Hyperscalers are slamming on the brakes, metering “intelligence,” and discovering that someone still has to pay the datacenter bill. Anthropic chases profits, OpenAI fights for its life, Microsoft sells shovels, and everyone tries to figure out what—if anything—could justify an agentic-pace GPU burn. The datacenters are running flat‑out, the subsidies are ending, and the secret sauce may lie less in magic model weights than in the harness wrapped around them:

**Notes on the End of the $5... 1/