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That only applies to subscriptions. Enterprise customers pay API rates and therefore per-token. Being wasteful would directly increase Anthropic's profit, assuming they're not selling them at a loss.

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Overall I find this line of thinking pretty dubious. Competition exists. Yes, model provider X can run up my bill by instructing its model to do busywork. But I can easily swap to providers Y, Z, A, B, C.

I happen to find I'm receiving exceptional value from provider X, so I don't switch.

API customers can swap to alternate providers even more easily than subscription customers.

You meant to write "being frugal", I think.

I meant "being wasteful with tokens", as in, Anthropic makes more profit when Claude Code sends many input tokens and requests many output tokens when billing the customer for the API cost.

Ahh, sorry, my bad.

As long as price elasticity is zero.

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