alt Hacker NewsNo, it doesn't cost Anthropic $5k per Claude Code user
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> Qwen 3.5 397B-A17B is a good comparison
It is not. It's a terrible comparison. Qwen, deepseek and other Chinese models are known for their 10x or even better efficiency compared to Anthropic's.
That's why the difference between open router prices and those official providers isn't that different. Plus who knows what open routed providers do in term quantization. They may be getting 100x better efficiency, thus the competitive price.
That being said not all users max out their plan, so it's not like each user costs anthropic 5,000 USD. The hemoragy would be so brutal they would be out of business in months
I calculated only last weekend that my team would cost, if we would run Claude Code on retail API costs, around $200k/mo. We pay $1400/month in Max subscriptions. So that's $50k/user... But what tokens CC is reporting in their json -> a lot of this must be cached etc, so doubt it's anywhere near $50k cost, but not sure how to figure out what it would cost and I'm sure as hell not going to try.
A huge number of people are convinced that OpenAI and Anthropic are selling inference tokens at a loss despite the fact that there's no evidence this is true and a lot of evidence that it isn't. It's just become a meme uncritically regurgitated.
This sloppy Forbes article has polluted the epistemic environment because now theres a source to point to as "evidence."
So yes this post author's estimation isn't perfect but it is far more rigorous than the original Forbes article which doesn't appear to even understand the difference between Anthropic's API costs and its compute costs.
If Anthropic's compute is fully saturated then the Claude code power users do represent an opportunity cost to Anthropic much closer to $5,000 then $500.
Anthropic's models may be similar in parameter size to model's on open router, but none of the others are in the headlines nearly as much (especially recently) so the comparison is extremely flawed.
The argument in this article is like comparing the cost of a Rolex to a random brand of mechanical watch based on gear count.
What CC costs internally is not public. How efficient it is, is not public.
…You could take efficiency improvement rates from previous models releases (from x -> y) and assume; they have already made “improvements” internally. This is likely closer to what their real costs are.
How confident are you in the opus 4.6 model size? I've always assumed it was a beefier model with more active params that Qwen397B (17B active on the forward pass)
What people don't realize is that cache is *free*, well not free, but compared to the compute required to recompute it? Relatively free.
If you remove the cached token cost from pricing the overall api usage drops from around $5000 to $800 (or $200 per week) on the $200 max subscription. Still 4x cheaper over API, but not costing money either - if I had to guess it's break even as the compute is most likely going idle otherwise.
the openrouter comparison is interesting because it shows what happens when you have actual supply-side competition. multiple providers, different quantizations, price competition. the spread between cheapest and priciest for the same model can be 3-5x.
anthropic doesn't have that. single provider, single pricing decision. whether or not $5k is accurate the more interesting question is what happens to inference pricing when the supply side is genuinely open. we're seeing hints of it with open router but its still intermediated
not saying this solves anthropic's cost problem, just that the "what does inference actually cost" question gets a lot more interesting when providers are competing directly
This is such a well-written essay. Every line revealed the answer to the immediate question I had just thought of
Good article! Small suggestions:
1. It would be nice to define terms like RSI or at least link to a definition.
2. I found the graph difficult to read. It's a computer font that is made to look hand-drawn and it's a bit low resolution. With some googling I'm guessing the words in parentheses are the clouds the model is running on. You could make that a bit more clear.
These margins are far greater than the ones Dario has indicated during many of his recent podcasts appearances.
By the way, one of the charts in the article shows that Opus 4.6 is 10x costlier than Kimi K2.5.
I thought there was no moat in AI? Even being 10x costlier, Anthropic still doesn't have enough compute to meet demand.
Those "AI has no moat" opinions are going to be so wrong so soon.
Is it fair to say the Open Router models aren't subsidized though? They make the case that companies on there are running a business, but there are free models, and companies with huge AI budgets that want to gather training data and show usage.
Was anyone under the impression that it does? Serious question. I've never heard that, personally.
Well, IDK, I have used CC with API billing pretty extensively and managed to spend ~$1000 in one month more or less. Moved to a Max 20x subscription and using it a bit less (I'm still scared) but not THAT less and I'm around 10% weekly usage. I'm not counting the tokens, though.
This article is hilariously flawed, and it takes all of 5 seconds of research to see why.
Alibaba is the primary comparison point made by the author, but it's a completely unsuitable comparison. Alibab is closer to AWS then Anthropic in terms of their business model. They make money selling infrastructure, not on inference. It's entirely possible they see inference as a loss leader, and are willing to offer it at cost or below to drive people into the platform.
We also have absolutely no idea if it's anywhere near comparable to Opus 4.6. The author is guessing.
So the articles primary argument is based on a comparison to a company who has an entirely different business model running a model that the author is just making wild guesses about.
Ok but so it does cost Cursor $5k per power-Cursor user?? Still seems pretty rough..
> I'm fairly confident the Forbes sources are confusing retail API prices with actual compute costs
Aren't they losing money on the retail API pricing, too?
> ... comparisons to artificially low priced Chinese providers...
Yeah, no this article does not pass the sniff test.
Claude subscription is equivalant of spot instance
And APIs are on-demand service equivalant.
Priority is set to APIs and leftover compute is used by Subscription Plans.
When there is no capacity, subscriptions are routed to Highly Quantized cheaper models behind the scenes.
Selling subscription makes it cheaper to run such inference at scale otherwise many times your capacity is just sitting there idle.
Also, these subscription help you train your model further on predictable workflow (because the model creators also controls the Client like qwen code, claude code, anti gravity etc...)
This is probably why they will ban you for violating TOS that you cannot use their subscription service model with other tools.
They aren't just selling subscription, but the subscription cost also help them become better at the thing they are selling which is coding for coding models like Qwen, Claude etc...
I've used qwen code, codex and claude.
Codex is 2x better than Qwen code and Claude is 2x better than Codex.
So I'd hope the Claude Opus is atleast 4-5x more expensive to run than flagship Qwen Code model hosted by Alibaba.