Prices per 1M tokens Claude Opus 5.5 Claude Opus 5
Cache reads $0.20 $0.50
Input tokens $4 $5
Output tokens $20 $25
Cache writes $5 $6.25
Opus 5 is the model with highest spend on openrouter (<a href="https://openrouter.ai/rankings#task-spend" rel="nofollow">https://openrouter.ai/rankings#task-spend) and it seems plausible that Opus 5 is/was the highest spend model in the world, and certainly Anthropic's biggest moneymaker.
If you are forced to reduce price despite raising capabilities, that certainly tells something about the market, and potentially about Anthropic future profitability too, since this model is their biggest topline contributor
It's the Chinese open source models. They're barely behind the frontier, making AI a commodity, forcing openAI and Anthropic's margins downward.
I'm hardly a fan of China/Xi, but I do appreciate and benefit from this.
China doesn't care about money. Imagine a world where it's globally normalized to ask a Chinese LLM who to vote for, what happened in Hongkong, about the Uigurs, or if Taiwan is a country.
They will burn as much money as necessary to make that happen. And they have a virtually infinite amount of liquidity.
This is one explanation. However, if Xi Jinping believes that whoever reaches superintelligence first becomes the next global hegemon, doing this (and more, cough cough Taiwan) suddenly looks very sane solely as a way to kneecap the competition.
The goodwill/propaganda are convenient, sure, but my guess is that they aren't the primary motivation. Another possibility is that if no takeoff happens, pressuring OpenAI/Anthropic on profitability would exacerbate the damage overinvestment has done to the US stock market/economy.
The service is the value, not the model unto itself. This is where nearly all of HN is somehow entirely blind.
Capturing the users is the ad network, that's Google and OpenAI. Capturing corporate trust at a reasonable API cost, that's Anthropic's direction.
China has none of that and they never will for exactly the same reason Baidu is irrelevant globally despite being a highly capable search engine. 'Search' is also a commodity, that's not the value that Google brings to the table.
It's a search engine, anybody can build a search engine = that's what you just said.
Search is different as a service provided for free. When cost isn't in the picture, trust/convenience win.
But two products that provide essentially the same benefit, and one is significantly cheaper? Corporations maximize profit, my friend. What the model has to say about Tianammmen Square doesn't matter when we're using it to write code.
These companies are posting massive losses while also lowering prices. This sounds just like the Chinese bikeshare bubble where they were all taking massive losses in hopes that their competitor would go broke first.
In the end, everyone lost and there are millions of bikes in landfills.
If you're interested in the bikeshare bubble, Asianometry did a video on it a while ago.
GodelNumbering · · focus · HN ↗
If you are forced to reduce price despite raising capabilities, that certainly tells something about the market, and potentially about Anthropic future profitability too, since this model is their biggest topline contributor
margorczynski · · focus · HN ↗
It doesn't look like that's happening, on the contrary the prices are falling especially when taking into account capabilities.
johnecheck · · focus · HN ↗
I'm hardly a fan of China/Xi, but I do appreciate and benefit from this.
bulbar · · focus · HN ↗
They will burn as much money as necessary to make that happen. And they have a virtually infinite amount of liquidity.
epolanski · · focus · HN ↗
There's only 12 countries that do on the planet, the most relevant of them being Guatemala.
bulbar · · focus · HN ↗
For political reason, yes. Taiwan is a country though.
johnecheck · · focus · HN ↗
The goodwill/propaganda are convenient, sure, but my guess is that they aren't the primary motivation. Another possibility is that if no takeoff happens, pressuring OpenAI/Anthropic on profitability would exacerbate the damage overinvestment has done to the US stock market/economy.
adventured · · focus · HN ↗
Capturing the users is the ad network, that's Google and OpenAI. Capturing corporate trust at a reasonable API cost, that's Anthropic's direction.
China has none of that and they never will for exactly the same reason Baidu is irrelevant globally despite being a highly capable search engine. 'Search' is also a commodity, that's not the value that Google brings to the table.
It's a search engine, anybody can build a search engine = that's what you just said.
johnecheck · · focus · HN ↗
But two products that provide essentially the same benefit, and one is significantly cheaper? Corporations maximize profit, my friend. What the model has to say about Tianammmen Square doesn't matter when we're using it to write code.
dboreham · · focus · HN ↗
hajile · · focus · HN ↗
In the end, everyone lost and there are millions of bikes in landfills.
If you're interested in the bikeshare bubble, Asianometry did a video on it a while ago.
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQrEDq8KPiU" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQrEDq8KPiU
adventured · · focus · HN ↗
The notion of comparing this to Chinese bikesharing is comically absurd.
rvz · · focus · HN ↗
"Allegedly".
Plus with a lot of accounting tricks, and this not being recurring to make their books look nice for the eventual IPO.
filoeleven · · focus · HN ↗
DonHopkins · · focus · HN ↗
MayeulC · · focus · HN ↗
runtime_terror · · focus · HN ↗