Do you know for sure if the pro / max plans are unprofitable at full usage? I did a brief back of the envelope calculation for minimax m2.5 comparing its api pricing to my token usage on a full quota max 20x Claude plan, it worked out around 260 ish which assuming some margin would put the Claude max around breakeven.

It doesn't matter if they are unprofitable at full usage, as long as there are enough users (like me!) who barely ever max out but still pay the $100/month. The people who love Claude Code enough to max out the 20x plan every day, that's probably the best influencer marketing campaign you could ever buy anyways.

Anthropic previously shared that they make ~60% margin on API access. So they're losing money on plan whales.