[pqtyw]

To be fair the margins on inference should be pretty good for Anthropic and OpenAI.

The token cost for very large open models seems to indicate that. Of course DeepSeek is probably subsidizing their current pricing to a significant extent but then you have all other provides on OpenRouter and I can't imagine it would make sense for them to operate at a significant loss since they don't offer anything but inference.

Anthropic is just utilizing its position to maximize the prices as much as possible and see what the market can bear and of course they are not even close to offsetting their R&D and capital investments.

If LLMs become commoditized and open models become good enough for most use cases its hard to imagine that prices won't drop (and the AI bubble popping as a consequence of that...)