> they make a ton of money on inference

So it is stated, but is it actually true? I am not convinced.

Besides, it's not as if they can suddenly stop training models, the moment you do that you've spelled a death sentence for profitablity because Google and open source will very quickly undercut a 15 year break even timeline.

from what i understand, the issue with inference is it doesn't scale as user count grows the way traditional saas scales. In typical saas adding users requires very little additional capacity. However with inference, supporting more users requires much more capacity to be added. I don't know if it's quite linear but it certainly requires more infrastructure to support additional LLM users than say a web application.

Afaik Anthropic still loses money for their main product in this space: Claude Code and their Max plans.

Not really. They are burning money on hardware, resources and payroll without meaningful return prospects.