A lot of AI haters like Ed Zitron and their readers have refused to update on this. I don't know if any of them have yet, but it'll take a year or two for the idea to fully filter out of their podcasts anyway.
1. Their figures have been pretty dodgy or excluded training costs so why is it trustworthy this time?
2. API inference charged at a profitable level rather than heavily subsidised subscriptions means everyone tightens up their usage + governance Which we very much saw with the rise of openrouter et al.
Personally I think there's a lot of the bait and switch of 2 when people talk about profitability of the 10-20% of API usage for Anthropic while also wanting to lump in subsidised chat users as if they're profitable too.
I think we know if it was this clear cut then the behaviours of companies would be wildly different and more consistent with profitability.
It's not actually clear that subscription users are unprofitable as a group (and the group level is the only important one).
We do know the companies are not currently profitable, because they're open and intentional about that, but that tells us nothing about their margins without infrastructure buildout and investment in training.
> It's not actually clear that subscription users are unprofitable as a group (and the group level is the only important one).
[Open AI losing money on subscription users](https://fortune.com/2025/01/07/sam-altman-openai-chatgpt-pro...)
If anthropic were making money on subscriptions they wouldn’t be pushing people onto API + enterprise packages.
> We do know the companies are not currently profitable, because they're open and intentional about that
Why do they keep engaging in stunts like excluding infra costs then?
You are picking choosing to ignore evidence and actions when it suits you and then saying “oh we can’t possibly know” when we do absolutely know the problems of capital and debt raising on infrastructure problems (which are mostly not the Big Frontier labs either) there’s hard arithmetic for what’s needed to make these projects profitable and right now all the inputs are getting more expensive between chips and capital.