alt Hacker NewsWhy would anthropic at all prefer this approach when that middle man can switch and cost-arbitrage between countless other model providers.
We're not talking about what is best for the consumer (ex more competition to force iterations and improvements), but what Anthropic thinks is best for Anthropic.
Make up the lower margins by larger volume because you get much better market penetration. But you are right that this only works if you know the middle-men don't go to other model providers. That's where some kind of incubation program that provides capital or credits or whatever in return for long-term commitments might work
But I doubt staying a pure model provider is a winning move. It's a market nobody will win long-term. Almost all of the value to be captured isn't in inference APIs but in how to use them to generate business value. Claude Code was already the right approach, they "just" need to show they can repeat this for other kinds of tasks