Aren’t the subscriptions extremely subsidized and burning cash for Anthropic and OpenAI? A reasonable explanation is they’re simply abstaining from the war of attrition, especially given cheaper comparable models are breaking the illusion that the “frontier of intelligence” has any kind of per token margin.

This is hotly debated and completely unclear. Let's say Anthropics Opus models cost the same to serve as GLM 5.2. GLM 5.2 is 4.4$/MTok while Opus is 5.6 times more expensive. Assume that GLM 5.2 is served at essentially zero margin. Then Anthropic has >80% margin on API pricing. So even if an average person with a subscription pays only 20% of the API price of their usage, Anthropic makes money on subscriptions.

And the real numbers could be better for Anthropic. It's feasible Opus models are actually cheaper to serve than GLM 5.2 because Anthropic have optimized the hell out of inference.

they're subsidized if you max them out, i'd imagine most users are paying $20 for maybe $2-5 of tokens.

anthropic probably has more customers that use more of their sub, but for open ai where a lot of their subs are consumers through chatgpt.com, they have a lot of free money to work with there

Makes sense, subsidizing tokens doesn’t seem like a great strategy for a public company.

Possibly, but aren't the tech giants positioned to win a war of attrition? Then again, they're more likely to sit on that cash and wait for the opportune time to buy a frontier lab.

The subsidizing thing is repeated over and over without proof. Personally, I doubt they're actually subsidized.