, often connected to street gang activity, and threaten only a tiny fraction of Americans. Just 2% of counties account for approximately 54% of all murders, and within those counties roughly two-thirds of killings occur within areas covering only about ten city blocks. By contrast, 53% of U.S. counties report no murders in a typical year, while another 16% report only one.

Moreover, when analyzing the incidence of a broader set of crimes, the U.S. is nowhere near the most dangerous developed country.

Ignoring Police

Because police statistics capture only a fraction of actual crime, the U.S., Canada, and Australia all conduct large-scale victimization surveys that estimate total crime, including incidents never reported to police. The Bureau of Justice Statistics has conducted the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which interviews roughly 240,000 Americans annually, for more than 50 years. Australia relies on a comparable survey conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, while Statistics Canada conducts the General Social Survey (GSS) on Safety and Victimization.

"Anyone who wants to understand the seriousness of crime in Canada needs to recognize that victimization surveys paint a more complete picture than police-reported crime," said Gary Mauser, who has extensively studied crime at Simon Fraser University in Canada.

The gap between police statistics and actual victimization is substantial. In Canada, the police-reported violent-crime rate is 885 per 100,000 people. The GSS reported a violent victimization rate almost 10 times that - 8,300 per 100,000.

Australia shows a similar pattern. Although the state of Victoria did not provide assault data to the ABS, only about 37% of robberies and sexual assaults were reported to police in 2024.

The U.S. data tell a very different story. Although the FBI does not collect national counts of simple assault, it recorded 1,203,808 violent crimes in 2019. During the same year, the NCVS estimated 2,013,220 felonious violent crimes - rape or sexual assault, robbery, and aggravated assault, excluding simple assault. Police reports therefore captured 59.8% of the NCVS estimate.

Using these broad estimates, Australia's rape and sexual assault rate is roughly three times higher than that of the United States. Australia's assault rate is about twice as high, and its burglary rate is about 2.5 times higher. Robbery is the only category where the two countries report similar rates.

But even this Australian data significantly understates the extent of violent crime because it counts victims rather than the number of crimes, unlike the U.S. data. If someone is robbed or sexually assaulted twice, the Australian survey records only one victimization, while the U.S. counts two separate crimes. As a result, Australia's survey misses repeat victimizations and understates the total amount of violent crime. Even modest adjustments suggest that Australia's violent crime rate is 15% higher than already discussed.

"For decades, researchers have documented that people report crimes more often when law enforcement is more likely to catch and punish the offenders," said David Mustard, a professor and crime expert at the University of Georgia. "The extremely low reporting rates in Australia and Canada therefore raise serious doubts about public confidence in their criminal justice systems."

Normalizing Rape

For example, in Canada in 2019, about 8.1% of total violent crimes resulted in the person being arrested and charged with the crime (210,000 arrested and charged out of 2.59 million victimizations), which is quite low even compared to the 20% rate in the U.S.

In Australia, there are numerous complaints that "Rape is effectively decriminalized." In New South Wales, of the 9,138 sexual assaults reported to police in 2022, there were only 1,016 convictions - just an 11% conviction rate. Indeed, during a recent lecture that I gave to college students in New South Wales in February, several women said there was no reason to report rapes and sexual assaults to the police because they believed nothing would happen to the criminal and it was personally embarrassing to come forward publicly.

As a result, an analysis based solely on police statistics can be misleading when comparing countries. Victimization surveys tell a different story. Although direct comparisons require some caution because the Canadian GSS and the U.S. NCVS define certain crimes like sexual assault differently, those differences generally favor Canada and make the U.S. appear relatively more violent.

Still, the results remain striking. In 2019, Canada's overall violent-crime victimization rate was at least 175% higher than the U.S. after adjusting for different methods. "Anyone who wants to understand just how serious crime is in Canada needs to recognize that crime rates are higher in Canada than in the U.S., according to victimization surveys," Mauser said.

Robbery offers an especially useful comparison because both surveys define it similarly. Canada's robbery victimization rate was 268% higher than the U.S. rate. Property crime follows a similar pattern. Canada's burglary rate was 259% higher than the U.S. rate.

Nor is this pattern unique to recent years. The International Crime Victimization Survey (ICVS), which used identical questions and definitions across participating countries before the United Nations assumed responsibility for the survey and later discontinued it, reached similar conclusions. In 2000, Australia's violent-crime victimization rate - including robbery, sexual incidents, assaults, and threats - was 104% higher than the U.S. rate. Robbery was 150% higher and sexual assaults 167.9% higher. The survey also found Canada's violent-crime victimization rate to be 40% higher than the U.S.

Few countries conduct victimization surveys, but the historical evidence from older ICVS data paints a similar picture. The ICVS found that England and Wales and Scotland had violent crime rates about 40% higher than the United States, while Finland's rate was about 20% higher. France, the Netherlands, and Sweden recorded rates roughly equal to the U.S., whereas Belgium and Poland experienced violent crime rates about 20% lower.

"The media's emphasis on reported crime badly underestimates how bad the violent crime situation in Australia is compared to the U.S.," Dr. Kesten C. Green, who has studied crime and is a researcher at the University of Adelaide Business School, tells RealClearInvestigations.

"Only victimization surveys capture both reported and unreported crimes, providing a far more complete picture

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Myth Busted: U.S. Much Safer Than Many Peer Nations

Mali Govt Says Al-Qaeda Extremists In Region Receive Training, Drones From Ukraine

Via The Cradle

The Malian government announced on Thursday that militant groups with links to Al-Qaeda carrying out terror attacks in the country were trained and armed by Ukrainian specialists.

Fousseynou Ouattara, Vice President of the Defense Commission of Mali's Transitional Council, said authorities identified militants who received training in Ukraine to carry out operations using kamikaze drones produced by Kiev. "These young people are known, we have now added them to our lists, and we have their names," Ouattara said.

Illustrative file image

The militants fighting the Malian government belong to a Tuareg-led separatist group, the Azawad Liberation Front (ALF), and Jamaat Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimeen (JNIM), an extremist group linked to Al-Qaeda.

He added that the militant groups are receiving fighters from Algeria, Mauritania, and Libya, as well as training from members of the French Foreign Legion and Ukrainian instructors.

France is allegedly supporting the ALF and JNIM following the Malian government's removal of French troops in 2022. In their place, private military contractors from Russia's Wagner Group were deployed.

After a May 2021 coup in Mali, the country's military junta officially demanded that France withdraw its troops "without delay." French troops had been present in Mali for nine years, allegedly to fight the Al-Qaeda-linked insurgency.

Mali was a French colony known as French Sudan before it gained independence as the Republic of Mali in 1960. However, France has sought to reassert its influence in Mali and in neighboring Burkina Faso and Niger, which are also former French colonies.

In September 2023, the military leaders of Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso established the Alliance of Sahel States (AES), which established a partnership with Russia.

Fighting between the Malian army and the ALF and JNIM has escalated in recent weeks. On July 7, the Malian army released a statement saying that "more than 200 terrorists were neutralized during coordinated air and ground operations" conducted in the village of Anefis in the northern Kidal region. The army statement noted that the operation was conducted in response to attacks by armed groups on military positions.

On July 4, Mali's Ministry of Defense and Veterans Affairs announced that militant groups attacked army positions in Aguelok, Anefis, Gao, Kenioroba, Konna, Sevare, and Somadougou.

Clashes with the militants reportedly continue near Anefis, where a major Malian military base is located. On Wednesday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and his AES counterparts held a meeting in which they condemned destabilization campaigns supported by Ukraine and France.

Russia and the AES agreed to expand military cooperation, with Moscow pledging additional support to strengthen the operational capabilities of the armed forces of AES nations.

The foreign ministers of Russia, Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso described the recent militant attacks on AES countries as "barbaric and ignoble" acts threatening regional stability.

"The two sides firmly condemned such destructive actions aimed at undermining the sovereignty of the AES and regional stability," they said.

via Middle East Eye

The ministers also acknowledged the efforts of troops from AES member states in repelling "terrorist attacks," as well as the contribution of Russia's African Corps to counterterrorism operations in the Sahel.

The Russia-AES meeting took place as French President Emmanuelle Macron visited Syria to meet President Ahmad al-Sharaa, the former Al-Qaeda and ISIS commander. During the 14-year war to topple former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, France joined the US and its allies in supporting Sharaa's Nusra Front, which finally took power in Damascus in 2024.

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Mali Govt Says Al-Qaeda Extremists In Region Receive Training, Drones From Ukraine

US, Japan, And South Korea Push SMR Exports For "Energy Security Needs"

The American nuclear buildout is not just about the climate or powering data centers. It's a geopolitical war against the export of nuclear technology from Russia and China, mixed with a new demand for national energy security.

On the sidelines of the NATO Summit in Ankara, the United States, Japan, and South Korea signed a trilateral Memorandum of Cooperation aimed at accelerating small modular reactor (SMR) deployments in other countries, with an initial focus on the Indo-Pacific. The agreement is designed to bring together the complementary strengths of the three countries’ civil nuclear industries.

The US State Department also notes, “The MOC advances our mutual security interests and paves the way for partner countries to meet their energy security needs.”

In addition to deploying reactors in the Indo-Pacific, the initiative is also supported by the U.S. committing over $10 million in new funding to the State Department's Foundational Infrastructure for Responsible Use of Small Modular Reactor Technology (FIRST) Program.

Lastly, the U.S. also announced an industry initiative agreed upon with GE Vernova and their partner Hitachi, with Samsung C&T and SGE to deploy the BWRX-300 SMR in Europe. 

The U.S. is continuing its trend, started after the executive orders were signed last year, of deploying American nuclear technology in foreign countries. In the executive orders, the State Department was directed to renew or start 20 civil nuclear cooperation agreements, sometimes referred to as “123 Agreements”. 

The goal is to strengthen U.S. political ties with allies and other countries in Europe and Asia by supporting those countries' domestic energy security needs.  

The reactor export story also has a fuel-chain counterpart. More allied SMR deployments would eventually require more allied fuel supply, and that is where companies like Centrus Energy and General Matter become relevant.

Centrus already has a direct South Korea connection. In 2025, Centrus announced that it had expanded its agreement with Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power and POSCO International, including higher low-enriched uranium supply volumes tied to new enrichment capacity at the American Centrifuge Plant in Ohio. 

The supply commitment remains contingent on Centrus receiving the necessary federal funding to build that capacity, but as we clearly identified just last week, Centrus should reasonably expect to receive whatever financial support they ask for from the federal government at this point.  

General Matter adds another piece to the same puzzle. In March, the Export-Import Bank of the United States issued Letters of Interest supporting up to $4.2 billion in potential financing for nuclear fuel sales by General Matter to nuclear power operators in Japan and South Korea.

The new US-Japan-Korea framework does not name a reactor developer, but it can be reasonably expected that GE Vernova (GEV) will lead the pack given its connection to all three countries. The framework does create a backdrop for additional US-aligned advanced reactor developers trying to work with Asian industrial partners.

NANO has already started building that lane in South Korea. In January, the company signed an MOU with DS Dansuk to advance potential deployment of its KRONOS MMR system in South Korea. Under the agreement, DS Dansuk is expected to help with site identification, supply-chain localization, regulatory engagement, and institutional partnerships.

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US, Japan, And South Korea Push SMR Exports For "Energy Security Needs"