Anthropic's AI Is Getting Cheaper to Use. That's Becoming a Problem for Its Business - Decrypt
By Google News AI ·
Anthropic is making Claude cheaper to use. Its computing bill, however, is moving in the other direction.
Anthropic said revenue growth from increased usage was "partially offset by a decrease of approximately $600 million from price reductions introduced as part of new model versions and contractual discounts," according to its amended SEC filing.
Meanwhile, compute and infrastructure expenses surged from $5.56 billion to $9.86 billion, an increase of roughly 77%.
That means Anthropic spent roughly 58 cents on compute and infrastructure for every dollar of revenue, versus 48 cents a quarter earlier. The measure includes computing used for research, training, and internal operations—not just serving paying Claude customers—so it isn't a per-prompt profit margin.
The $600 million figure isn't revenue that vanished from Anthropic's books. It's the amount the company says price reductions and discounts offset revenue growth driven by higher usage.
The cuts are not hypothetical. Claude Opus 5.5, which lowered token prices compared with Opus 5, was recently released, being more capable than any previous model, and sometimes even up to par against Fable. Anthropic also introduced Haiku 5.5 in October, pitching a much cheaper model for high-volume work.
Anthropic says Fable 5.1 reduced the cost of typical workloads by around 25%, while Opus 5.5 brought customers' cost per task down roughly 40% compared with Opus 5. The reductions reflect both lower prices and efficiency gains, rather than straight discounts across every task. Anthropic detailed Fable's lower cache-read pricing in its model announcement.
There is a business case for that strategy: cheaper, more capable AI can encourage customers to use more of it. Anthropic says users have historically expanded…
Originally published by Google News AI