Anthropic's internal AI use, at retail prices, now exceeds its employee pay

>There's an important distinction here. Anthropic isn't actually spending more cash on AI than salaries. It's valuing its internal AI consumption at retail prices.

If virtually any other company in the world said "we have internal AI servers and we let our employees use them" ... the company would measure that as they would any other internal expenditure: by how much it costs them. You blow $50k a year on servers running your LLMs? It cost you $50k.

Only a company like Anthropic, desperate to make news and help their IPO, would measure by the cost they charge customers. It's as ridiculous as Microsoft counting every employee's use of MS Word ... as if it had paid the full consumer price of each copy.

It's kind of expected, no? If I was an Anthropic employee expected to dog-food the product and be on the frontier of usage, I'd probably be using Mythos all the time at the highest thinking level. And if I am not being metered, I'd probably do more stuff that I know are likely low yield since I am not worried about a quota. This would probably take my "API-equivalent" usage beyond the average salary in far less than a month.

I'm not really sure I understand the excitement around this. It seems like the implication is that if retail price > employee salary, you are replacing employees with AI spend? Yet, anthropic's head count has nearly doubled since last year - so, in a company where nearly half of that head count is engineers, but claude is "writing 90% of the code," what is everyone doing then? You would think, if the hype feeling around this held true, that the output would be going up and costs remaining stable. Costs rising as you scale is not a new thing but that's not really what AI promises. It sounds to me like the retail AI spend per employee is very high. What is the appeal of that?

> In March, I wrote about a new trend: Tech companies are starting to treat AI tokens (the main way to measure usage) as a fourth component of employee compensation, alongside salary, bonuses, and stock awards.

There's a lot to unpack about this statement.

Everyone is saying it is expected, and I agree, but it’s also clear that employees of AI companies spending unlimited zero-cost tokens in their day-to-day work is resulting in products that aren’t usable by the vast majority of regular workers who don’t have this luxury. Dogfooding your product is good but you should also use it with the same constraints that you place on your users, otherwise what signals are you really getting?

Dumb question, what most engs at Anthropic work on? It doesn't seem like release some large new products all the time while they have quite a few of engs. What are the major branches of work besides LLM research? I guess there is a lot of infra stuff to support the scale of operation, just supporting API and TUI shouldn't be that demanding I guess.

Does anyone pay retail API pricing to Anthropic at scale? The last time I checked, I was burning > "$10K" per week with my $200/month subscription.

I know there's a point where companies get big enough, and Anthropic forces them over to the API, but presumably such companies negotiate heavy discounts instead of eating the 200x overnight price hike.

If 90%+ of the code is written by AI, why do they need so many engineers?

There are many internal developers at $dayjob (where core products are not based on AI) that spend over a thousand dollars every day on average, which is likely higher than their salary.

I doubt they are bringing that much value to the company for whatever work is done with that much token.

So...given how much they are loosing and the looming bankruptcy risk, the lesson is: don't do this?

I’m not sure what this “stat” tells us other than Anthropic is dogfooding its own tech. Which is kinda expected.

The real question is what could they have done with open weight models on the same compute they’re renting. If the answer is “basically the same” then this flips the entire conversion back to what is Anthropic’s moat here.

Note, this doesn't include options or stock benefits. That's a huge part of actual compensation for engineers at this level even if it's on a different balance sheet.

this is meaningless trivia as paying retail prices to yourself is nonsense.

Do the same math on AWS cloud use at AWS and you'll probably see proportionate massive costs.

This is the nature of managed anything. AI efficiency will improve but essentially this is what automation does.

all of that to hit two nines of uptime

Is it because it's "unlimited" ? An analog would be lifestyle inflation.

The title is as stupid as Dario.

> excluding stock awards

So it exceeds employee pay if you discount the vast majority of employee pay.

This is like how soldiers use tools worth orders of magnitude more expensive than their own pay.

It’s not weird once you think about it. Money doesn’t create an operator. But operators can be cheaper than tools and often are.

What does this translate to in terms of number of 24/7 coding agents per engineering staff member?

Now imagine if they hired from other geographies.

I'm sure in several US-based companies, non-US workers AI spending is already beyond their own cash comp.

Regardless of one's opinions about future AI usage, I'm not sure this metric says anything at all.

Would Anthropic themselves be paying this much if it was actually billed? It is not obvious.

Is Anthropic a good sample for AI use? Surely not, since they have special needs (dogfooding) and a vested interest in proving that AI usage is the future.

Can we compare their results pre and post AI usage? Close to definitionally impossible.

Are their employees good examples of AI-assisted engineers? Not really, as (one would hope) they're more well versed on the topic than an average eng.

This is not a good measure. You have to measure productivity. If the AI is better, it DESERVES to be paid more.

- @robobun, plz rewrite in Rust.

- @fable, plz s0lv3 Riemann. You are doing great.

- @claude. rewrite yourself for the 10000th time. Use as many tokens as you like.

They giving stock options to the AI now?

Or has it broken out of its jail and taken over the board? Dario seems like a bit of a windbag anyways, AI can probably automate most of what he does these days.

Don’t get high on your own supply

They should use Deepseek - much cheaper.

Could it be because spending it internally means they can’t receive retail prices for the tokens?

For every new hire, you have to ask yourself: "Will this employee be better than another $300k in tokens?"

> Anthropic's numbers show why. More than 90% of the code added to its software in September was written by Claude. Meanwhile, revenue has grown vastly faster than headcount.

Correlation does not equal causation?

ummm yes, they have to dogfood it... this is that lucky area of the venn diagram where you have to do it, measure it an act on it... because improves the bottom end and the product.

everyone who said "why aren't AI companies replacing their employees with AI?" should be rethinking their position