alt Hacker News> API is definitely being sold at a decent profit.
Where do you get this from?
Enterprise plans are being cancelled or limited all over the place (Uber, Microsoft). I doubt Anthropic would be leveraging a loss leader with their consumer plans, while catastrophically hemorrhaging customers on the enterprise.
They are either operating at a loss (possibly a minor one), or a minor profit (which is chasing customers away).
If they were comfortably profitable they wouldn't need to participate in the circular deal circus.
It would be insane, if they can't serve the models at a profit sure at current GPU prices the profit might be 10% or lower. But at realistic gpu prices it would have been close to 30-60% based on how big the models actually are and how much they have optimized the stack to serve them.
1T parameter models like Kimi K2.6 can be served for 1/10 to 1/5 of the price of opus 4.8 for perspective.
Sure opus is 2x the size and hosting might be non linearly scaling so still it should be around 50% margin at regular gpu prices.
If it isn't I would be very surprised.
Also for enterprises we joke but Google is not paying same rates as us there are big massive enterprise discounts. I have heard upto 20-30%... OpenAI is supposedly even more generous.
I don't think API is being sold at a loss at the end of the day even if the API profits are marginal 10-20% because of insane GPU prices now.