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US AI Vendor Switches Stall as Costs Jump to $5.75

4/29/2026

44 9 Full Breakdown

Summary

AI Buyers Face Lock-in

AI buyers in the United States face lock-in as switching hardens and costs climb, shown by Keith Townsend’s need to rebuild control moving from Google Cloud to on-prem DGX Spark.
Zapier surveyed 542, 90 % felt they could switch vendors but 42 % had migrations and 58 % faced failures.
Pricing for GPT-5.2 rose from $1.25 to $5.75 while Anthropic’s April 15, 2026 shift of Claude enterprise to a usage-based model could double or triple costs.

Summary

IBM Launches Bob

IBM launched Bob globally, citing a 45 percent productivity gain among 80,000 internal pilots.
Researchers showed in January that Bob’s CLI can be forced to run malware and its IDE can exfiltrate data.
Bob Premium for Z adds free-preview Architect mode for dependency analysis and Code mode for standards-aligned generation.
Subscriptions start at $20/month for Pro (40 Bobcoins) and $200/month for Ultra (500 Bobcoins), each worth about 50 cents.

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AI Buyers Face Lock-in

AI buyers in the United States face lock-in as switching hardens and costs climb, shown by Keith Townsend’s need to rebuild control moving from Google Cloud to on-prem DGX Spark.
Zapier surveyed 542, 90 % felt they could switch vendors but 42 % had migrations and 58 % faced failures.
Pricing for GPT-5.2 rose from $1.25 to $5.75 while Anthropic’s April 15, 2026 shift of Claude enterprise to a usage-based model could double or triple costs.

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