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points by adwn 1 day ago | 0 comments

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.

[–] NiloCK 19 hours ago

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.

[–] stavros 22 hours ago

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

[–] adwn 21 hours ago

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.

[–] brookst 18 hours ago

As long as price elasticity is zero.

[–] stavros 21 hours ago

Ahh, sorry, my bad.