Anthropic and OpenAI sell AI's 'first class', but almost no one uses it on the open market

By AI Secret (Magna Ding) · October 23, 2026.

AI Secret's Friday Deep Dive, titled 'Sam and Dario Sell Legroom,' argues that the ten smartest AI models account for just 6% of traffic on an open platform.

The newsletter uses an airplane metaphor. A developer hooking up a coding agent picks a model the way a traveler picks a seat. At the front is the smartest AI money can buy: according to the email, Claude Opus, GPT-6 Astra and the models topping the intelligence rankings. At the back, the price is a fraction of the fare and the model is, according to the text, roughly two-thirds as smart.

The key figure is that in the open market, where developers can switch models with a single line of code, 94 of every 100 tokens last month traveled at the back, meaning on cheaper, less capable models. Frontier models capture just 6% of traffic. The email describes first class as 'lit, staffed and almost empty.'

The article's thesis is that Anthropic and OpenAI keep selling that first class to investors despite its low real-world adoption in that open market.

The email received includes only the introduction. The rest of the analysis is behind a paywall ('Upgrade to continue reading'), so the arguments, additional figures and conclusions of the full article cannot be summarized.