alt Hacker NewsI must be alone in this but I don't think its heavily subsidized. I see their models as really overpriced. No way they cost that much. Could they really?
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Cost to the business and price to customers are not the same thing. Even if it cost Anthropic nothing to run any of these (it actually costs quite a bit in electricity, infrastructure, ops teams to keep everything running smoothly, and above all else, extraordinary R&D expenses to develop the models), they could set the price at a million dollars per token if they wanted to.
That clarified: yes, every major lab is losing money on full utilization of their inference subscription plans. The API prices are what the business has determined they need to achieve profitability, and are not reflective of actual costs as you point out, but the discounts vs API pricing can get pretty extreme. Some users report 50x+ (98%+) discounts on the $100/mo Max subscription plans vs PAYG API pricing¹. Even the skeptical, contrarian takes that focus on cost to the business will tell you that, yes, Anthropic is losing money on those subscriptions, even using generously low estimates on costs².
¹ https://www.ksred.com/claude-code-pricing-guide-which-plan-a...
² https://martinalderson.com/posts/no-it-doesnt-cost-anthropic...
Yes. Their API rates are breakeven to profitable, the subscription that people are arbitraging is a 90% discount or so from API rates.
There’s a reason 5% of GitHub commits are from Claude code and no other provider is above 0.1%… it’s quality, but it’s also subsidy.