It's a big leap to go from "some users may be using large quantities of tokens" to "the labs are burning money on subs in an attempt to kill the competition."

Lots of businesses have subscription programs in which a small number of users are money losers, but which in aggregate make money.

It's not even obvious that the labs are losing a lot of money on even a minority of users; the rate use caps are fairly aggressive for Anthropic, and a cursory analysis of likely actual cost of serving tokens shows they are high margin products at the API level and unlikely to be unprofitable within the usage constraints provided to subscribers.

I do think subscription models make commercial sense because users want predictable costs, and it's a club good in which marginal token cost is zero which helps consolidate their customers' purchasing volume to one provider. But that's a different claim than them serving it unprofitably to kill competition.

Also, they (Anthropic) are transitioning many of their enterprise customers to API consumption billing anyway.

> Basically the prime bet that they made (that one needs extremely expensive hardware to have useful AI) has already failed.

I thought the prime bet was that the winning lab who reaches takeoff through recursive self improvement will make a galactic superintelligence. Not saying I believe this but the people running the labs do. Under this scenario if you are a few months behind at the pivotal time you might as well not exist at all.

> We understood (and knew for a long time) that the large AI labs are not monetarily profiting from subscription users that make heavy use of their subscription.

I dont think this is "understood" or "known" to anyone except Ed Zitron. Subscription plans like Claude Code also have rolling usage limits, it could be profitable. Inference is very cheap and unless you're using OpenClaw no one is actually maxing out the usage window at all times. I'm sure in aggregate the subs are not money furnaces.

> We understood (and knew for a long time) that the large AI labs are not monetarily profiting from subscription users that make heavy use of their subscription.

"profit" is a weird concept in the software business. it might be true that there is an opportunity cost to these users, either because they displace other potential users by using up capacity, or because they would be willing to pay more if forced. but I don't believe that anyone is losing money on inference costs on any of their plans.

> At some point they have to price their product fairly

they are competing in a market. if most of their costs were inference then this would be a good thing, because everyone would have roughly the same prices, so as long as they had the best model they would win. in fact model development costs eclipse the cost of inference, and is something that non frontier labs get for much cheaper by distilling from the frontier companies.

> They will have to compete on merit alone, and that is much less profitable.

that's not really true. google won search on merit alone, and were massively successful as a result. the trick is that everyone from the poorest shmuck to the richest businessman uses google, so they win through scale. in ai, google and openai are making a bet that they can do the same thing. there's only really room for one winner at this game, even two is stretching it, so anthropic has to win by being the smartest model that only high end businesses use. that's a very risky bet.

If you were right Anthropic's ARR would be going down but it's not. They just surpassed $30B up from $14B two months ago.

>Basically the prime bet that they made (that one needs extremely expensive hardware to have useful AI) has already failed.

Honestly, I don't think it's that cut and dry. Their bet is that the marginal utility of having a smarter model more than makes up for the cost of the additional high-end hardware.

And honestly, if you look at their frankly insane revenue growth since Opus 4.5 released, they were right.

>The secondary bet that they can lock users into their ecosystem (which requires them to subsidize their harness via unprofitable subscriptions burning their capital) and be able to monetize that later will also fail.

I think we're already past this point, honestly. They lowered usage limits, blocked OpenClaw then tried to remove Claude Code from the $20/mo plan. They have always had low market share for the consumer chatbot market and don't seem to care about catching up to OpenAI there.

> These labs play the game of trying to kill competition in the harness game

Anthropic and Google are arguably playing that game. OpenAI's Codex CLI is open source and entirely optional for use of the GPT Codex models.

What about the data they are accumulating, for non-training purposes? That data isn't of negligible value; the "subscription cost" is really a "harvesting data" opportunity. Don't be naive to that our data is not incredibly valuable.

The thing is, the harness _is_ the model at the end of the day:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down

Are there any situations you would compare this to historically?

To me, the obvious comparison seems to be Docker. Their tooling revolutionized software development and made cgroups and containerization accessible to the masses. Yet they generally seem to have failed to extract payment from users, even with managed service opportunities.

It seems to me that there are substantial obstacles to monetizing a project licensed with even a weaker OSS license like MIT. I think this is especially true for projects that don’t have managed service / “open core” potential.

Any gratis project you rely on runs the risk that it will no longer be provided gratis. That alone is not a strong basis for making decisions.

> I think it is insane that people got into a situation where they had committed to a javascript runtime that had to "figure out how to monetize at some point".

Why? What's the risk? It's open source. Also, speaking of open source, we are happy to commit to open source projects that have no monetization, nor any plans to ever monetize.

I partially agree with you, but I also think that it's good that people can make something they want, that seems to have no monetization path, and have some hope of being bailed out.

It's not great that the search for profit will usually corrupt projects, but the other most common option is that the projects don't exist at all. It's very rare (or it used to be before this year) that someone can do something like this on their own with no compensation. So now at least Bun exists.

It's a bit insane, but the cost of switching to regular NodeJS is low (for all but most bun-specific projects).

All valid points though, I'm pessimistic about Anthropic still actively diverting resources to these side quests when tough times hit (which might be in a week for all we know).

I know people say it is unprofitable but I wonder if there is a way to verify it is truly is. I will not say any details but I worked for a giant company which was barely making money YoY but somehow the bonuses for heads were bigger and bigger given a proxy metric related to profit.

There are way too many ways companies arrange to pay themselves and never be profitable to avoid taxes.

I don't disagree with the notion, but what is up with the dev community championing influencers that work no real jobs and just sell courses where they reread the docs to you at $500 a pop (this gent, $1k a pop)?

Bun is not a "product" at Anthropic though, it's a tool for its developers to build products. IMO as long as it remains that way, the incentives for its developers will remain fairly aligned with the incentives of people who use it outside the company.

A good example is React. Facebook's interest is that React be performant (website performance is correlated with time spent on said website), reliable (also correlated to time spent), quick to build on (features ship faster) and popular (helps new recruits hit the ground running). That's fairly well aligned with what developers outside of Facebook want too.

Sure, since Facebook's server is written in Hack it means we'll never get a truly full-stack React, and instead we'll need third parties for the back-end (Next.js, Tanstack Start, etc). But Facebook building react also means it will always be someone's job to make sure this Framework works well in codebases with millions of modules.

This is all independent of any shitty practices with their other software. And this has been for decades at this point.

> Anthropic acquired Bun for their own benefit, to protect and grow their investment in Claude Code.

I’m unclear about this. What’s the business case? I use Gemini CLI a lot, which runs on Node, and I can’t see anything that would be improved by using a different JS runtime. It’s not something you notice as a user. Node is mature, stable, and perfectly fit for the purpose.

If Anthropic were public and if these decisions were comprehensible to the average investor, an acquisition like this ought to cause the stock to plummet. Luckily for the people involved, there are no constraints like that in the current market.

1 9 of uptime later

You dropped this: </sarcasm>

I think you have some nostalgia about Github's stability before the acquisition.

you can own your upstream supply chain while simultaneously being less responsive to user pain points

Own your supply chain. Reduces risk.

Anthropic bought actual engineers to undo the slop their vibe-coders produce with reckless abandon: https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2026497606575398987

However, these engineers, too, now start to vibe-code with reckless abandon https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2048434628248359284 and https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2049780223311548729

I'm not the parent poster which is why I still stick to looking at the people...

If you start seeing the people that created bun leaving Anthropic, then I'd probably start to worry. And I haven't seen any sign of that yet.

It’s organizations figuring out how to monetize all the way up.