this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2026
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Anthropics numbers are probably better than OpenAIs, but i am willing to eat my boots (with ketchup and mustard tho) if they are even close to profitable at API pricing.
They are (maybe, allegedly) "profitable on inference" i.e. the API pricing is higher than the actual compute they use just for the input/output tokens for the query. That excludes, though, training, capex, staff, etc., which... is by far the vast majority of their actual expenses.
At least according to Ed Zitron, they only appeared profitable due to creative bookkeeping. They timed the announcement of their shitty "annualized revenue" to coincide with the few months of vastly reduced rent at the datacenter Musk rented to them as well as the shift to token based billing for enterprise customers. Their inference is likely not profitable.
Yeah, hence I couched it in allegedly. Ultimately we don't really know. But even if it were true, it wouldn't really mean anything for their profitability as a company. They have to keep improving the models if they hope to keep what customers they have.
It's subsidized. I will eat my hat if the number is less than 50%. It is even crazier at work. My personal account cost 3 times as much for the same prompt on my work account. Inference cost is the same for all users, you can't mega-ultra scale something that is at maximum scale labeled as a hyper scale.
Yeah, subsidized by mainly Nvidias circular financing crap. This will cause a major recession, and it is so obvious for everyone looking at how much cash investors are throwing at this thing and how much you can actually earn with something that confidently misinforms you on the regular. Roleplaying like Character.ai is one of the better uses, because there false information isn't that relevant. Then there's coding where it is easy to automatically check for errors, and then... scientific uses. But i think that's it, and you can't prop up all that investment just with coding, RP and weather analysis (which is woke by definition in the US to boot) or interpreting CT scans.
That's interesting. My employer is too large to use subscriptions and also we have our own harnesses, so they have to pay per token. Some employees spend thousands of dollars (or more) per month, but if they were doing it at home, they'd be easily able to fit the same usage into a $200/m subscription.
I was comparing API costs at home, the plans give you a lot of value. When I had to use GitHub Copilot the API cost was closer to my home cost, but whatever Enterprise plan we have through Anthropic is crazy.