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

martinalderson.com

41–50 of 374 posts

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

#42
post #29
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.

Anthropic CEO said 50%+ margins in an interview. I'm guessing 50 - 60% right now.

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

#43
post #37

If Anthropic's compute is fully saturated then the Claude code power users do represent an opportunity cost to Anthropic much closer to $5,000 then $500. Anthropic's models may be similar in parameter size to model's on open router, but none of the others are in the headlines nearly as much (especially recently) so the comparison is extremely flawed. The argument in this article is like comparing the cost of a Rolex…

Opportunity cost is not the same thing as actual cost. They might have made more money if they were capable of selling the API instead of CC, but I would never tell my company to use CC all the time if I didn’t have a personal subscription.

You’re looking through the wrong end of the telescope. An investor is buying opportunity and it is a real cost to them.

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

#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 competitive price.

That being said not all users max out their plan, so it's not like each user costs anthropic 5,000 USD. The hemoragy would be so brutal they would be out of business in months

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

#45
post #39
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also curious if any experts can weigh in on this. I would guess in the 1 trillion to 2 trillion range.

Try 10s of trillions. These days everyone is running 4-bit at inference (the flagship feature of Blackwell+), with the big flagship models running on recently installed Nvidia 72gpu rubin clusters (and equivalent-ish world size for those rented Ironwood TPUs Anthropic also uses). Let's see, Vera Rubin racks come standard with 20 TB (Blackwell NVL72 with 10 TB) of unified memory, and NVFP4 fits 2 parameters per btye..…

China is targeting H20 because that's all they were officially allowed to buy.

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

#46

If Anthropic's compute is fully saturated then the Claude code power users do represent an opportunity cost to Anthropic much closer to $5,000 then $500. Anthropic's models may be similar in parameter size to model's on open router, but none of the others are in the headlines nearly as much (especially recently) so the comparison is extremely flawed. The argument in this article is like comparing the cost of a Rolex…

Don’t give them any ideas, please! I need my 100 USD subscription with generous Opus usage!

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

#47

If Anthropic's compute is fully saturated then the Claude code power users do represent an opportunity cost to Anthropic much closer to $5,000 then $500. Anthropic's models may be similar in parameter size to model's on open router, but none of the others are in the headlines nearly as much (especially recently) so the comparison is extremely flawed. The argument in this article is like comparing the cost of a Rolex…

> The argument in this article is like comparing the cost of a Rolex to a random brand of mechanical watch on gear count

I mean... rolex is overpriced brand whose cost to consumers is mainly just marketting in itself. Its production cost is nowhere close to selling price and looking at gears is fair way of evaluating that

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

#48
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try 10s of trillions. These days everyone is running 4-bit at inference (the flagship feature of Blackwell+), with the big flagship models running on recently installed Nvidia 72gpu rubin clusters (and equivalent-ish world size for those rented Ironwood TPUs Anthropic also uses). Let's see, Vera Rubin racks come standard with 20 TB (Blackwell NVL72 with 10 TB) of unified memory, and NVFP4 fits 2 parameters per btye..…

China is targeting H20 because that's all they were officially allowed to buy.

I generally agree, back of the napkin math shows H20 cluster of 8gpu * 96gb = 768gb = 768B parameters on FP8 (no NVFP4 on Hopper), which lines up pretty nicely with the sizes of recent open source Chinese models.

However, I'd say its relatively well assumed in realpolitik land that Chinese labs managed to acquire plenty of H100/200 clusters and even meaningful numbers of B200 systems semi-illicitly before the regulations and anti-smuggling measures really started to crack down.

This does somewhat beg the question of how nicely the closed source variants, of undisclosed parameter counts, fit within the 1.1tb of H200 or 1.5tb of B200 systems.

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

#49

> 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 performance of current SOTA models. They perform much worse than the current models while also costing much less - exactly what I would expect. Current Qwen models perform as good as Sonnet 3 I think. 2 years later when Chinese models catchup with enough distillation attacks, they would be as good as Sonnet 4.6 and still be profitable.

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

#50

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

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.
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