Anthropic changed one component most developers have never heard of. Your wallet felt it before your brain did. Getting ripped off cleanly is almost respectable. Price goes up, you see it, you rage-tweet about it, you maybe switch providers. Transactional. At least everyone’s being honest about what’s happening. The move Anthropic just pulled is the other kind. The sneaky kind. The kind where the pricing page stays completely untouched, the model name barely changes, and your bill climbs 27% while you’re busy actually shipping things. By the time you notice, you’ve already paid for three months of the new reality. Here’s what happened: Claude Opus 4.7 shipped with the same per-token price as Opus 4.6 $5 input, $25 output per million tokens. Same numbers. Same page. But hiding underneath that was a new tokenizer the component that sits between your text and the model and decides how many tokens your words are worth. The new one is more aggressive. Same sentence, more tokens. More tokens, bigger bill.…