Trajectory·Capability

Agents now handle real volume in customer support, coding, and operations at major enterprises — the demo-versus-production debate is over. The new debate is reliability: as agents take on more autonomous decisions, the frequency and cost of their failures has become the question that decides how fast the rollout continues.

The 38-month price compression has paused. GPT-5's launch reset the frontier price upward for the first time since 2023 — not by much, but enough to raise the question of whether the era of constantly-falling AI prices is over, or whether competitive pressure pulls prices back down within the next two release cycles.

After a year of Anthropic catching up and overtaking OpenAI on several dimensions, GPT-5's May launch has put OpenAI back on top — but barely, and only on some benchmarks. Anthropic still leads in business deployment, Google still leads in cost-per-query, and the era of any single company being clearly ahead is over.