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.

> 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.

>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.

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?

> 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.

I think it's the other way around? Sparse use of GPU farms should be the more expensive thing. Full saturation means that we can exploit batching effects throughout.

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

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.

> 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

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

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.

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).

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

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.

What did he say?

Claude Code Max obviously doesn't cost 10x more than Kimi. The article even confirms that you can get $5k worth of computer for $200 with Claude Code Max.

So no, Claude would not be getting NEARLY as much usage as it's currently getting if it weren't for the $100/$200 monthly subscription. You're comparing Kimi to the price that most people aren't paying.

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

Recursive self improvement and Repetitive Strain Injury being the same initialism is really funny to me

Honest questions: have you never heard of a hyperbole before and are you on the spectum?

Ed Zitron made that claim (in particular here: [1]). In the same article he admits he not a programmer, and had to ask someone else to try out Claude Code and ccusage for him. He doesn't have any understanding of how LLMs or caching works. But he's prominent because he's received leaked financial details for Anthropic and OpenAI, eg [2]

[1] https://www.wheresyoured.at/anthropic-is-bleeding-out/ [2] https://www.wheresyoured.at/costs/

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.

I mean, the very first paragraph of TFA is describing who is under that impression. Literally the first sentence:

> My LinkedIn and Twitter feeds are full of screenshots from the recent Forbes article on Cursor claiming that Anthropic's $200/month Claude Code Max plan can consume $5,000 in compute.

Twitter.

Yes, you could turn it around to say that using Anthropic models in Cursor, Copilot, Junie, etc. is 'subsidising' Claude Code users.

$5 = $5

but $5 that I amortize over 7 years might end up being $1.7 maybe if I don't rapidly combust (supply chain risk)

I wonder how they are defining a power user. How many tokens, what could be the size the code base?

No, to use $5k in Cursor you have to pay $5k.

> Aren't they losing money on the retail API pricing, too?

No, they aren't, and probably neither is anyone else offering API pricing. And Anthropic's API margins may be higher than anyone else.

For example, DeepSeek released numbers showing that R1 was served at approximately "a cost profit margin of 545%" (meaning 82% of revenue is profit), see my comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46663852