Ed Zitron made that claim (in particular here: [1]). In the same article he admits he not a programmer, and had to ask someone else to try out Claude Code and ccusage for him. He doesn't have any understanding of how LLMs or caching works. But he's prominent because he's received leaked financial details for Anthropic and OpenAI, eg [2]

[1] https://www.wheresyoured.at/anthropic-is-bleeding-out/ [2] https://www.wheresyoured.at/costs/

Maybe I'm misreading it, but I don't see him saying it's just the cost of *inference* alone (which is the strawman that the article in the OP is arguing against). He says:

> this company is wilfully burning 200% to 3000% of each Pro or Max customer that interacts with Claude Code

There is of course this meme that "Anthropic would be profitable today if they stopped training new models and only focused on inference", but people on HN are smart enough to understand that this is not realistic due to model drift, and also due to comeptition from other models. So training is forever a part of the cost of doing business, until we have some fundamental changes in the underlying technology.

I can only interpret Ed Zitron as saying "the cost of doing business is 200% to 3000% of the price users are paying for their subscriptions", which sounds extremely plausible to me.

You would be surprised because there are lots of posters here who think that the cost is so enormous that this whole industry is unviable.

Is that conceit somehow intrinsically absurd? Or is everyone just supposed to just know?

Like I wish it was simple as "if it wasn't viable, they wouldn't be in business," but alas that argument is kinda the more naive one in this world. Right?

Or is there some intuition about energy/cost here all the dump posters miss, that you could tell us about?

Please, anything, my company is dying.

It’s the most simple intuition. You can run a 2 year old gpt model equivalent on your laptop today. So cost is obviously going down.

Its so strange to see people still think costs are not going down..

Wow never thought about it like that... Guess there is nothing to worry about! I feel so silly now.

Twitter.

I mean, the very first paragraph of TFA is describing who is under that impression. Literally the first sentence:

> My LinkedIn and Twitter feeds are full of screenshots from the recent Forbes article on Cursor claiming that Anthropic's $200/month Claude Code Max plan can consume $5,000 in compute.

That's claiming that worst case, a subscriber _can_ use that much. It's possible that's wrong too, but in any case a lot of services are built on the assumption that the average user doesn't max out the plan.

So the article's title is obviously sensationalized.

I have no problem believing that a Claude Max plan can consume equivalent to $5000 worth of retail Opus use, but one interesting thing you'll see if you e.g. have Claude write agents for you, is that it's pretty aggressive about setting agents to use Sonnet or even Haiku, so not only will most people not exhaust their plans, but a lot of people who do will do so in part using the cheaper models. When you then factor in Anthropics reported margins, and their ability to prioritise traffic (e.g. I'd assume that if their capacity is maxed out they'd throttle subscribers in favour of paid by the token? Maybe not, but it's what I'd do), I'd expect the real cost to them of a maximised plan to be much lower.

Also, while Opus certainly is a lot better than even the best Chinese models, when I max out my Claude plan, I make do with Kimi 2.5. When factoring in the re-run of changes because of the lower quality, I'd spend maybe 2x as much per unit of work I were to pay token prices for all my monthly use w/Kimi.

I'd still prefer Claude if the price comes down to 1x, as it's less hassle w/the harder changes, but their lead is effectively less than a year.

The article discusses all of that, in great detail.

The title does not seem sensationalized. It's literally a summary of the article.

It does and that is exactly why the article's title is sensationalized.

The title is refuting a strawman argument that wasn't actually made, and that the article itself doesn't claim was made.

> The title is refuting a strawman argument that wasn't actually made

The argument was literally made in Forbes. It's linked to. What are you on about?

Is there something I'm missing here?

The quote from Forbes in the article is a claim that a subscription could use up to 5k worth of tokens.

Which is different from actaully costing 5k in tokens per Claude Code user. As users won't max out their subscriptions. And there doesn't seem to be any stronger claim elsewhere in the article.

But the title is about a strawman that it would cost Anthropic 5k per user which it seems nobody claimed.

OK, I see what you're saying, thanks for clarifying.

But headlines are short. This is so common even in mainstream news, I can't really complain about it. Especially when the full claim with "up to" is printed in the very first paragraph.

And the entire point of the article is not about which users max out their subscriptions. It's about conflating retail prices with actual costs.

So maybe the headline would be more accurate with "up to" in it, but the article itself is totally fine, and does not hinge on that distinction. The article is certainly not about a strawman.