The $100 plan war begins

The buildout has a price tag. OpenAI dropped a $100 ChatGPT Pro tier that slots between the $20 Plus plan and the $200 Pro plan. It mirrors Anthropic’s Claude Max 5x tier to the dollar. Same model access as the $200 tier—GPT-5.4 Pro, unlimited Instant and Thinking—with 5x Codex usage, bumped to 10x through May 31. Codex just hit 3 million weekly users. That’s 5x growth in three months. The agentic coding market now has a fixed price: $100.

Nvidia is hedging the silicon side. SiFive closed a $400 million Series G at a $3.65 billion valuation, oversubscribed, with Nvidia, Apollo, Point72 Turion, and T. Rowe Price all in. Atreides Management led. SiFive builds RISC-V—not x86, not ARM—and the chips will hook into Nvidia GPUs via NVLink Fusion for agentic workloads. Read that again: Nvidia is funding an Arm alternative. The accelerator stack is getting a second option, and the biggest winner of the first one is writing the check.

Google’s window opens in five weeks. I/O 2026 is locked for May 19–20 at Shoreline, with Gemini Ultra 2 expected to debut after months of DeepMind testing. A 2 million token context window is the working rumor. Android 17, Chrome, and XR updates round out the bill. OpenAI’s $100 move has to hold through that launch—and through whatever Anthropic counters with next.

Free users got a surprise upgrade too. Google quietly pushed Gemini 3 Pro’s Thinking model and Nano Banana Pro image generation into the free tier, with daily caps but no paywall. AI Pro subscribers ($19.99/month) just had their storage bumped from 2TB to 5TB on April 1 at no extra cost—300 Thinking prompts a day, 1 million token context, 100 images, 20 Deep Research reports. Ultra ($249.99/month) now includes Project Mariner, the browser agent that actually books flights and fills forms for you. The frontier labs are racing on price, but the quieter story is what’s free now that wasn’t free last month.