alt Hacker News> I suspect the API prices are already served at prices with profitable unit economics.
There is absolutely no evidence to support this.
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We don’t know the models sizes, requirements, and optimisations, but we could take a guess using the infrastructure costs of the largest open weight alternatives that perform slightly worse.
In my opinion, it’s a profitable kind of service. They probably don’t pay the public prices for the cloud GPUs though.
> There is absolutely no evidence to support this.
Analysts like Semi-Analysis have done a lot of modeling and estimates on the topic.
But two can play this game: There is absolutely no evidence to support that API prices do not have profitable unit economics.
Mr.Truth-teller Amodei confirmed it that APIs are profitable at Anthropic.
Some basic math supports it. A GB300 NVL72 is about $6.5 million. Lets say that you need $6 million worth of cooling and another $6 million worth of electricity. At current rates, that's 720 billion tokens worth of Claude Opus 4.7. At 100,000 tokens per second, it pays for itself in about 3 months.
Obviously this is an extremely rough calculation. I can even be off by a factor of 10 and it's still a pretty good return.