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To provide inference, Anthropic and OpenAI need to also constantly spend resources on training new models.

If either one of them stops doing that, customers will stop using them, because other models will become better.

In other words, there is no point in talking about inference cost in isolation.

OpenAI leaked financial data (2025) suggests this - it has $5.7 billion for marketing which 44% of revenue. It’s hard to explain where these billions go other than into subsidised subscription plans and a free tier.

> Inference is cheap;

When they outsource training to China they will be so profitable!

Because using chinese models on OpenRouter is way more expensive than the equivalent codex sub, unless you use something clearly inferior like deepseek flash.