alt Hacker NewsOnly in the sense that all companies legally exist only on paper - splitting a large company in many legally discinct 149-employee legal entities is possible (some industries have practices like that, e.g. construction and real estate sometimes spawn a separate company for each major building) but would absolutely create lots of very real work and other costs for legal, tax, general finance and HR functions. And simply faking many 149-employee LLCs while not having them actually be real entities is both unlikely to succeed (like, B2B transactions can't be pseudonymous, Anthropic knows your company's registration data) and would also technically be criminal fraud so high (personal!) risk for the small gain in API pricing.
> splitting a large company in many legally discinct 149-employee legal entities is possible
Sure it might be work to set up the first subcompanies, but once you have that can't you just replace the company name in all the legal texts? Also I think large companies already do have tons of subcompanies, so I guess that cost already got paid?
> And simply faking many 149-employee LLCs while not having them actually be real entities is both unlikely to succeed
You do not need to fake it, you can just rent it?