I don't understand why simonw's comment is dead, because he mentions a real counterpoint to the video: API token prices are NOT the raw costs for any provider. I'd even say that inference needs to have quite a juicy margin to cover for all the other costs. It would make no business sense to sell API tokens at a loss: nobody knows yet how to price intelligence, so why start in the red when it's the only source of revenue?

It's a different story for subscriptions. According to my rough computation (N=1), a Claude Max 20x at $200 gives you access to around $8k worth of tokens per month – but they don't cost Anthropic $8k! – and there I think they'd make a loss on every token maxxer which may or may not be compensated by subscriptions that are not used. But that's not the end of the subscription story.

Once you are "enterprise" you pay for token use and there is no way around it: Anthropic does it and so does OpenAI. The subscription is the gateway drug to token maxxing. When people are hired in an Enterprise job, they'll come with their habit of using AI for all and any task.

All to say that: yes, AI labs are bleeding money but on everything else – datacenters, training models, talent,...