The headline claim assumes that Anthropic is operating the API at cost, and losing massive amounts of money on subscriptions
My own impression based on inference prices for deepseek or other "open" models in the 1T range (including providers like DeepInfra with no obvious reason to subsidize their API costs) is that Anthropic is offering subscriptions at cost (on average, power users are a bit more expensive, casual users more profitable) and making good profit on API pricing. Profit that then is spent on model training, marketing and development, for an overall negative bottom line
Edit: in case it gets changed: current headine is "Anthropic/OpenAI may be spending more than $1000 for every $100 you pay them"
This is absolutely absurd. Claude code is of course using the cache (and this can be verified by looking at the traffic). It would be an incredibly stupid design to resend the whole input without a cache for every input, every tool use, etc..
My own impression based on inference prices for deepseek or other "open" models in the 1T range (including providers like DeepInfra with no obvious reason to subsidize their API costs) is that Anthropic is offering subscriptions at cost (on average, power users are a bit more expensive, casual users more profitable) and making good profit on API pricing. Profit that then is spent on model training, marketing and development, for an overall negative bottom line
Edit: in case it gets changed: current headine is "Anthropic/OpenAI may be spending more than $1000 for every $100 you pay them"