By the way, one of the charts in the article shows that Opus 4.6 is 10x costlier than Kimi K2.5.

I thought there was no moat in AI? Even being 10x costlier, Anthropic still doesn't have enough compute to meet demand.

Those "AI has no moat" opinions are going to be so wrong so soon.

Is it fair to say the Open Router models aren't subsidized though? They make the case that companies on there are running a business, but there are free models, and companies with huge AI budgets that want to gather training data and show usage.

Why does Claude charge 10x for API, compared to subscriptions? They're not a monopoly, so one would expect margins to be thinner.

The comparison with Qwen/Kimi by "comparable architecture size" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Parameter count doesn't tell you much when the models aren't in the same league quality-wise.

I wonder if a better proxy would be comparing by capability level rather than size. The cost to go from "good" to "frontier" is probably exponential, not linear - so estimating Anthropic's real cost from what it takes to serve Qwen 397B seems off.

I have very naive question:

People in comments have assumption that Atropic 10 times bigger than chinese models so calc cost is 10 times more.

But from perspective of Big O notation only a few algorithms gives you O(N). Majority high optimized things provide O(N*Log(N))

So what is big O for any open model for single request?

Did anthropic do the oldest SaaS sales trick in the 2010s SaaS playbooks ;)

Nobody gets RSI typing “iterate until tests pass”

tldr: the author argues it is closer to costing 500 USD per month IF a user hits their weekly rate limits every week.

Which is probably a lot more correct than other claims. However it's also true that anybody who has to use the API might pay that much, creating a real cost per token moat for Anthropics Claude code vs other models as long as they are so far ahead in terms of productivity.

This article is hilariously flawed, and it takes all of 5 seconds of research to see why.

Alibaba is the primary comparison point made by the author, but it's a completely unsuitable comparison. Alibab is closer to AWS then Anthropic in terms of their business model. They make money selling infrastructure, not on inference. It's entirely possible they see inference as a loss leader, and are willing to offer it at cost or below to drive people into the platform.

We also have absolutely no idea if it's anywhere near comparable to Opus 4.6. The author is guessing.

So the articles primary argument is based on a comparison to a company who has an entirely different business model running a model that the author is just making wild guesses about.

Well, IDK, I have used CC with API billing pretty extensively and managed to spend ~$1000 in one month more or less. Moved to a Max 20x subscription and using it a bit less (I'm still scared) but not THAT less and I'm around 10% weekly usage. I'm not counting the tokens, though.