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.
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.
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.