Models, however, are completely interchangeable on demand. That’s why companies are building these realtime internal marketplaces to route tokens to different models. Anthropic may win the occasional “bleeding edge” use case but the money is in the day to day use cases that get routed to the cheap-but-works options. There’s zero cost to having all the forklift sizes at your disposal and only using the size needed when it’s truly needed.
Anthropic is trying to sell the biggest baddest forklift in a world where companies can swap out cheaper ones easily and on demand. Hence why Anthropic doesn’t appear to have a viable business model in its current form.