No, it doesn't cost Anthropic $5k per Claude Code user • Hacker News Board

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

#301

Post by calvinmorrison » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 5:14 PM UTC

nr378 wrote: post #295

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…

Dario has made a specific cohort argument here. His numbers (from various interviews) are: you train a model in 2023 for $100M, deploy it, and it earns $200M over its lifetime. Meanwhile you train the 2024 model for $1B, which goes on to earn $2B. Each vintage returns 2x on its training cost. However, the GAAP P&L tells the opposite story. You book $200M revenue in the same year you spend $1B training the next model,…

GAAP doesn't work here really. the R&D treadmill means you are always betting on next year and its NOT inventory or something you can defer your cost on. It's an upfront R&D expense.

so what happens on year 10 when Anthropic hits a $10B training and only returns $8T? they're cooked

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

#302

Post by elbasti » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 5:16 PM UTC

skybrian wrote: post #297

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…

> Almost certainly, any reasonable depreciation schedule of the cost of training [...] Maybe not? This is an argument that has to be made using numbers. We can't do the estimate without the numbers.

This is correct. I regret that assertion and have added a comment reflecting that.

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

#303

Post by Verdex » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 5:18 PM UTC

nr378 wrote: post #295

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…

Dario has made a specific cohort argument here. His numbers (from various interviews) are: you train a model in 2023 for $100M, deploy it, and it earns $200M over its lifetime. Meanwhile you train the 2024 model for $1B, which goes on to earn $2B. Each vintage returns 2x on its training cost. However, the GAAP P&L tells the opposite story. You book $200M revenue in the same year you spend $1B training the next model,…

That's an interesting idea. I'm curious, though, are there any other industries and/or companies that have tried to pull this sort of thing off? And what ultimately happened to them?

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

#304

Post by johndough » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 5:18 PM UTC

Chamix wrote: post #293

jychang wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody is running 10s of trillion param models in 2026. That's ridiculous. Opus is 2T-3T in size at most .

What do you think labs are doing with the minimum 10TB memory in NvLink 72 systems that were publicly reported to all start coming online in November/December of last year? And why would this 1 TB -> 10 TB jump matter so much for Anthropic previously being wholly dependent on running Opus 4x on TPUs, if the models were 2-3T at 4bit and could fit in 8x B200 (1.5 TB = 3T param) widely deployed during the Opus 4 era? Yo…

Could you point at some more public info about active parameter count? You said:

> and while an exact number is hard to compute, let me tell you, it is not 17B or anywhere in that particular OOM :)

I can see ~100B, but that would near the same order of magnitude. I find ~1000B active parameters hard to believe.

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

#305

Post by Verdex » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 5:21 PM UTC

calvinmorrison wrote: post #301

nr378 wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dario has made a specific cohort argument here. His numbers (from various interviews) are: you train a model in 2023 for $100M, deploy it, and it earns $200M over its lifetime. Meanwhile you train the 2024 model for $1B, which goes on to earn $2B. Each vintage returns 2x on its training cost. However, the GAAP P&L tells the opposite story. You book $200M revenue in the same year you spend $1B training the next model,…

GAAP doesn't work here really. the R&D treadmill means you are always betting on next year and its NOT inventory or something you can defer your cost on. It's an upfront R&D expense. so what happens on year 10 when Anthropic hits a $10B training and only returns $8T? they're cooked

Yeah, that's kind of what I'm wondering about.

It's an interesting story about how even though all metrics show massive losses actually they have massive gains.

Accounting is a rather mature field, so I figure that someone in the past has tried this stunt and there should probably be ways for dealing with it.

Or do they always flame out after losing all the money? Knowing the history here would be informative.

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

#306

Post by simianwords » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 5:27 PM UTC

beepbooptheory wrote: post #250

simianwords wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would be surprised because there are lots of posters here who think that the cost is so enormous that this whole industry is unviable.

Is that conceit somehow intrinsically absurd? Or is everyone just supposed to just know? Like I wish it was simple as "if it wasn't viable, they wouldn't be in business," but alas that argument is kinda the more naive one in this world. Right? Or is there some intuition about energy/cost here all the dump posters miss, that you could tell us about? Please, anything, my company is dying.

It’s the most simple intuition. You can run a 2 year old gpt model equivalent on your laptop today. So cost is obviously going down.

Its so strange to see people still think costs are not going down..

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

#307

Post by Avshalom » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 5:30 PM UTC

skybrian wrote: post #298

nr378 wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dario has made a specific cohort argument here. His numbers (from various interviews) are: you train a model in 2023 for $100M, deploy it, and it earns $200M over its lifetime. Meanwhile you train the 2024 model for $1B, which goes on to earn $2B. Each vintage returns 2x on its training cost. However, the GAAP P&L tells the opposite story. You book $200M revenue in the same year you spend $1B training the next model,…

If you can remember where you read it, could you share a link?

https://youtu.be/GcqQ1ebBqkc?t=1027 is on such but he doesn't actually say that each model has been profitable.

He says "You paid $100 million and then it made $200 million of revenue. There's some cost to inference with the model, but let's just assume in this cartoonish cartoon example that even if you add those two up, you're kind of in a good state. So, if every model was a company, the model is actually, in this example is actually profitable. What's going on is that at the same time"

importantly you'll notice that he's talking revenue, and assumes that inference is cheap enough/profitable enough that 100M + Inferance_Over_Lifetime < 200M

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

#308

Post by jchallis » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 5:34 PM UTC

fritzo wrote: post #294

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…

I'm not accountant, but I would expect Pizza Hut's accounting is significantly more complex than Anthopic's. 50+ year old global franchise with physical supply chain partnerships vs an upstart SAAS company?

Your instincts are good here. Whatever complexity Pizza Hut has it comes from being the weakest of the Yum! Brands siblings — KFC carries the international profit, Taco Bell owns domestic. Pizza Hut is slow growth, perpetual restructuring, and a weird inherited obligation to always serve Pepsi.

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

#309

Post by d1sxeyes » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 5:39 PM UTC

mike_hearn wrote: post #258

d1sxeyes wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But opportunity cost is not actual cost. “If everyone just kept paying but used our service less we would be more profitable” is true, but not in any meaningful way. Are Anthropic currently unable to sell subscriptions because they don’t have capacity?

The opportunity cost isn't selling subscriptions, the cost is the gap between what they could sell the GPU time for via their API vs what they're selling it for in a flat rate subscription. If you assume API demand is unlimited and GPU supply is fixed, then the opportunity cost is the 'real' loss of revenue that comes from redirecting supply away from customers willing to pay more to customers willing to pay less.

> If you assume API demand is unlimited

Doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Not everyone on a subscription plan would convert to a 200USD/mo API consumer.

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

#310

Post by crazygringo » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 5:44 PM UTC

fulafel wrote: post #289

crazygringo wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

OK, I see what you're saying, thanks for clarifying.

But headlines are short. This is so common even in mainstream news, I can't really complain about it. Especially when the full claim with "up to" is printed in the very first paragraph.

And the entire point of the article is not about which users max out their subscriptions. It's about conflating retail prices with actual costs.

So maybe the headline would be more accurate with "up to" in it, but the article itself is totally fine, and does not hinge on that distinction. The article is certainly not about a strawman.