It's also unclear wherever the subscription price is the real cost, or the API.

I suspect it's closer to the sub price and anthropic is just milking their API users, but that's something you'd only know from the inside

Generally speaking, B2B prices are rarely supply-and-demand priced in the usual sense.

YC has advised startups in the past that it's easier to sell a single $100k customer than 100 $1k customers.

It would also be relatively surprising to learn that i.e. the Chinese providers are OOMs better at inference than OAI/Anthropic (like their prices would imply if they were in a perfectly competitive market).

Costs also have to include the amortized training costs.

But the API price is likely simply regular supply and demand, charging as much as the market will pay. Corporations are dropping insane amounts because it's still peanuts for many industries. Software has just been ridiculously cheap before AI. So high prices are still low for companies if it eases some bottlenecks.

Open weight SOTA models are not greatly cheaper than Anthropic and providers don't have to cover training capex.