posted in Technology
Other AI Companies Should Be Very Afraid of What Just Happened to Character.AI, According to Its Own Bankruptcy Documents: Be afraid.
futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-companies-afraid-characterai-bankrupcy
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
Those enterprise customers are companies like this very one, who then have to heavily discount their rates or nobody wants it, (and as we see here, even then) so that’s not a solution for anthropic.
Replying to @porous_grey_matter@lemmy.ml
I don’t have data to back this up but I’d say thay the majority of their customers aren’t also selling AI services themselves. It’s customers that use AI for their business processes, software development, etc.
Nobody has extremely good data about this because it’s in their interest to make that as opaque as possible, but the reporting I’ve seen suggests that it is, if not the majority at least an extremely large fraction, and even where it’s used for in-house software development that is largely bankrolled by VC hoping to gain a competitive advantage with AI. It doesn’t really appear that the API pricing offers better cost/productivity than just hiring junior devs (lol).