The implication would be that those API requests are being sold at a loss. Amodei wrote in January that Claude 3.5 Sonnet was trained for only a few $10Ms, but Anthropic has been losing billions.
That would be a killer for the current and near future generations of LLM as a business. If they are having to pay many times in compute what they are able to get for the API use (due to open models being near comparable?), then you definitely can't "make up for it in volume".