They are talking about Meta, AWS, Microsoft, Google, Nvidia and so on.
Although Anthropic supposedly has a good margin on each token, so the inference is substantially less expensive than what they charge customers. Training is eating into that.
> Although Anthropic supposedly has a good margin on each token
I am still to see any evidence of this being true.
The actual data at hand suggests otherwise, with Anthropic's losses increasing with more usage, and they relying on shenanigans to give an appearance of being healthy. They also need to raise money like crazy and seem desperate to offload this hot potato through an IPO. Not really the sort of thing that screams "sustainable" to me.
Such as having a "profitable" quarter on one of their funny metrics when they were not paying for compute, or leaking completely obscure ARR, "EBTIT", etc.
What data? To my knowledge the only data point that exists is a 2025 document, which is completely irrelevant considering how massively they hiked the API token price.
To my knowledge, the subscriptions are the only part that may still be profiting from vc subventions. And if not, then their API margins are gigantic
- The suspiciously high amount of money they have to keep raising at a rapid pace
- The fact that they have to play around with silly metrics and leak bullshit to pretend they are healthy
- Their desperation for an IPO.
I feel kind of silly having to repeat myself, it was all there in my previous reply of you bothered to read. I point at that whenever people spread this bullshit of Anthropic being "profitable" especially when it comes to subscriptions. Everything points at it being ruinously unprofitable actually.
Profitability only matters if we consider that they are grifters willing to cash in as quickly as possible before this jenga tower falls apart. It matters less if the interpretation is that the fucking weirdos at Anthropic are death cultists that want to conjure their death god into existence.
but none of those are data points which actually meaningfully tell what we were discussing? They're not even data points, theyre merely observations from the outside, not at all objective.
Anthropic can be profitable and massively overvalued, AND deeply into debt from running too fast and loose with their money in previous years.
That situation would have them behave exactly the same: hurrying to get the IPO done while the stocks are still skyhigh to get over the debt burden and then buckle up for the profitability to weather them through coming correction...
Because it's kind of true, but also mostly wrong. People conflate two things: "Subsidized" subscriptions as a monetization model, and (unsustainable) subsidization through outside investors.
When you max out your Claude Max plan every billing period, are you consuming more tokens than you could realistically pay for with the same money spent on API inference? Definitely! This works because many Claude Max subscribers don't use it to the max (and you probably aren't using it to the max every single time either), so overall subscriptions might still be profitable. Technically, the subscribers subsidize each other, but this is entirely sustainable (see any other subscription model that is based on its consumers not maximizing their usage, e.g. gyms).
What people mean (or want to say) when they say inference is subsidized is that it is subsidized in an unsustainable way (e.g. with investments that will not last forever - if this is true at scale it should worry us!). What happens now is that they take the fact that an individual subscription used to the max by itself is a financial drain for the company offering it, attach the "subsidized" term to it, and infer from that a bunch of stuff that is usually associated with the term (such as unsustainability) but doesn't really apply here.
whether people want to use the service or not is irrelevant, the only thing that matters is whether or not (and how much) they actually do use it. Also there are subscription/flat rate based cinema services that have been in business for almost two decades now, so it doesn't seem like that wouldn't work.
Because the subscriptions grant you much more usage than what you get in tokens for the same money via the API. That being said, they probably don't have ruinous losses per subscription, if any. Don't forget that many users are casual and do not use Claude Code, so a casual user and a power user level out
This just reads like cope, like you WANT them to be failing rather than the actual truth. Shutting down SORA proves nothing. How many products and services has Google shut down?
Video is costly and wasn't going to get them to RSI like math and coding will. While I enjoyed Sora and it showed just how far AI has come, their decision makes sense.
And to think just how amazing agents are at coding compared to even 6 months ago... I'm not complaining!
Because they are, I pay anthropic 200 a month, if I were paying by the token like an enterprise it would be close to 11 grand a month. Yes I use 100 percent of my allocation on every window.
That’s only a subsidy if you argue about lost revenue (like the anti-piracy arguments). But somehow I doubt you’d be willing/able to pay even close to 11 grand a month.
The only real comparison point that matters for the argument of subsidization is how much money it cost costs Anthropic to serve you those tokens.
Although Anthropic supposedly has a good margin on each token, so the inference is substantially less expensive than what they charge customers. Training is eating into that.