They had pretty drastic price cuts on Opus 4.5. It's possible they're now selling inference at a loss to gain market share, or at least that their margins are much lower. Dario claims that all their previous models were profitable (even after accounting for research costs), but it's unclear that there's a path to keeping their previous margins and expanding revenue as fast or faster than their costs (each model has been substantially more expensive than the previous model).

It wouldn't surprise me if they found ways to reduce the cost of serving Opus 4.5. All of the model vendors have been consistently finding new optimizations over the last few years.

I sure hope serving Opus 4.5 at the current cost is sustainable. It’s the first model I can actually use for serious work.