It is not clear at all if Claude will actually be profitable, are there enough people who will actually pay the subsidized costs especially if they end up being a significant fraction of an additional dev's salary.
I think there's enough people willing to pay Claude's token rates today, either via subscription or via proxy through e.g. Cursor, that they can effectively turn the "new model R&D cost" knob to whatever their financials can support, and they'll survive for as long as their models can remain competitive.
The challenge all these frontier labs have is: Their existing models can have high token profitability, but they have to invest everything they've got (and everything they're given) into new model R&D, because if they don't xAI will beat them, or Anthropic will beat them, or Google will. That's the nature of frontier spaces like this.
But the flipside is, model capability will plateau, they probably are already, and as that happens it becomes safer to aim for profitability. And I have zero doubt that OpenAI and Anthropic can find profitability. xAI, Perplexity, Mistral, and the other labs, I'm less sure about.
The challenge all these frontier labs have is: Their existing models can have high token profitability, but they have to invest everything they've got (and everything they're given) into new model R&D, because if they don't xAI will beat them, or Anthropic will beat them, or Google will. That's the nature of frontier spaces like this.
But the flipside is, model capability will plateau, they probably are already, and as that happens it becomes safer to aim for profitability. And I have zero doubt that OpenAI and Anthropic can find profitability. xAI, Perplexity, Mistral, and the other labs, I'm less sure about.