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Comment by bodge5000 | Hacker News Reader

> A huge number of people are convinced that OpenAI and Anthropic are selling inference tokens at a loss despite the fact that there's no evidence this is true

Theres quite a lot of evidence, no proof I'd agree, but then there's no absolute proof I'm aware to the contrary either, so I don't know where you're getting this from.

The two pieces of evidence I'm aware of is that 1) Anthropic doesn't want their subsidised plans being used outside of CC, which would imply that the money their making off it isn't enough, and 2) last time I checked, API spending is capped at $5000 a month

Like I say, neither of these are proof, you can come up with reasonable arguments against them, but once again the same could be said for evidence on the contrary

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> which would imply that the money their making off it isn't enough

I don't think this logically follows. An unlimited buffet doesn't let you resell all of the food out the backdoor. At some level of usage any fixed price plan becomes unprofitable.

I agree the 5k cap is interesting as evidence although as you said I suspect there are other reasons for it.

As for evidence against it: The Information reported that OpenAI and Anthropic are 30%+ gross margins for the last few years. Sam Altman and Dario have both claimed inference is profitable in various scattered interviews. Other experts seem to generally agree too. A quick search found a tweet from former PyTorch team member Horace He: https://x.com/typedfemale/status/1961197802169798775 and a response to it in agreement from Anish Tondwalkar former researcher at OpenAI and Google Brain.

I get the other things, but believing Altmans's words is not high on the list of things to be considered evidence.

Nor Dario's frankly, I was supposed to be out of a job by now according to his predictions over the years. I can totally buy that inference is possible, but not because they said it is

> 1) Anthropic doesn't want their subsidised plans being used outside of CC, which would imply that the money their making off it isn't enough, a

Claude Code use-cases also differ somewhat from general API use, where the former is engineered for high cache utilization. We know from overall API costs (both Anthropic and OpenRouter) that cached inputs cost an order of magnitude less than uncached inputs, but OpenCode/pi/OpenClaw don't necessarily have the same kind of aggressive cache-use optimizations.

Vertically integrated stacks might also be able to have a first layer of globally shared KV cache for the system prompts, if the preamble is not user specific and changes rarely.

> 2) last time I checked, API spending is capped at $5000 a month

Per https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/api/rate-limits, that seems to only be true for general credit-funded accounts. If you contact Anthropic's sales team and set up monthly invoicing, there's evidently no fixed spending limit.

> If you contact Anthropic's sales team and set up monthly invoicing, there's evidently no fixed spending limit.

I don't think thats a smoking gun either, for a start we don't know if the pricing would be the same as you'd get credit-funded, but also a monthly invoicing agreement is closer to their fixed plans (you spend X per month, regardless of usage) than pay-per-use API credits, which may not be profitable.

Not that thats a smoking gun either, I can see it both ways

But a simple assumption that Anthropic runs a normal large MoE LLM (which it almost certainly does) suggests that the actual price of running it (mostly energy) is pretty small.

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