There is a strong suspicion, especially of people who are skeptical of AI, that the actual price is being severely subsidized. The sense is that it’s an extreme version of growth before revenue. It is questionable if the true cost of training and inference make any of this worthwhile once Anthropic/OpenAI need to stand on their own and make money.

Imagine you open a cookie shop and you are VC funded, so you charge 5¢ for a cookie to attract people.

- Your real cost is $20/cookie. $15 for the fancy retail packaging and presentation, $5 for baking each cookie.

- You get lots of attention, strong profits and go public.

- VC funding is gone so, now instead of charging 5¢, you now need to charge $25 in order to not be in the red.

One of the reasons people think this is the shenanigans that Anthropic is currently playing, quietly tweaking the behavior of Claude Code and whatnot without really telling people. You can see lots of comments online about Claude Code randomly feeling dumber before Anthropic engineers admit they are messing with it.

Imagine you are on the $200/month Max plan. If the sustainable cost of this is several orders of magnitude higher, would enough current users pay something like $3,000/month for what we currently have?