Remix.run Logo
simonw 14 hours ago

I think lying about their numbers now is risky if they're planning on an IPO this year - the real figures will come out in the S-1, and investors don't like untrustworthy companies.

Update: this inspired a note on my blog: https://simonwillison.net/2026/May/29/anthropic/

SpicyLemonZest 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> (Also in Axios today is an anonymously sourced note that "An AI consultant tells Axios one of their clients recently spent half a billion dollars in a single month after failing to put usage limits on Claude licenses for employees" - times that by 12 and you get an extra $6 billion in annualized run-rate!)

This one client, then, is 12.8% of Anthropic's run-rate revenue? That does not exactly fill me with confidence that it's a meaningful number. Doesn't this suggest run-rate revenue will fall off a cliff if Anthropic customers start applying cost controls?

vmbm 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah, I think it is pretty obvious at this point that users have gotten over their skis a bit on the fixed rate plans. I suspect a lot of folks were playing around with agentic workflows on a $10-200/month plan and then started implementing them at their companies under enterprise accounts not realizing that API based billing would result in easily 10-100x the costs. Running hundreds of agents 24/7 is all fun and games when you can do it for beer money. Not as fun when it is super yacht money.

As an anecdote, Github is changing their copilot plan to usage based billing next month. They released a tool that allows their users to estimate what their bills will look like under the new plan based on their past usage. There are some screenshots online from users showing their plans will go from $40/month to $3-5k/month. I imagine this is happening everywhere. These tools absolutely can do more than they were capable of just six months ago. But if the true costs are as high as it appears, folks are going to be much more judicious with how they use them moving forward.

256BitChris 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

GitHub doesn't have access to its own models so it has to pay the prices of the model it uses.

People confuse price with cost all the time. The price of Opus has dropped from $75/1M output tokens to $25. That's the price. The cost is much lower and according to Dario, about a month ago, they had about a 73% margin.

I don't understand how anyone would use GitHub copilot...it's basically running a custom harness and using close to API pricing for Opus. This is why Microsoft is cooked in this game.

But yeah, I don't understand why people switch from subscription to API prices for Claude. They're way higher, but again that's price and not necessarily the cost to Anthropic to serve.

riffraff 9 hours ago | parent [-]

> according to Dario, about a month ago, they had about a 73% margin.

Do you have a source for this? I missed this and it does not match my impression.

SatvikBeri 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Not OP, but Dario said on Dwarkesh's podcast 3 months ago that their gross margins are "significantly higher than 50%"

Incipient 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm really annoyed at github for only allowing export of a single month of usage.

There were a lot of people (here included) that were absolutely abusing github - getting Opus to generate its own subagents for days on end with a single premium request. If THAT'S $3k/mo, I'm honestly not worried.

I was just asking sonnet, 5.4, opus, in single agent session to fix a problem for 20 minutes...if THAT'S $3k/mo, then AI is truly cooked.

simonw 10 hours ago | parent [-]

I went digging and found this one - https://www.reddit.com/r/GithubCopilot/comments/1tbfkui/ill_... - billing $39.00, usage-based billing $5,851.77

simonw 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Maybe? We don't know if that Axios anonymous note is accurate, and we don't know how Anthropic are actually calculating annualized run-rate - I'm just guessing that they might be taking that monthly number x12.

If they really did count that one customer as $6B it means they've gone from $30B in April to a mere $41B in May.

3ff 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

lmao got him.

im really not sure why he keeps parroting on about this. its all irrelevant frankly. companies play games. non-gaap revenue recognition, adjusted operating income.... boo-ya.

wait for the somewhat official doc's to come out, then its worth talking about.

shimman 11 hours ago | parent [-]

Yeah, until they release their S1 all numbers are highly suspect.

14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]
[deleted]