Comment Re:They be dead. (Score 2) 19
Funny thing is Claude is pretty much the only AI I regularly use for coding
Me too, but that doesn't address the OP's concern. I use Claude Code almost daily for multiple side projects. I have the $200 per month max plan, but my ccusage metrics show I use about $1500 in API-equivalent tokens per month. And that is on top of my regular Claude web chat usage, and I run over a hundred deep research sessions per month too. I estimate that is about $500-1000 in additional API-equivalent tokens per month. API use may be profitable for Anthropic, so that doesn't mean they are losing $2000 per month on my subscription, but I bet their losses on my account are at least $1-1.5k monthly. I realize I am an extreme example, but any huge influx of users to any of these providers does mean an increase in their burn rate (not an increase to profits).
That said, none of these losses will matter in the long run. All that matters is whether they can start replacing human labor. $1 trillion in AI spending is nothing if AI can do 10% of white collar work. That would represent $2-3 trillion in value every year. The fact we have only seen about $1.2 trillion in AI investment over the past 5 years shows investors aren't that confident AI can replace that many jobs. If they were, they would be investing 5 times as much.
I am a pretty big proponent of Anthropic's models, and I lead a $80+ billion dollar company's AI platform strategy pod within our corporate strategy department. Winning over someone like me has a significant impact on Anthropic's ability to win more lucrative corporate deals. My company can afford to spend $100 per day on a continuously running agent as long as it can replace a human employee ($35k/yr vs $50-$150k/yr).