My guess is my usage is atypically high, but even if the average equivalent is $100-250/day you can get a sense of how much Anthropic is subsidizing subscriptions as a loss leader to lock market share. IMHO this is a doomed strategy since open models will get into a long tail of parity and they’ll ultimately essentially be in the business of commodity compute.
At some point they might decide they have enough demand and inertia from enterprise to reduce the subsidy. But to say “it’s doomed” really misses the fact that it has already been immensely successful.
For me Opus 4.8 was a slow model with a strong habit of talking down to me in an obnoxious way that would not be possible to prompt away. GPT 5.5 is now my main driver for serious work.
That doesn't mean those models are stupid or just pretending. I do think that Fable is the best we can get right now. Nevertheless, I prefer OpenAI models for easier tasks where the primary output is text and explanations, not code.
But Anthropic’s games with Fable and false humility is getting a bit old. And increasingly it seems like Agent Orange is gonna implode rather than team up with someone like Sam Altman to form America’s Third Reich. Particularly post-midterms.
Nonetheless, wish there was a third option on par with them two. Maybe there is I need to investigate.
I also compared them against GLM Coding Plan (cause everyone was positive of the model): https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/z-ai-s-glm-5-2-is-a-great-model... and Anthropic still gives you a bit more tokens despite having some of the presumably most expensive to train and run models.
I suspect they're subsidizing a lot less than people think.
Agreed.
One business is serving great models via the API. I think that one is indeed going to become commoditized. The other is making consumer / developer focused products like Chat GPT, Claude Code or Codex.
Anthropic is leaning hard into making Claude Code work with things like enterprise compliance policies. I wouldn't be surprised if at least one of these companies basically ends up as a SaaS fronting many different models for different capability points, some of which are open.