Comment by Leftium

I think the strategy you're suggesting is: "We lose money on every sale, but make it up in volume!"

If the resellers down the chain were purchasing your shoes for less then your cost, would you still be happy?

Say the resellers were abusing an 80% discount coupon. Anthropic is basically closing a 95% discount coupon that was being abused.

If OpenClaw users were paying the API rate, your strategy could make more sense.

The reason Anthropic is subsidizing inference is because they are trying to capture users (marketshare). However the acquisition costs for a single OpenClaw user is much higher. And OpenClaw users are less likely to convert into profitable users later.

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In addition, there is a supply bottleneck. Currently Anthropic is having trouble servicing all the demand due to a shortage of GPU's. And in the current market it is impossible to get more GPU's (or at least prohibitively expensive).

Anthropic (and all other AI companies) also need GPU's to stay competitive: GPU's are needed to train better models. So you could view it as Anthropic has decided instead of subsidizing nonprofitable OpenClaw users, it is better to repurpose that GPU for internal R&D instead.