Nikesh Arora runs a cybersecurity company and wants AI tokens to cost less. Not 10% less. Not half price. He needs a 90% markdown or businesses won't adopt the technology at scale.
Picture this. You sell enterprise software. Your customers complain about pricing every single quarter. You decide the problem is not your product but someone else's product that your customers might also buy. You hold a press conference. You demand that other vendor cut their prices by nine-tenths so your customers have budget left over for your stuff.
Arora says token costs are skyrocketing. He's technically correct. They went up. But the man sells firewalls and VPNs. He's not in the token business. He's not training models. He's not running inference at scale. He's the guy watching from the sidelines asking why the popcorn costs so much when he didn't even buy a ticket to the movie.
The beautiful part is he frames this as a crisis for AI adoption. Businesses can't scale if tokens stay expensive. Translation: Palo Alto's customers are spending their IT budgets on OpenAI and Anthropic instead of renewed security contracts. Arora needs those API bills to drop so his renewal rates don't.
Retail traders heard "AI" and "90%" in the same headline and bought calls on everything. They think this means AI stocks go up. They don't read past the headline. They never do. Arora just told the market his customers are too broke to pay for the future, and some guy named Brayden with a Robinhood account thinks that's bullish.
The CEO of a firewall company wants the AI industry to take a 90% haircut so his sales team has an easier Q3.
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