At this point the AI labs would pretty much have to form an illegal price fixing cartel in order to jack the prices up, they've been competing to drive down prices for so long.
They'd have to get the Chinese AI labs to go along with that price fixing too.
You don't need collusion, just the VC money drying up. Economic reality will set the base price.
Why would vc money dry up?
There's only so much of it to spend before they run out.
I don't pretend to have detailed domain knowledge here, I may have seen other people's GenAI output rather than reality*, but the numbers people are throwing around for this stuff sum to trillions of USD, slightly higher than other (same caveat, perhaps also GenAI output*) claims I've seen about the total supply of money in the global venture capital markets.
* I miss the days when I could make a decent guess as to which websites were reliable and which were BS
They’d have an entire country of geniuses prepared to defend against the antitrust allegations, who’s to stop them? /s