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Comment by square_usual | Hacker News Reader

There is no evidence that per-token inference prices (which is what Uber is setting a cap on) is subsidized.

The evidence that per-token inference _is_ subsidized is (a) competition is a bloodbath (b) these companies are raising more money than any company has raised ever (c) a maybe-profitable quarter is maybe-coming for Anthropic after maybe-signing a compute deal with SpaceX that legitimizes both companies.

The evidence that per-token inference _is not_ subsidized is... a quote or two from Dario and Sam Altman

You think Fireworks is subsidizing token spend? And Friendli? And Baseten?

Every single provider on Openrouter is offering their service at a loss?

What?

Yes I believe Anthropic is selling its tokens to Fireworks and Openrouter at a loss.

AI companies have more expenses than inference.

yes, and theres no evidence that they arent (or can't) use profitable inference to subsidise those other expenses. Some companies will keep spending massively to train better models, and some other companies will not, and offer good api prices. Which will end up being used? That depends on whether the spending turns into better value models

> theres no evidence that they arent (or can't) use profitable inference to subsidise those other expenses

as far as we know there's no evidence that they can produce any profits at all

Is there any evidence that it's not?

Yes; they ban various uses of their subscriptions but say you can do whatever if you’re paying for the API without limits

That's not evidence. Very likely though, but the only evidence we get one way or another is when they IPO.

This story isn't about those subscriptions - enterprise customers like Uber are paying the full API prices.

That's just market segmentation and them trying to maximize revenue it doesen't really say anything about their costs.

The fact that Anthropic models are offered at the same API pricing by not just themselves but AWS, Azure and Vertex despite Anthropic taking a major slice on licensing along with the cost an open weight 1T parameter model like K2.6 costs to run on any third-party provider, make it unlikely that API inference cost are subsidized by the labs.

Openrouter? i.e. Even excluding Deep Seek inference for very large open models is way cheaper. Maybe these providers are not very profitable but its highly unlikely that they are losing $4 for every $1 they make since selling inference is their only product...

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