Agent teams change everything. I can easily burn through 1m tokens in 15 minutes. There's no way the $200 price will hold once everyone is doing it.

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.

The first clue that an article is likely bullshit is that it’s posted on Forbes. Forbes is now basically a contributor blog wearing the tattered remains of a designer suit.

off-topic, but, please stop hosting websites behind cloudflare, just nginx is enough, cloudflare is cancer.

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.

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.

And on top of that, Anthropic does not run their own compute clusters do they? They probably get completely ripped by whoever is renting them the processors.

$200 worth of actual computation is an awful lot of computation.

What this doesn't mention is the "cost" to the public: the inevitable bailouts after it all comes crashing down again, the massive subsidies that Datacenters get from tax payers, the fresh water they consume, the electricity price hikes for everyone else, the noise, air and water pollution and the massive health impact on the surrounding population of every datacenter. The jobs that it destroys and the innocent people it kills through use of the technology in military targeting and autonomous weapons usage.

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Tl;dr, their guesstimate:

> Anthropic is looking at approximately $500 in real compute cost for the heaviest users.