And on top of that, Anthropic does not run their own compute clusters do they? They probably get completely ripped by whoever is renting them the processors.
$200 worth of actual computation is an awful lot of computation.
No, it doesn't cost Anthropic $5k per Claude Code user
171–180 of 374 posts
Re: No, it doesn't cost Anthropic $5k per Claude Code user
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
Inference is profitable. No one is selling at a loss. It’s training to keep up with competitors that is causing losses.
> Inference is profitable Eh. We don't really know that, and the people saying that have an interest in the rest of the world believing it's true.
How are we so sure that deep inside the moon isn't made out of cheese?
Re: No, it doesn't cost Anthropic $5k per Claude Code user
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That's a tautology. People think chinese models are 10x more efficient because they're 10x cheaper They do have different infrastructure / electricity costs and they might not run on nvidia hardware. It's not just the models.
Except there are providers that serve both chinese models AND opus as well. On the same hardware. Namely, Amazon Bedrock and Google Vertex. That means normalized infrastructure costs, normalized electricity costs, and normalized hardware performance. Normalized inference software stack, even (most likely). It's about a close of a 1 to 1 comparison as you can get. Both Amazon and Google serve Opus at roughly ~1/2 the…
AWS and GCP both have their own custom inference chips, so a better example for hosting Opus on commodity hardware would be Digital Ocean.
Re: No, it doesn't cost Anthropic $5k per Claude Code user
#174> Qwen 3.5 397B-A17B is a good comparison It is not. It's a terrible comparison. Qwen, deepseek and other Chinese models are known for their 10x or even better efficiency compared to Anthropic's. That's why the difference between open router prices and those official providers isn't that different. Plus who knows what open routed providers do in term quantization. They may be getting 100x better efficiency, thus the…
That's a tautology. People think chinese models are 10x more efficient because they're 10x cheaper, and then you use that to claim that they're 10x more efficient. Opus isn't that expensive to host. Look at Amazon Bedrock's t/s numbers for Opus 4.5 vs other chinese models. They're around the same order of magnitude- which means that Opus has roughly the same amount of active params as the chinese models. Also, you ca…
Opus doubled in speed with version 4.5, leading me to speculate that they had promoted a sonnet size model. The new faster opus was the same speed as Gemini 3 flash running on the same TPUs. I think anthropics margins are probably the highest in the industry, but they have to chop that up with google by renting their TPUs.
Re: No, it doesn't cost Anthropic $5k per Claude Code user
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is this related to the inference , may I ask? Except for some very hardware-specific optimizations of model architecture, there's nothing to prevent one to host these models on your own infrastructure. And that's what actually many OpenRouter providers, at least some of which are based in US, are doing. Because most of Chinese models mentioned here are open-weight (except for Qwen who has one proprietary "Max" mo…
I mean sure, but in terms of cost per dollar/per watt of inference Nvidia's GPUs are pretty up there - unless China is pumping out domestic chips cheaply enough. Also with Nvidia you get the efficiency of everything (including inference) built on/for Cuda, even efforts to catch AMD up are still ongoing afaik. I wouldn't be surprised if things like DS were trained and now hosted on Nvidia hardware.
> unless China is pumping out domestic chips cheaply enough
They are. Nvidia makes A LOT of profit. Hey, top stock for a reason.
> I wouldn't be surprised if things like DS were trained and now hosted on Nvidia hardware
DS is "old". I wouldn't study them. The new 1s have a mandate to at least run on local hardware. There are data center requirements.
I agree it could still be trained on Nvidia GPUs (black market etc), but not running.
Re: No, it doesn't cost Anthropic $5k per Claude Code user
#176A 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'd love to be a fly on the wall when this argument is tried in front of a bankruptcy court. It drives me nuts. Of course there's evidence that they're selling tokens at a loss. The only thing these companies sell are tokens. That's their entire output. OpenAI is trying to build an ad business but it must be quite small still relative to selling tokens because I've not yet seen a single ad on ChatGPT. It's not like t…
You're missing costs.
- Amortized training costs.
- SG&A.
- Capex depreciation.
All the above impact profitability over various time horizons and have to rolled into present and projected P&L and cash flow analysis.
Re: No, it doesn't cost Anthropic $5k per Claude Code user
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had a similar reaction to OP for a different post a few weeks back - I think some analysis on the health economy. Initially as I was reading I thought - "Wow, I've never read a financial article written so clearly". Everything in layman's terms. But as I continued to read, I began to notice the LLM-isms. Oversimplified concepts, "the honest truth" "like X for Y", etc. Maybe the common factor here is not having deep…
Alternate theory... a few months into the LLMism phenomenon, people are starting to copy the LLM writing style without realizing it :(
This happens to non-native English speakers a lot (like me). My style of writing is heavily influenced by everything I read. And since I also do research using LLMs, I'll probably sound more and more as an AI as well, just by reading its responses constantly.
I just don't know what's supposed to be natural writing anymore. It's not in the books, disappears from the internet, what's left? Some old blogs for now maybe.
Re: No, it doesn't cost Anthropic $5k per Claude Code user
#178A 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…
> 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 Theres quite a lot of evidence, no proof I'd agree, but then there's no absolute proof I'm aware to the contrary either, so I don't know where you're getting this from. The two pieces of evidence I'm aware of is that 1) Anthropic doesn't want their subsidised…
> which would imply that the money their making off it isn't enough
I don't think this logically follows. An unlimited buffet doesn't let you resell all of the food out the backdoor. At some level of usage any fixed price plan becomes unprofitable.
I agree the 5k cap is interesting as evidence although as you said I suspect there are other reasons for it.
As for evidence against it: The Information reported that OpenAI and Anthropic are 30%+ gross margins for the last few years. Sam Altman and Dario have both claimed inference is profitable in various scattered interviews. Other experts seem to generally agree too. A quick search found a tweet from former PyTorch team member Horace He: https://x.com/typedfemale/status/1961197802169798775 and a response to it in agreement from Anish Tondwalkar former researcher at OpenAI and Google Brain.
Re: No, it doesn't cost Anthropic $5k per Claude Code user
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean sure, but in terms of cost per dollar/per watt of inference Nvidia's GPUs are pretty up there - unless China is pumping out domestic chips cheaply enough. Also with Nvidia you get the efficiency of everything (including inference) built on/for Cuda, even efforts to catch AMD up are still ongoing afaik. I wouldn't be surprised if things like DS were trained and now hosted on Nvidia hardware.
> unless China is pumping out domestic chips cheaply enough They are. Nvidia makes A LOT of profit. Hey, top stock for a reason. > I wouldn't be surprised if things like DS were trained and now hosted on Nvidia hardware DS is "old". I wouldn't study them. The new 1s have a mandate to at least run on local hardware. There are data center requirements. I agree it could still be trained on Nvidia GPUs (black market etc)…
> The new 1s have a mandate to at least run on local hardware.
They do? Source?
But if that's true, it would explain why Minimax, Z.ai and Moonshot are all organized as Singaporean holding companies, with claimed data center locations (according to OpenRouter) in the US or Singapore and only the devs in China. Can't be forced to use inferior local hardware if you're just a body shop for a "foreign" AI company. ;)
Re: No, it doesn't cost Anthropic $5k per Claude Code user
#180> Qwen 3.5 397B-A17B is a good comparison It is not. It's a terrible comparison. Qwen, deepseek and other Chinese models are known for their 10x or even better efficiency compared to Anthropic's. That's why the difference between open router prices and those official providers isn't that different. Plus who knows what open routed providers do in term quantization. They may be getting 100x better efficiency, thus the…
>It is not. It's a terrible comparison. Qwen, deepseek and other Chinese models are known for their 10x or even better efficiency compared to Anthropic's. I find it a good comparison because it is a good baseline since we have zero insider knowledge of Anthropic. They give me an idea that a certain size of a model has a certain cost associated. I don't buy the 10x efficiency thing: they are just lagging behind the pe…
> I don't buy the 10x efficiency thing: they are just lagging behind the performance of current SOTA models. They perform much worse than the current models while also costing much less - exactly what I would expect.
Define "much worse".
+--------------------------------------+-------------+-----------+------------------+
| Benchmark | Claude Opus | DeepSeek | DeepSeek vs Opus |
+--------------------------------------+-------------+-----------+------------------+
| SWE-Bench Verified (coding) | 80.9% | 73.1% | ~90% |
| MMLU (knowledge) | ~91 | ~88.5 | ~97% |
| GPQA (hard science reasoning) | ~79–80 | ~75–76 | ~95% |
| MATH-500 (math reasoning) | ~78 | ~90 | ~115% |
+--------------------------------------+-------------+-----------+------------------+