An extremely hypothetical experiment but what if this is some sort of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) and in our timeline, we have accepted it with AI.
Deepseek can do MAD on Anthropic and release open weights model (which means that they might not earn the most or basically burn millions/billions to then give us all essentially the same thing and we would all be on equal footing, oh they also released their inference engine right now.)
This might explain why the stock market got into an bubble and is fearing itself right now.
Mutually Assured Commoditization. (Credit where it's due I pasted my comment to Chatgpt and it gave me this term ironically and it seems to fit well to the comment that I am writing, I might write a blog about it someday.)
Where it falls apart is when you get companies that take open models, rent compute and sell tokens at a profit, without heavy investment into research or training. They spend way less, and if they can keep distilling the frontier models, they can produce reasonable products without the massive losses of subscription plans. In your example, DeepSeek et al aren't nearly so vulnerable. There's nothing mutually assured.
It is much more of a classic race to the bottom. Every new frontier model shifts the goal posts a bit, but eventually the house of cards will crumble - or at least, that's what the market seems to be thinking will happen.
They are simply less profitable than API pricing. They are on par with what sellers of open model tokens sell for.
Are you trying to say "the Anthropic API surely cannot be highly marked up! Therefore subscriptions surely are selling at a loss!"? If not, I'm not sure how your comment is particularly relevant to the discussion?
And once their models start to accelerate their progress, which may already be happening, this would further solidify their lead.
Infact they’re going to end up in price competition unless they field an army of ‘FDE’ who go to every large firm and reorganise the operations around their models and displace labour.
Anthropic can’t raise their prices without loosing market share of Claude code