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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

#51

Post by scuff3d »

This article is hilariously flawed, and it takes all of 5 seconds of research to see why.

Alibaba is the primary comparison point made by the author, but it's a completely unsuitable comparison. Alibab is closer to AWS then Anthropic in terms of their business model. They make money selling infrastructure, not on inference. It's entirely possible they see inference as a loss leader, and are willing to offer it at cost or below to drive people into the platform.

We also have absolutely no idea if it's anywhere near comparable to Opus 4.6. The author is guessing.

So the articles primary argument is based on a comparison to a company who has an entirely different business model running a model that the author is just making wild guesses about.

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

#52

Post by jychang »

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…

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 can select BF16 or Q8 providers on openrouter.

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

#53

Post by YetAnotherNick »

eaglelamp wrote: post #31

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…

You can rent the GPUs and everything needed to run the model. Opportunity cost is not a real cost here.

Only thing that matters is if the users would have paid $5000 if they don't have option to buy subscription. And I highly doubt they would have.

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

#54

Post by lelanthran »

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…

> That being said not all users max out their plan,

These are not cell phone plans which the average joe takes, they are plans purchased with the explicit goal of software development.

I would guess that 99 out of every 100 plans are purchased with the explicit goal of maxing them out.

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

#55

Post by jychang »

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.

> I find it likely Opus is larger.

Unlikely. Amazon Bedrock serves Opus at 120tokens/sec.

If you want to estimate "the actual price to serve Opus", a good rough estimate is to find the price max(Deepseek, Qwen, Kimi, GLM) and multiply it by 2-3. That would be a pretty close guess to actual inference cost for Opus.

It's impossible for Opus to be something like 10x the active params as the chinese models. My guess is something around 50-100b active params, 800-1600b total params. I can be off by a factor of ~2, but I know I am not off by a factor of 10.

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

#56

Post by lelanthran »

weird-eye-issue wrote: post #18
lovecg wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can’t get past all the LLM-isms. Do people really not care about AI-slopifying their writing? It’s like learning about bad kerning, you see it everywhere.

I think you're just hallucinating because this does not come across as an AI article

> I think you're just hallucinating because this does not come across as an AI article

It has enough tells in the correct frequency for me to consider it more than 50% generated.

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

#57

Post by jychang »

johndough wrote: post #34
daemonologist wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if it's larger, OpenRouter has DeepSeek v3.2 (685B/37B active) at $0.26/0.40 and Kimi K2.5 (1T/32B active) at $0.45/2.25 (mentioned in the post).

Opus 4.6 likely has in the order of 100B active parameters. OpenRouter lists the following throughput for Google Vertex: 42 tps for Claude Opus 4.6 https://openrouter.ai/anthropic/claude-opus-4.6 143 tps for GLM 4.7 (32B active parameters) https://openrouter.ai/z-ai/glm-4.7 70 tps for Llama 3.3 70B (dense model) https://openrouter.ai/meta-llama/llama-3.3-70b-instruct For GLM 4.7, that makes 143 * 32B = 4576B paramete…

Yep, you can also get similar analysis from Amazon Bedrock, which serves Opus as well.

I'd say Opus is roughly 2x to 3x the price of the top Chinese models to serve, in reality.

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

#58

Post by simianwords »

jychang wrote: post #55
Bolwin wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I find it likely Opus is larger. Unlikely. Amazon Bedrock serves Opus at 120tokens/sec. If you want to estimate "the actual price to serve Opus", a good rough estimate is to find the price max(Deepseek, Qwen, Kimi, GLM) and multiply it by 2-3. That would be a pretty close guess to actual inference cost for Opus. It's impossible for Opus to be something like 10x the active params as the chinese models. My guess is s…

Are you sure you can use tps as a proxy?

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

#59

Post by rhubarbtree »

lovecg wrote: post #12
z3ugma wrote: post #4

This is such a well-written essay. Every line revealed the answer to the immediate question I had just thought of

I can’t get past all the LLM-isms. Do people really not care about AI-slopifying their writing? It’s like learning about bad kerning, you see it everywhere.

It is certainly very obvious a lot of the time. I wonder if we revisited the automated slop detection problem we’d be more successful now… it feels like there are a lot more tells and models have become more idiosyncratic.

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

#60

Post by simianwords »

scuff3d wrote: post #51

This article is hilariously flawed, and it takes all of 5 seconds of research to see why. Alibaba is the primary comparison point made by the author, but it's a completely unsuitable comparison. Alibab is closer to AWS then Anthropic in terms of their business model. They make money selling infrastructure, not on inference. It's entirely possible they see inference as a loss leader, and are willing to offer it at cos…

What? Aws is a good comparison if you want only infra level costs which is what the post is talking about.
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