I think you need to consider how much dev mindshare you get from the loss-leader. Claude has grown at an insane rate. They brought vibe-coding mainstream.

At some point they might decide they have enough demand and inertia from enterprise to reduce the subsidy. But to say “it’s doomed” really misses the fact that it has already been immensely successful.

Using Opus 4.8 on their Max 5x plan (108 EUR with VAT) would have cost me around 4600 EUR at API rates: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48684539

I also compared them against GLM Coding Plan (cause everyone was positive of the model): https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/z-ai-s-glm-5-2-is-a-great-model... and Anthropic still gives you a bit more tokens despite having some of the presumably most expensive to train and run models.

Anthropic and OpenAI are really two different businesses in one company.

One business is serving great models via the API. I think that one is indeed going to become commoditized. The other is making consumer / developer focused products like Chat GPT, Claude Code or Codex.

Anthropic is leaning hard into making Claude Code work with things like enterprise compliance policies. I wouldn't be surprised if at least one of these companies basically ends up as a SaaS fronting many different models for different capability points, some of which are open.

What makes you think the API costs are "the true price" and anywhere near their inference costs? Also what percentage of users do you think actually maxes out their subscription?

I suspect they're subsidizing a lot less than people think.

I track the subscription value against API rates and you get between 13-20k at current rates. When Fable launched I got 32k for a short time. 500 USD per day is thus very little.