It makes me wonder what Anthropic's true margins are. I could believe they are overcharging via the API, Sonnet is $3/$15/Mtok and Opus at an ABSURD $15/$75/Mtok. But to break even for me, that would mean that they're overcharging by a factor 5x-10x, which doesn't seem possible. Is the music going to stop for Claude Code the same way it did for Cursor? I have to imagine every incentive in the world is pushing them to lower inference cost rather than introduce stricter limits, and unlike Cursor they can actually can reach into their stack and do this. But I'm not sure they're capable of miracles.
Regardless, I'm bullish Anthropic. Sonnet and Opus don't benchmark as well as O3/Grok4 at pure coding, and aren't as cheap as Kimi K2 for theoretically similar perf, but as any user knows they are top tier at instruction following, highly reliable and predictable, and have a certain intangible theory of mind that is unique to Anthropic.