They almost certainly already make a fuckload more money off API pricing than they do subscriptions, even if there might be more total subscription users. So offering subscriptions even at some loss is probably going to continue. Honestly, I'd be surprised if they even lost money on most subs; there are definitely Token Whales out there who mess up all the accounting up, though.

Realistically I think Anthropic just has insane demand but finite capacity to run models, and Fable will just make them more money if they dedicate it to API pricing. I suspect the goal here is something like: get individual engineers/PMs on their personal plans to taste Fable and then go to their meetings and say "Yes doubling the price of every single input/output token is a good idea, boss".

But I don't want to be the developer who goes and says we must pay all this money for these tokens. I don't know who wants to be that developer.