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.

I work in the video AI world.

We gave up on subscriptions long ago. They're rinky dink and get you a paltry amount of utilization before they run out.

The per day per seat costs can exceed $1000. This is already normal for studios, and it's already producing positive ROI.

There's simply no way to price video any other way than by usage. I suspect the same will come for everything.