Almost all consumer services have a built-in level of breakage that make them profitable. Mobile providers certainly wouldn't be able to offer unlimited calling if everyone was actually on the phone 24x7.

But if it's intended to be used by one person, it seems like breaking the contract by sublicensing it out to dozens of other people. It's like buying a netflix subscription for $15, then sublicensing it on a per-hour basis to dozens of other people.

Plenty of things are intentionally run at a loss (for years!) to gain market share and quantity of ongoing recurring users, or with expectation of ROI later on. Multiple generations of the Xbox hardware have been sold at a loss with the expectation that customers will purchase 300, 400, 500 dollars worth of games, which are very high margin, over the lifespan they own the system.

We really don’t know what are Anthropic’s margins on inference. Most available data indicates they are quite high on the API so it’s not that obvious that subscriptions are unprofitable.

[dead]