Every AI Company Is Accidentally Building a Bank — Dor Sasson, Stigg

In one month, three of the biggest AI companies had a pricing emergency. Dor Sasson says it was really an infrastructure problem. Dor Sasson, co-founder and CEO of Stigg, argues that every AI company is accidentally building a bank. He starts with the April pricing scramble, when Anthropic cut third-party agents like OpenClaw off its subscription plans, OpenAI changed its Pro tier, and GitHub pulled free Copilot access, plus stories of companies burning through their AI budgets in weeks. The common problem: usage gets checked after the invoice, not before. He makes the case for checking entitlements synchronously before inference and settling asynchronously after, like an ATM, and points to OpenAI's own published architecture. He covers the banking ideas AI products now need, from hold-and-settle and double-entry bookkeeping to credit sources and spend caps across teams, users and agents. In this talk: • Why AI pricing emergencies are really infrastructure problems • Check before you spend: synchronous checks, asynchronous settlement • Concurrency, double spend, and drawing down from different credit pools • Four patterns for selling AI at scale, from reserve-and-settle to spend visibility SPEAKER Dor Sasson, Co-founder & CEO, Stigg LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/datapm/ LINKS Stigg: https://www.stigg.io Stigg on X: https://x.com/GetStigg CHAPTERS 0:00 Intro 0:37 Every AI company is building a bank 1:17 April's pricing emergencies 2:52 Case: Anthropic and OpenClaw 4:02 It's not just Anthropic 5:02 Checks happen after the invoice 6:27 Check first, settle later 7:32 The ATM analogy 8:11 How OpenAI built it 9:21 Three takeaways 10:31 Concurrency and double spend 12:16 Which credits get spent first? 13:31 Budgets, hierarchies and spend caps 14:46 Four patterns 17:50 A pricing change that was really infrastructure 18:35 AI's Stripe moment Recorded at the AI Engineer World's Fair 2026 in San Francisco. Subscribe for more talks from the engineers building with AI. AI Engineer: https://ai.engineer YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@aiDotEngineer X: https://x.com/aiDotEngineer LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/aidotengineer/ #AIPricing #Monetization #AIEngineer