dan@dan@upvote.au
edited

Replying to @⁨eicker@lemmy.world⁩

Anthropic made a smart business decision to mostly focus on enterprise customers rather than regular consumers. Only around 10% of their revenue comes from their heavily subsidized subscription plans. The remaining 90%ish comes from API and enterprise usage billed at per-token rates, which is something that’s actually profitable for them. They have a decent margin on token rates. It’s R&D, hardware, and subscriptions that are putting them in the red at the moment.

I suspect they’ll discontinue subscriptions some time after their IPO. Even though subscriptions are only responsible for 10% of revenue, they consume 42% of their inference compute power (www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/10/…/5301470)

In comparison, around 70% of OpenAI’s revenue comes from subscriptions. Without subsidized subscriptions, they’d lose most of their customers.

theregisterAnthropic Claude subscription plan provides more value than OpenAI's, study saysResearch firm not exactly thrilled by House of Altman's subscription changes
CovfefeKills@CovfefeKills@lemmy.world

Replying to @⁨dan@upvote.au⁩

The subscriptions generate lots of usage data and enabled experiments on human subjects at scale. If you are paying for API they cannot really compare two similar users and give them wildy different results because those are business trying to do their job but a random ass subscriber that does not read the ToS is fair game for experimentation.

en