The world doesn't make sense to me. I use 5.6 Luna. Deepseek v4 flash 0731. And kimi k3. Don't even need claude anymore at their insane prices for anything I do.
If you're primarily writing code yourself or meticulously reviewing the output from agents, then you're right. However, if you tried to have any of those models one-shot an app or do some highly agentic work, they would certainly fail. That's the future people are looking towards with these valuations: when its no longer economical for humans to write or even understand code, just let the models drive because they are superhuman at it. Not saying we are there today, but that's when you really start to see the benefit of more expensive models. Luna or Deepseek flash would never find any of the mathematical discoveries or security exploits that the larger models can find.
Claude is certainly able to make a superhuman mess. All of its efficacy still hinges upon good architecture and programming principles, which do not seem to be instilled in the model by anything other than luck
I'm not convinced that one-shotting things is anything other than a vanity-metric.
Maybe in the distant future where quickly building a visualisation to help explain some concept would be valuable to one shot quickly - but "One shotting an app" is ridiculous because app development (or any development) is never "build it and then finish" but is an interative process, testing feedback, user feedback, and even app-creator communication ambiguity means being able to "one shot an app" is pretty worthless
I've been using GLM 5.3 for the past week, and I find to does a straight up better job than Opus 5 on my projects. I use both for agentic work, and GLM tends to dig deeper into tasks on the latest version.
But.. what is it that anthropic does that cannot be replicated by open models teamed up with open source? Heck open source even has cheap AI to help write the code now.
Make new mathematical discoveries, and the security capabilities of the closed models have not yet been rivaled by open ones.
Also, just because a model is open now doesn't mean it will always be. If/when China or meta catches up to the frontier, they'll instantly go closed source. China, the biggest surveillance state in the world, would love to have all user data pouring in to its servers. It's just a business strategy, they're not doing it out of the kindness of their hearts.
What enterprises pay for is all that matters. They pay insane amounts for a lot of things I would never do personally, but I'm not the target demographic in those cases.
Right, and it's often very sane. If you're paying $250k/year for a software engineer, it likely makes sense to have them spend $10k/year on tokens from the best available model rather than trying to save a few thousand with random Chinese models that may or may not be good enough.
> If you're paying $250k/year for a software engineer, it likely makes sense to have them spend $10k/year
Would be nice. I feel like the more you go towards the 3rd world (or tbh anywhere not in the US), the more this calculus shifts, probably all the way to underspecced workstations, no IDE licenses (e.g. JetBrains) and also no investment into tokens or whatever.
Also, 10k USD per year seems a bit low, I'm not tokenmaxxing but my non-subscription usage equivalent would be around 3000-6000 USD per month, though obviously with models like Kimi K3 and GLM 5.3 it would be way more sensible compared to Anthropic.
Do you have a source I can read? All I see on Google are random blog posts mostly debunking that idea. Profit margins on API tokens isn't the same as running a profitable long term business, or bringing returns on the large amount of funding they got.
While not today, very soon every company, of every complexity will run local models. It's not in a companies interest to hand over its domain expertise, data, and proprietary IP for a increase in productivity. Most will quickly realize it makes sense to run their own weights. This will be commonplace once tooling and training infrastructure is commoditized.
200usd/mo for Claude gives me tens of thousands of dollars of value.
API prices are paid by companies getting tens of millions of dollars of value.
In normal life money is the key constraint; buy this don't buy that etc. - whereas in VC funded companies the constraint is time. If you as a founder get funding and don't spend it fast enough you put yourself at serious risk of being replaced.
When enough of the world operates on that principle it creates a highly price insensitive market and that then can support a ton of ideas and experiments, some of which turn out to be really really good. It's a wild way to do innovation but it's been working well for decades.
$200/mo of Claude may give you what would have cost tens of thousands of dollars to create in 2023, but the value of what it creates isn't there anymore. It should be compared against what it would cost to create with other tools, not against the cost of you doing it by hand.
Otherwise would be like justifying an obviously overpriced car, because "it saves me so much compared to carrying things thousands of miles by hand!"
The comment I replied to said "I need Claude because it's better than no AI.
That's like saying "I need the Porsche because it's better than no car".
Making a "car vs no car" argument is not an argument for an expensive car. Making an argument for an expensive car, requires both car vs no car, and expensive car vs any car. This is what I was pointing out above.
> 200usd/mo for Claude gives me tens of thousands of dollars of value.
That may well be true, but the same tens of thousands of dollars of value can be purchased for a fraction of the 200usd Anthropic asks.... therefore why not?
And even beyond pure monetary considerations, it often refuses to help as soon as its trigger happy safeguards kick in, can't debug a lot of code before it decides to stop helping IME.
Below a certain threshold prices are effectively all the same.
Companies pay API prices because part of the bundle is a trust anchor / liability shield: "we bought Anthropic's thing! We didn't risk it! We paid for ZDR!"
It takes a big leap of faith for real companies with a real P&L to hand out token budgets in the thousands far and wide across their teams. The ROI is very easy difficult to demonstrate.
I've been thinking about it a lot and I think there's going to be commoditization of tokens. No local models - the hardware to run at scale is too complicated for companies that are reluctant to even run a local file server - and not wholesale run to Chinese suppliers (due to IP considerations mainly).
I think the winners in the coding/office work space will be intermediaries who can sell reasonable quality tokens at cost plus.
It's the same reason "real" companies don't hand out their employees fully decked Macbook Pros or don't provide $500k TC packages as a norm: they are fine with "good enough" and "good ROI". And that's not going to happen with Claude API pricing where it is.
Another field is API pricing for things that are not coding, like automated systems doing analysis of things. I think there it's a real race to the bottom, including - or even mostly - direct sourcing from China (just like business do with their real goods today).
Let's try a thought experiment. It's not subsidized. It's not "worth" the tens of times it costs if accessed through API. Let's drop the subsidy word, they're selling you a product, and they're trying to sell other people a similar product at 30x the price with some excuses. If either (or both) turns out to be unsustainable, they haven't been subsidizing you, they just had a crap business model (or a perfectly good one, if the goal was an inflated valuation, an IPO and then a crash once the losses are socialized).
They might raise the price, but I don't think they will ever get rid of the $20 tier. It is way too consumer friendly and likely has the highest percentage of users that aren't abusing their quota limits. A layperson will be extremely hard pressed to create an API key, know what to do with it, put money in their account. People want an easy subscription.
Anthropic’s revenue run rate just hit $50B, in a market that didn’t exist 5 years ago and was 10% of its current size 1 year ago. They are, by far, the fastest growing company in human history. The demand for “rockets” has been pretty high and growing ever since they started supplying it.
Anthropic and its investors/customers don’t need random internet commenter’s permission to decide whether or not something is worth doing or justified.
Personally I think when something doesn’t make sense to you, you should try to figure out why it makes sense to other people, and whether they might have different needs/constraints/incentives/skills/knowledge.
Why might people spend more on AI as it gets better, rather than less? Could they, perhaps, allow for entirely new kinds of capabilities and products that hacker news commenters have not yet seen? As they have done every year for 3 straight years (hacker news has been wrong in exactly the same way every time, btw)? Might some people prefer to spend $10/day to work with the most capable AI available, due to the amount they use it while doing their job, and its effect on output? Do some people use AI for more than just tinkering with open source harnesses? Could it be that when you don’t understand something, there really is a way to explain it, that isn’t “everybody else must be stupid”?
> "Could they (Anthropic) get a $2 trillion valuation, yeah they could and I just wonder if it would stay there over time"
Can someone explain exactly how the market can in any sense support not one but two trillion dollar valuations (referencing spacex as the first)? (I imagine openai will likely be in the same ballpark) genuinely we're reaching "elementary levels of big funny number" in the market.
The "valuation" is based on market capitalization, so the market "supports" it because of the mass hysteria of "perceived value." When a big IPO gets automatically added to a major stock index (such as NASDAQ or S&P 500), all the mutual funds which include holdings that mirror the indexes will automatically buy and hold shares. Lots of employee 401k money and pension fund investments are supporting the mutual funds, which are perceived as "safe."
To put it in fewer words; the stock market is rigged.
Can someone explain exactly how the market can in any sense support not one but two trillion dollar valuations
Suppose there are 100 million jobs that can benefit from spending $10k/year in tokens. At a conservative 30% margin and subtracting $100 billion for expenses that's $200 billion in annual profits, which can easily support a $5T market cap. And that's just scaling up today's use cases, not even considering the possibility of labs having their secret internal models doing drug discovery or quant trading or other profitable hobbies.
They are going to have to monetize their customers to try to reach that goal. So that means charging as much as the market can handle. They have a couple of problems though called OpenAI, SpaceX, Google, Chinese models and Open weights.
With the (unknown?) blend of consumer vs enterprise customers, what do "experts" project their margins to be around?
Some notes from me researching trying to answer my own question:
> Wall Street experts and financial research firms project Anthropic’s current blended gross margins to be in the mid-40% to mid-60% range, with internal company forecasts aiming for a software-like 77% gross margin by 2028
> Anthropic’s revenue is heavily dominated by enterprise and developer customers (roughly 75% to 85% of total revenue).
> Premium Token Pricing: Enterprise and API clients generate 3 to 5 times more revenue per token than consumer users.
Idk, but for me it is ridiculous, people still doubt these valuations. SpaceX was of course non sense. But to value those companies lower than 1 trillion???
Please, link some source to change my mind.
I love Claude but as soon as there is a viable replacement and I get around to it, I’m gone. I have zero loyalty to a chatbot and when the interface is just text the cost of switching is up to my personal whims.
I switched to codex after using Claude for a year. Faster, cheaper and smart (not sure smarter) but it likes to do things by itself without asking for clarification.
Anyone believing that this company will surpass Nvidia's revenue in 2028 is seeking a lot of exit liquidity to dump hundreds of millions of their stock after the first earnings release.
> The projection dwarfs the $47 billion revenue "run rate," reflecting the firm's current pace of business, that the company publicized as recently as May, and shows the scale of growth investors are being asked to underwrite.
Never do they account for competition, risks, delays, lawsuits and geo-political issues. Seems like this is massaged to get tens of millions of retail traders holding an expensive designer bag that is riddled with holes.
> Anthropic has projected revenue of at least $10.9 billion for the second quarter of 2026, more than double the previous quarter, on track for its first quarterly operating profit of $559 million.
The world doesn't make sense to me. I use 5.6 Luna. Deepseek v4 flash 0731. And kimi k3. Don't even need claude anymore at their insane prices for anything I do.
If you're primarily writing code yourself or meticulously reviewing the output from agents, then you're right. However, if you tried to have any of those models one-shot an app or do some highly agentic work, they would certainly fail. That's the future people are looking towards with these valuations: when its no longer economical for humans to write or even understand code, just let the models drive because they are superhuman at it. Not saying we are there today, but that's when you really start to see the benefit of more expensive models. Luna or Deepseek flash would never find any of the mathematical discoveries or security exploits that the larger models can find.
Claude is certainly able to make a superhuman mess. All of its efficacy still hinges upon good architecture and programming principles, which do not seem to be instilled in the model by anything other than luck
I'm not convinced that one-shotting things is anything other than a vanity-metric.
Maybe in the distant future where quickly building a visualisation to help explain some concept would be valuable to one shot quickly - but "One shotting an app" is ridiculous because app development (or any development) is never "build it and then finish" but is an interative process, testing feedback, user feedback, and even app-creator communication ambiguity means being able to "one shot an app" is pretty worthless
I've been using GLM 5.3 for the past week, and I find to does a straight up better job than Opus 5 on my projects. I use both for agentic work, and GLM tends to dig deeper into tasks on the latest version.
But.. what is it that anthropic does that cannot be replicated by open models teamed up with open source? Heck open source even has cheap AI to help write the code now.
Make new mathematical discoveries, and the security capabilities of the closed models have not yet been rivaled by open ones.
Also, just because a model is open now doesn't mean it will always be. If/when China or meta catches up to the frontier, they'll instantly go closed source. China, the biggest surveillance state in the world, would love to have all user data pouring in to its servers. It's just a business strategy, they're not doing it out of the kindness of their hearts.
The moat is money. How do you get more money? Point to your moat and ask for more money!
What enterprises pay for is all that matters. They pay insane amounts for a lot of things I would never do personally, but I'm not the target demographic in those cases.
Right, and it's often very sane. If you're paying $250k/year for a software engineer, it likely makes sense to have them spend $10k/year on tokens from the best available model rather than trying to save a few thousand with random Chinese models that may or may not be good enough.
> If you're paying $250k/year for a software engineer, it likely makes sense to have them spend $10k/year
Would be nice. I feel like the more you go towards the 3rd world (or tbh anywhere not in the US), the more this calculus shifts, probably all the way to underspecced workstations, no IDE licenses (e.g. JetBrains) and also no investment into tokens or whatever.
Also, 10k USD per year seems a bit low, I'm not tokenmaxxing but my non-subscription usage equivalent would be around 3000-6000 USD per month, though obviously with models like Kimi K3 and GLM 5.3 it would be way more sensible compared to Anthropic.
The Chinese companies will need to pay their bills eventually too.
> The Chinese companies will need to pay their bills eventually too.
What bills? Deepseek has been profitable for long time.
Do you have a source I can read? All I see on Google are random blog posts mostly debunking that idea. Profit margins on API tokens isn't the same as running a profitable long term business, or bringing returns on the large amount of funding they got.
Their purchasing costs are much lower proportionally.
China has cheaper electricity and a more capable grid for the industrial type usage levels they need to drive.
Data centers don't really cost less in China. Perhaps even more due to trade restrictions and the difficulty of smuggling the chips in.
Electricity is a small part of the bill.
> difficulty of smuggling the chips in
I wonder how long it'll be until they won't need to do that due to domestic options.
Wouldn't enterprises rather run their own models locally?
While not today, very soon every company, of every complexity will run local models. It's not in a companies interest to hand over its domain expertise, data, and proprietary IP for a increase in productivity. Most will quickly realize it makes sense to run their own weights. This will be commonplace once tooling and training infrastructure is commoditized.
Enterprises don't even want to self-host webservers, and those are about a thousand times easier to do than self-hosting an AI model
In many things in life it’s wise to think further than just what suits your needs personally
200usd/mo for Claude gives me tens of thousands of dollars of value.
API prices are paid by companies getting tens of millions of dollars of value.
In normal life money is the key constraint; buy this don't buy that etc. - whereas in VC funded companies the constraint is time. If you as a founder get funding and don't spend it fast enough you put yourself at serious risk of being replaced.
When enough of the world operates on that principle it creates a highly price insensitive market and that then can support a ton of ideas and experiments, some of which turn out to be really really good. It's a wild way to do innovation but it's been working well for decades.
It doesn't, though.
$200/mo of Claude may give you what would have cost tens of thousands of dollars to create in 2023, but the value of what it creates isn't there anymore. It should be compared against what it would cost to create with other tools, not against the cost of you doing it by hand.
Otherwise would be like justifying an obviously overpriced car, because "it saves me so much compared to carrying things thousands of miles by hand!"
Your comparison is wrong
It's not an expensive car vs. any car.
It's car vs. no car.
No, you are wrong. Or at least, incomplete.
The comment I replied to said "I need Claude because it's better than no AI.
That's like saying "I need the Porsche because it's better than no car".
Making a "car vs no car" argument is not an argument for an expensive car. Making an argument for an expensive car, requires both car vs no car, and expensive car vs any car. This is what I was pointing out above.
My argument may be wrong, but I myself am just fine, thank you.
Is it? Because you can just download a car now.
> 200usd/mo for Claude gives me tens of thousands of dollars of value.
That may well be true, but the same tens of thousands of dollars of value can be purchased for a fraction of the 200usd Anthropic asks.... therefore why not?
And even beyond pure monetary considerations, it often refuses to help as soon as its trigger happy safeguards kick in, can't debug a lot of code before it decides to stop helping IME.
It's less fungible than you think.
Below a certain threshold prices are effectively all the same.
Companies pay API prices because part of the bundle is a trust anchor / liability shield: "we bought Anthropic's thing! We didn't risk it! We paid for ZDR!"
It takes a big leap of faith for real companies with a real P&L to hand out token budgets in the thousands far and wide across their teams. The ROI is very easy difficult to demonstrate.
I've been thinking about it a lot and I think there's going to be commoditization of tokens. No local models - the hardware to run at scale is too complicated for companies that are reluctant to even run a local file server - and not wholesale run to Chinese suppliers (due to IP considerations mainly).
I think the winners in the coding/office work space will be intermediaries who can sell reasonable quality tokens at cost plus. It's the same reason "real" companies don't hand out their employees fully decked Macbook Pros or don't provide $500k TC packages as a norm: they are fine with "good enough" and "good ROI". And that's not going to happen with Claude API pricing where it is.
Another field is API pricing for things that are not coding, like automated systems doing analysis of things. I think there it's a real race to the bottom, including - or even mostly - direct sourcing from China (just like business do with their real goods today).
paying for API calls gives you no such deal hack.
> Don't even need claude anymore at their insane prices for anything I do.
What insane price is that? Pro is $20 per month. Same price as a Netflix ad free sub.
Until they stop to subsidize.
Let's try a thought experiment. It's not subsidized. It's not "worth" the tens of times it costs if accessed through API. Let's drop the subsidy word, they're selling you a product, and they're trying to sell other people a similar product at 30x the price with some excuses. If either (or both) turns out to be unsustainable, they haven't been subsidizing you, they just had a crap business model (or a perfectly good one, if the goal was an inflated valuation, an IPO and then a crash once the losses are socialized).
They might raise the price, but I don't think they will ever get rid of the $20 tier. It is way too consumer friendly and likely has the highest percentage of users that aren't abusing their quota limits. A layperson will be extremely hard pressed to create an API key, know what to do with it, put money in their account. People want an easy subscription.
Are they going to get to $200B revenue in 2028 at $20/month? That's a billion monthly subscribers. In 2028.
I walk to work and ride a bicycle in my free time, don’t see why anybody would need a hatchback or semi truck or build rockets. Idiots
Is the market for the "rockets" enough to justify what these frontier labs are spending yearly?
Anthropic’s revenue run rate just hit $50B, in a market that didn’t exist 5 years ago and was 10% of its current size 1 year ago. They are, by far, the fastest growing company in human history. The demand for “rockets” has been pretty high and growing ever since they started supplying it.
Anthropic and its investors/customers don’t need random internet commenter’s permission to decide whether or not something is worth doing or justified.
Personally I think when something doesn’t make sense to you, you should try to figure out why it makes sense to other people, and whether they might have different needs/constraints/incentives/skills/knowledge.
Why might people spend more on AI as it gets better, rather than less? Could they, perhaps, allow for entirely new kinds of capabilities and products that hacker news commenters have not yet seen? As they have done every year for 3 straight years (hacker news has been wrong in exactly the same way every time, btw)? Might some people prefer to spend $10/day to work with the most capable AI available, due to the amount they use it while doing their job, and its effect on output? Do some people use AI for more than just tinkering with open source harnesses? Could it be that when you don’t understand something, there really is a way to explain it, that isn’t “everybody else must be stupid”?
> "Could they (Anthropic) get a $2 trillion valuation, yeah they could and I just wonder if it would stay there over time"
Can someone explain exactly how the market can in any sense support not one but two trillion dollar valuations (referencing spacex as the first)? (I imagine openai will likely be in the same ballpark) genuinely we're reaching "elementary levels of big funny number" in the market.
The "valuation" is based on market capitalization, so the market "supports" it because of the mass hysteria of "perceived value." When a big IPO gets automatically added to a major stock index (such as NASDAQ or S&P 500), all the mutual funds which include holdings that mirror the indexes will automatically buy and hold shares. Lots of employee 401k money and pension fund investments are supporting the mutual funds, which are perceived as "safe."
To put it in fewer words; the stock market is rigged.
A $2tn IPO does mean $2tn materialized out of nowhere. What matters is how big the liquid market is, and that is a much smaller number.
Can someone explain exactly how the market can in any sense support not one but two trillion dollar valuations
Suppose there are 100 million jobs that can benefit from spending $10k/year in tokens. At a conservative 30% margin and subtracting $100 billion for expenses that's $200 billion in annual profits, which can easily support a $5T market cap. And that's just scaling up today's use cases, not even considering the possibility of labs having their secret internal models doing drug discovery or quant trading or other profitable hobbies.
100 million jobs is an insane number.
Apple has a $4.5 trillion valuation, and it just makes pretty consumer widgets. The global B2B economy is massive.
Well, if Anthropic actually makes $200B revenue in 2028 then that valuation is justified, depending on how fat their margins are.
They are going to have to monetize their customers to try to reach that goal. So that means charging as much as the market can handle. They have a couple of problems though called OpenAI, SpaceX, Google, Chinese models and Open weights.
With the (unknown?) blend of consumer vs enterprise customers, what do "experts" project their margins to be around?
Some notes from me researching trying to answer my own question:
> Wall Street experts and financial research firms project Anthropic’s current blended gross margins to be in the mid-40% to mid-60% range, with internal company forecasts aiming for a software-like 77% gross margin by 2028
> Anthropic’s revenue is heavily dominated by enterprise and developer customers (roughly 75% to 85% of total revenue).
> Premium Token Pricing: Enterprise and API clients generate 3 to 5 times more revenue per token than consumer users.
Net is estimated to be between 10% and 30%
Idk, but for me it is ridiculous, people still doubt these valuations. SpaceX was of course non sense. But to value those companies lower than 1 trillion??? Please, link some source to change my mind.
China keeps eating their lunch tho, have you guys seen the new deepseek harness?? Get ready to have your mind blown.
I love Claude but as soon as there is a viable replacement and I get around to it, I’m gone. I have zero loyalty to a chatbot and when the interface is just text the cost of switching is up to my personal whims.
I switched to codex after using Claude for a year. Faster, cheaper and smart (not sure smarter) but it likes to do things by itself without asking for clarification.
It's here already, called chatgpt 5.6 sol
It's Deepseek, GLM, Kimi
me too except mine is called Claudia and I think she is really sweet and understands me. ;O
What market size do they think AI will be in 2028 to give that prognosis.
Anyone believing that this company will surpass Nvidia's revenue in 2028 is seeking a lot of exit liquidity to dump hundreds of millions of their stock after the first earnings release.
> The projection dwarfs the $47 billion revenue "run rate," reflecting the firm's current pace of business, that the company publicized as recently as May, and shows the scale of growth investors are being asked to underwrite.
Never do they account for competition, risks, delays, lawsuits and geo-political issues. Seems like this is massaged to get tens of millions of retail traders holding an expensive designer bag that is riddled with holes.
I cannot read the article. Does it say anything about profit?
> Anthropic has projected revenue of at least $10.9 billion for the second quarter of 2026, more than double the previous quarter, on track for its first quarterly operating profit of $559 million.
Not a single mention. It’s all „revenue”. And as the downvoters are surely aware: profit != revenue.
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