The real question is what could they have done with open weight models on the same compute they’re renting. If the answer is “basically the same” then this flips the entire conversion back to what is Anthropic’s moat here.

This is the nature of managed anything. AI efficiency will improve but essentially this is what automation does.

So it exceeds employee pay if you discount the vast majority of employee pay.

Would Anthropic themselves be paying this much if it was actually billed? It is not obvious.

Is Anthropic a good sample for AI use? Surely not, since they have special needs (dogfooding) and a vested interest in proving that AI usage is the future.

Can we compare their results pre and post AI usage? Close to definitionally impossible.

Are their employees good examples of AI-assisted engineers? Not really, as (one would hope) they're more well versed on the topic than an average eng.