The Price of Thinking: Reasoning Effort as a Model-Specific API Contract

arXiv cs.AIAugust 19, 2026en

arXiv cs.AI

AI Global Wire

arXiv:2608.16956v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: API buyers purchase a dated contract, not a model name alone: the contract includes the requested and served model, reasoning-effort term or its omission, output rail, service product, prompt, and price schedule. We study the reasoning-effort term through a registered paired contrast of Sonnet 5 with explicit high effort against the same model with effort omitted, using 30 AIME 2026 items and five calls per item. Every paid attempt was assigned one frozen terminal category, and inference resampled items while retaining their repeated calls. Mean delivered cost was \$0.01031 per call higher under the explicit-high contract than under the omitted

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