Anthropic admitted last year to losing money on inference, it had negative margins. The margins have improved and are now positive but there’s still a significant cost. If plans aren’t being subsidized it would mean that the margin on inference is ~99%+ which would mean OpenAI and Anthropic should be wildly profitable but both are still losing money. So, it’s mathematically impossible that they’re not subsidizing plans.
The most widely accepted estimates (though I disagree with them) are that Anthropic’s margin on API inference is ~70% from which people extrapolate what their token usage would cost via the API and compare that to what their plan costs.
re: increasing usage with resets, it’s because they’ve overblown usage and need to show that usage is growing ahead of the IPO. They’re increasing usage on fixed price plans without increasing the cost, the only plausible explanation is they have unused capacity. If they were capacity constrained then the last thing they would do is give away more usage for free.
The last I saw with Claude was that the plans are subsidized somewhere around 10x. The usage of Claude and similar products (for people not paying the actual API token costs) would be lot less if they were paying 10x more per account/seat.
A lot of people are using Claude and ChatGPT for all kinds of minor things at work, and they probably wouldn't be if they were paying the true cost of the product. And this is all the while their work product is suffering because AI is not a great fit for a lot of use cases.
The most widely accepted estimates (though I disagree with them) are that Anthropic’s margin on API inference is ~70% from which people extrapolate what their token usage would cost via the API and compare that to what their plan costs.
https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/anthropic-3q26-profit-...
(edit: better link https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/anthropic-growth-and-b...)
re: increasing usage with resets, it’s because they’ve overblown usage and need to show that usage is growing ahead of the IPO. They’re increasing usage on fixed price plans without increasing the cost, the only plausible explanation is they have unused capacity. If they were capacity constrained then the last thing they would do is give away more usage for free.