Claude fast mode proves AI roi is real

Anthropic is charging $225 per million tokens with Opus 4.6 fast, and it just showed the world that the enterprise is getting incredible value from AI, and if the math doesn't make sense to you, you're behind. Anthropic ain't dumb. They didn't just build this fast model for nothing. Frontier models are slow, and they take time to generate tokens. These engineers are sitting idle while those tokens generate. Fast mode solves this problem. If a heavy AI engineer spends two hours a day just waiting for model responses, that's 10 hours a week, 25% of their entire year is now sitting idle. Now if that engineer costs their company $200 an hour fully loaded, that's almost $9,000 a month in idle time just waiting for tokens. Fast mode is 2.5 times faster, and there's 44 hours a month waiting. Drop it down to 17. You recover 26 and a half hours. That's $5,300 a month in productivity back. And what does fast mode cost? $2,500 in this scenario. Spend $2,500, get back $5,300, that's a 2x return per engineer per month. So when you see that 6x price tag and your gut reaction is that's insane, this is not a pricing problem. It's a signal. It means the enterprise is already extracting so much value from AI, this math is obvious to them. And if it's not obvious to you yet, you're behind.