[impulser_]

It shouldn't be surprising OpenAI does have the most compute out of all the major labs. The only reason why Anthropic models are expensive is they are the most in demand models in the world and Anthropic is fighting for compute. The only way to you limit demand for your model is increasing API pricing this is also why Anthropic probably has great margin and probably is profitable compared to OpenAI.

[scrlk]

Not just compute for OAI, GPT-5.6 is more token efficient across the board vs the Anthropic equivalents: https://artificialanalysis.ai/models?intelligence-index-toke...

No wonder why Tibo can afford to hit the reset button liberally.

[charcircuit]

I also suspect there is a price fixing agreement between all of the inference providers for Claude (such as Amazon, Anthropic, Microsoft, etc).

[vikramkr]

I doubt there's any sort of criminal behavior there - the model is anthropic's up and anthropic probably charges a very expensive license fee that's the same for all of them, and their cogs on compute aren't going to be wildly different, so the main drivers of the cost are roughly the same and they're all offering customers the same end product so the prices would likely also be similar in the end

[weird-eye-issue]

Requiring the exact same product to be set at a specific price across providers would not be criminal behavior, lol

[krzyk]

It is breaking competition.

Would you like all products everywhere be priced like their producers want?

[weird-eye-issue]

You seem terribly confused. Manufacturers are almost always able to set prices. That is not anti-competitive because it does not imply they are colluding with their competition...

[charcircuit]

A fixed price does not let stores compete with each other. Blocking competition is anticompetitive.

[vikramkr]

The competition is between openai and anthropic, if there are price agreements between them that's absolutely price fixing. Or if there's collusion between the cloud providers to inflate compute. I would expect Amazon and gcp to both pay about the same in license fees to anthropic for their models though because they're paying for the same thing. If I buy an apple for a dollar at one store and an apple for a dollar at another store - maybe there's price fixing, or maybe that's just the cost of apples at the moment.

[charcircuit]

>The competition is between openai and anthropic

In capitalism there are many many competitions going on at the same time. Both models can compete and inference providers can compete for costs.

In your apple example if at the same stores you saw "open" apples having different prices and having sales you might question if the costs of those frontier apples are not being manipulated.

[charcircuit]

Do you really think there is nothing someone could do to make it a fraction of a percentage cheaper to serve like having access to cheaper electricity or a more mature cloud management software. Even saving a fraction of a penny on the prices can make a different due to how much volume people are paying for.

[wmf]

"Price fixing" isn't the correct term here but yes, it's very common to have the same price across different retailers/resellers.

[charcircuit]

There is a difference between the market discovering a price and a bunch of retailers/resellers entering an agreement to sell at a specific price.