The Context Window Pricing Collapse

Claude's Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6 now ship with 1M token context windows at standard pricing. No premium tier. No waitlist. Just 1M tokens, available to everyone. This single change killed the moat that every RAG startup built in 2023-24. The competitive advantage those companies sold was never retrieval quality. It was working around small context windows. That constraint just disappeared. The retrieval layer was a workaround Between 2023 and early 2025, hundreds of startups raised money on the