I agree with you on substance, but this "thousands of dollars in inference" figure is overstated. The margins on inference in the API pricing by Anthropic are absurd. We know from the pricing of third-party inference providers of similarly-capable open models that inference is cheap. The "thousands of dollars" is an exaggeration using the API pricing markup and assuming all subscribers would be using 100% of their limits all the time.

Surely, they're not making up for the costs of training and R&D and may be losing money on the hardcore users, but rest assured they are not losing thousands of dollars for each customer on average.