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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

#281

Post by crazygringo »

fulafel wrote: post #272
crazygringo wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article discusses all of that, in great detail. The title does not seem sensationalized. It's literally a summary of the article.

It does and that is exactly why the article's title is sensationalized. The title is refuting a strawman argument that wasn't actually made, and that the article itself doesn't claim was made.

> The title is refuting a strawman argument that wasn't actually made

The argument was literally made in Forbes. It's linked to. What are you on about?

Is there something I'm missing here?

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

#282

Post by timmmmmmay »

vbezhenar wrote: post #155

Why does Claude charge 10x for API, compared to subscriptions? They're not a monopoly, so one would expect margins to be thinner.

they're obviously trying to steer customers to the monthly subscription instead of the pay-per-token API.

now, the consensus of the commentards on this website, who don't have access to any of anthropics financial data, is that the monthly subscriptions are a money loser!

so either the leading AI company's business dev team is wrong or the Jacker News comment section is wrong, it is a mystery

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

#283

Post by lokar »

elbasti wrote: post #280

"Any conversation about token costs devolves into an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden implementation of half of generally accepted accounting principles." We have a way of determining if Anthropic is, or has the capability of being profitable, and what the levers to that may be. AI may be world-changing, but the accounting principles behind AI labs are no different than those behind a Pizza Hut. Even if the c…

Of course a model does not really depreciate, the problem is they are forced by competitive pressure to offer newer/better models at the same price.

This is what the elites of the gilded age called "ruinous competition", and the solution today will be the same as back then: monopoly power. This has been the business plan of the tech VC industry for 25+ years.

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

#284

Post by crooked-v »

simianwords wrote: post #49
hirako2000 wrote: post #44

> 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…

> distillation "attacks"

I find it really funny that anyone can call it this with a straight face when all the American models are based on heaps of illegally pirated books and TOS-breaking website scraping in the first place.

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

#285

Post by devonkelley »

vidarh wrote: post #203
coldtea wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everyone who's used Opus knows it's better than the others in a way that isn't captured by the benchmarks. I would describe it as taste. Ah, the "trust me bro" advantage. Couldn't it just be brand identity and familiarity?

I have a project where we've had Opus, Sonnet, Deepseek, Kimi, Qwen create and execute an aggregate total of about 350 plans so far, and the quality difference as measured in plans where the agent failed to complete the tasks on the first run is high enough that it comes out several times higher than Anthropics subscription prices, but probably cheaper than the API prices once we have improved the harness further - a…

[dead]

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

#286

Post by bdangubic »

itintheory wrote: post #248
bdangubic wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This maybe was the case year+ ago but this is no longer the case, used to be most; now it is some/few

Any references on this? I hear this argument a lot. In fact, in a talk on AI last week I heard someone say: "If you click the thumbs up button to rate a chat, the AI provider will use the contents for training, so our company's policy is never to click the thumbs up button" That seemed so farcical I had a hard time taking this person seriously. Enterprise plans must give some strong guarantees around data usage, righ…

Obviously I can speak only from my personal experience but just me I have 5 examples of companies that were “no AI, IP and all that” that are now full-on “every developer must use CC, Cursor…”

How many conpanes today don’t have “AI strategy” and are fearing will be left behind etc? In my small circle we went from “most are not using AI” to “none are not using AI” in somewhat short period of time

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

#287

Post by benlivengood »

elbasti wrote: post #280

"Any conversation about token costs devolves into an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden implementation of half of generally accepted accounting principles." We have a way of determining if Anthropic is, or has the capability of being profitable, and what the levers to that may be. AI may be world-changing, but the accounting principles behind AI labs are no different than those behind a Pizza Hut. Even if the c…

The world labor market is ~35T USD yearly, and so that is roughly the order of magnitude to balance against frontier model training cost. E.g. Dario Amodei has his "data center of PhDs" level where he assumes that's "good enough" to stop training frontier models; so if that can take even 5% of global labor market that's ~1.5T a year revenue, balanced against current model training costs of ~1B. 3 orders of magnitude might get us to PhD level? I think that is ultimately the bet the big AI companies are making. Even if 1T is the cost of PhD level AI then three/four companies could depreciate that over 4-5 years sharing that 5% of global market.

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

#288

Post by addandsubtract »

itintheory wrote: post #248
bdangubic wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This maybe was the case year+ ago but this is no longer the case, used to be most; now it is some/few

Any references on this? I hear this argument a lot. In fact, in a talk on AI last week I heard someone say: "If you click the thumbs up button to rate a chat, the AI provider will use the contents for training, so our company's policy is never to click the thumbs up button" That seemed so farcical I had a hard time taking this person seriously. Enterprise plans must give some strong guarantees around data usage, righ…

This is why most businesses only have ChatGPT subscriptions. Plus their integration into existing Microsoft products and billing.

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

#289

Post by fulafel »

crazygringo wrote: post #281
fulafel wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does and that is exactly why the article's title is sensationalized. The title is refuting a strawman argument that wasn't actually made, and that the article itself doesn't claim was made.

> The title is refuting a strawman argument that wasn't actually made The argument was literally made in Forbes . It's linked to. What are you on about? Is there something I'm missing here?

The quote from Forbes in the article is a claim that a subscription could use up to 5k worth of tokens.

Which is different from actaully costing 5k in tokens per Claude Code user. As users won't max out their subscriptions. And there doesn't seem to be any stronger claim elsewhere in the article.

But the title is about a strawman that it would cost Anthropic 5k per user which it seems nobody claimed.

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

#290

Post by vidarh »

devonkelley wrote: post #285
vidarh wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a project where we've had Opus, Sonnet, Deepseek, Kimi, Qwen create and execute an aggregate total of about 350 plans so far, and the quality difference as measured in plans where the agent failed to complete the tasks on the first run is high enough that it comes out several times higher than Anthropics subscription prices, but probably cheaper than the API prices once we have improved the harness further - a…

[dead]

Thankfully it's not as bad as that. The 50% that goes red means we re-execute those steps, potentially several times, to see if they succeed, before we even bother manually looking at it. But the overall principle holds: First yoou multiply the cost by re-running, then eventually you either need to kick it up to a more expensive model and/or a human.

But of course this is also only viable for non-latency sensitive work, for starters.

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