A second flagship API adopts time-of-day pricing
Why I called it
DeepSeek became the first frontier provider to price by the hour of day, with peak and off-peak tiers and hard concurrency caps that say the move is capacity management. If really is capacity-constrained at peak, the rate card spreads the way it did in electricity markets. If it stays one lab's quirk, the utility comparison this morning's editorial leans on is wrong, and we would rather find that out on the record.
The call, in full. At least one of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI, Alibaba, Zhipu, Moonshot or Mistral publishes time-of-day-differentiated list pricing for a flagship model API by February 17th 2027.
Scoring criterion. RESOLVES CORRECT if OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI, Alibaba, Zhipu, Moonshot or Mistral publishes documented time-of-day-differentiated list pricing (distinct peak and off-peak rates) for a current flagship model API on its official pricing page on or before 2027-02-17 23:59 UTC. RESOLVES WRONG otherwise. Pre-existing batch-tier discounts and compute spot markets do not qualify.
The criterion is the machine-checkable version: a prediction that cannot be settled by a third party against a public source fails the build before it reaches this page.