2026-05-02XQuote

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Well, one fucked up and non obvious part of the answer could be that certain folks are paying massive amounts to them to distill the model via API. But the revenue is so worthwhile that they could stop it but instead allow it because it allows them to stay ahead in the funding race by showing evermore increasing revenue. Aka my enemy’s enemy is my friend.

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I’m really struggling to see how the back of the envelope math on this works out… There are generously 4 million characterized “software workers” in America. That’s pretty broad and includes a lot of people who aren’t really classical engineers don’t produce that much code. That comes out to nearly $1k per month of average Claude spend across every dev in America. Yes, there’s some international usage, but it can’t be that much. Yes there is some non software Cowork usage, but that doesn’t use that many tokens. Yes, some non engineers are using Claude to vibe code, but I really doubt many are spending hundreds per month on. Even if we assume 50% of all software workers are using Claude, that comes out to $2k spend per month per Claude user. Thats 10X more than the highest tier Max subscription. So almost all of Anthropics revenue has to be API billing So the only explanation is that something like 20%+ of software engineers are not only Claude users but on API billing and regularly spending thousands per month. At $5/m Opus tokens that means the average API user has to be going through something like 25 million tokens per day. *OR* the other possibility is API revenue is heavily power law dominated. Maybe there’s just something like 100k super users who are making up the majority of the revenue. For that to work the typical super user would have to be spending on the order of $50k/month and guzzling nearly 1 billion tokens per day.
0xdoug ↗