They are for sure subsidising costs on all you can prompt packages (20-100-200$ /mo). They do that for data gathering mostly, and at a smaller degree for user retention.
> evidence at all that Anthropic or OpenAI is able to make money on inference yet.
You can infer that from what 3rd party inference providers are charging. The largest open models atm are dsv3 (~650B params) and kimi2.5 (1.2T params). They are being served at 2-2.5-3$ /Mtok. That's sonnet / gpt-mini / gemini3-flash price range. You can make some educates guesses that they get some leeway for model size at the 10-15$/ Mtok prices for their top tier models. So if they are inside some sane model sizes, they are likely making money off of token based APIs.
> They are being served at 2-2.5-3$ /Mtok. That's sonnet / gpt-mini / gemini3-flash price range.
The interesting number is usually input tokens, not output, because there's much more of the former in any long-running session (like say coding agents) since all outputs become inputs for the next iteration, and you also have tool calls adding a lot of additional input tokens etc.
It doesn't change your conclusion much though. Kimi K2.5 has almost the same input token pricing as Gemini 3 Flash.
Ive been thinking about our company, one of big global conglomerates that went for copilot. Suddenly I was just enrolled.. together with at least 1500 others. I guess the amount of money for our business copilot plans x 1500 is not a huge amount of money, but I am at least pretty convinced that only a small part of users use even 10% of their quota. Even teams located around me, I only know of 1 person that seems to use it actively.
They are for sure subsidising costs on all you can prompt packages (20-100-200$ /mo). They do that for data gathering mostly, and at a smaller degree for user retention.
> evidence at all that Anthropic or OpenAI is able to make money on inference yet.
You can infer that from what 3rd party inference providers are charging. The largest open models atm are dsv3 (~650B params) and kimi2.5 (1.2T params). They are being served at 2-2.5-3$ /Mtok. That's sonnet / gpt-mini / gemini3-flash price range. You can make some educates guesses that they get some leeway for model size at the 10-15$/ Mtok prices for their top tier models. So if they are inside some sane model sizes, they are likely making money off of token based APIs.