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No, it doesn't cost Anthropic $5k per Claude Code user

martinalderson.com

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Re: No, it doesn't cost Anthropic $5k per Claude Code user

#131

Post by rafaelmn »

himata4113 wrote: post #87
eru wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [...] if I had to guess it's break even as the compute is most likely going idle otherwise. Why would it go idle? It would go to their next best use. At least they could help with model training or let their researchers run experiments etc.

inference compute is vastly different versus training, also it has to stay hot in vram which probably takes up most of it. There is limited use for THAT much compute as well, they are running things like claude code compiler and even then they're scratching the surface of the amount of compute they have. Training currently requires nvidia's latest and greatest for the best models (they also use google TPU's now which…

I think I've heard multiple time that a large % of training compute for SoTA models is inference to generate training tokens, this is bound to happen with RL training

Re: No, it doesn't cost Anthropic $5k per Claude Code user

#132

Post by bob1029 »

overrun11 wrote: post #109

A huge number of people are convinced that OpenAI and Anthropic are selling inference tokens at a loss despite the fact that there's no evidence this is true and a lot of evidence that it isn't. It's just become a meme uncritically regurgitated. This sloppy Forbes article has polluted the epistemic environment because now theres a source to point to as "evidence." So yes this post author's estimation isn't perfect bu…

I think the wafer scale compute is a massive deal. It's already being leveraged for models you can use right now and the reception on HN has been negligible. The entire model lives in SRAM. This is orders of magnitude faster than HBM/DRAM. I can't imagine they couldn't eventually break even using hardware like this in production.

Re: No, it doesn't cost Anthropic $5k per Claude Code user

#133

Post by ffsm8 »

aweb wrote: post #106
anonzzzies wrote: post #67

I calculated only last weekend that my team would cost, if we would run Claude Code on retail API costs, around $200k/mo. We pay $1400/month in Max subscriptions. So that's $50k/user... But what tokens CC is reporting in their json -> a lot of this must be cached etc, so doubt it's anywhere near $50k cost, but not sure how to figure out what it would cost and I'm sure as hell not going to try.

I'm surprised, isn't it forbidden to use the Max plan as part of a company? Just curious, as I thought it was forbidden by the ToS but I'm not sure if I have a good understanding of it

There is nothing in the TOS last time I checked forbidding it's use with Claude code. It's only forbidden to utilize it in the running of the business.

So getting Claude code subscriptions for developers should be permissable and not be against anything... However, if you created a rest endpoint to eg run a preconfigured prompt as part of your platform, that'd be against it

But I'm neither a lawyer nor work for anthropic

Re: No, it doesn't cost Anthropic $5k per Claude Code user

#134

Post by sunaurus »

aweb wrote: post #106
anonzzzies wrote: post #67

I calculated only last weekend that my team would cost, if we would run Claude Code on retail API costs, around $200k/mo. We pay $1400/month in Max subscriptions. So that's $50k/user... But what tokens CC is reporting in their json -> a lot of this must be cached etc, so doubt it's anywhere near $50k cost, but not sure how to figure out what it would cost and I'm sure as hell not going to try.

I'm surprised, isn't it forbidden to use the Max plan as part of a company? Just curious, as I thought it was forbidden by the ToS but I'm not sure if I have a good understanding of it

Surely that can't be true? The expectation would be that people pay $200 a month for building open source and personal hobby software with Claude?

Re: No, it doesn't cost Anthropic $5k per Claude Code user

#135

Post by akhrail1996 »

The comparison with Qwen/Kimi by "comparable architecture size" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Parameter count doesn't tell you much when the models aren't in the same league quality-wise.

I wonder if a better proxy would be comparing by capability level rather than size. The cost to go from "good" to "frontier" is probably exponential, not linear - so estimating Anthropic's real cost from what it takes to serve Qwen 397B seems off.

Re: No, it doesn't cost Anthropic $5k per Claude Code user

#136

Post by barrell »

overrun11 wrote: post #109

A huge number of people are convinced that OpenAI and Anthropic are selling inference tokens at a loss despite the fact that there's no evidence this is true and a lot of evidence that it isn't. It's just become a meme uncritically regurgitated. This sloppy Forbes article has polluted the epistemic environment because now theres a source to point to as "evidence." So yes this post author's estimation isn't perfect bu…

Does this not count as evidence? I would agree that it sounds a little shaky, but I would not say there is no evidence.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/oai_docs/

Re: No, it doesn't cost Anthropic $5k per Claude Code user

#137

Post by nl »

janalsncm wrote: post #128
faangguyindia wrote: post #114

Claude subscription is equivalant of spot instance And APIs are on-demand service equivalant. Priority is set to APIs and leftover compute is used by Subscription Plans. When there is no capacity, subscriptions are routed to Highly Quantized cheaper models behind the scenes. Selling subscription makes it cheaper to run such inference at scale otherwise many times your capacity is just sitting there idle. Also, these…

> When there is no capacity, subscriptions are routed to Highly Quantized cheaper models behind the scenes. Have they announced this?

> Have they announced this?

No and indeed they have said they never do this at all.

Re: No, it doesn't cost Anthropic $5k per Claude Code user

#138

Post by lyu07282 »

What this doesn't mention is the "cost" to the public: the inevitable bailouts after it all comes crashing down again, the massive subsidies that Datacenters get from tax payers, the fresh water they consume, the electricity price hikes for everyone else, the noise, air and water pollution and the massive health impact on the surrounding population of every datacenter. The jobs that it destroys and the innocent people it kills through use of the technology in military targeting and autonomous weapons usage.

Re: No, it doesn't cost Anthropic $5k per Claude Code user

#139

Post by wongarsu »

Bolwin wrote: post #29
ymaws wrote: post #8

How confident are you in the opus 4.6 model size? I've always assumed it was a beefier model with more active params that Qwen397B (17B active on the forward pass)

Yeah that's a massive assumption they're making. I remember musk revealed Grok was multiple trillion parameters. I find it likely Opus is larger. I'm sure Anthropic is making money off the API but I highly doubt it's 90% profit margins.

GPT 4 was rumoured/leaked to be 1.8T. Claude 3.5 Sonnet was supposedly 175B, so around 0.5T-1T seems reasonable for Opus 3.5. Maybe a step up to 1-3T for Opus 4.0

Since then inference pricing for new models has come down a lot, despite increasing pressure to be profitable. Opus 4.6 costs 1/3rd what Opus 4.0 (and 3.5) costs, and GPT 5.4 1/4th what o1 costs. You could take that as indication that inference costs have also come done by at least that degree.

My guess would have been that current frontier models like Opus are in the realm of 1T params with 32B active

Re: No, it doesn't cost Anthropic $5k per Claude Code user

#140

Post by sunaurus »

versteegen wrote: post #33
functionmouse wrote: post #2

Was anyone under the impression that it does? Serious question. I've never heard that, personally.

Ed Zitron made that claim (in particular here: [1]). In the same article he admits he not a programmer, and had to ask someone else to try out Claude Code and ccusage for him. He doesn't have any understanding of how LLMs or caching works. But he's prominent because he's received leaked financial details for Anthropic and OpenAI, eg [2] [1] https://www.wheresyoured.at/anthropic-is-bleeding-out/ [2] https://www.wheres…

Maybe I'm misreading it, but I don't see him saying it's just the cost of *inference* alone (which is the strawman that the article in the OP is arguing against). He says:

> this company is wilfully burning 200% to 3000% of each Pro or Max customer that interacts with Claude Code

There is of course this meme that "Anthropic would be profitable today if they stopped training new models and only focused on inference", but people on HN are smart enough to understand that this is not realistic due to model drift, and also due to comeptition from other models. So training is forever a part of the cost of doing business, until we have some fundamental changes in the underlying technology.

I can only interpret Ed Zitron as saying "the cost of doing business is 200% to 3000% of the price users are paying for their subscriptions", which sounds extremely plausible to me.

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