Flavor of the month LLM gets inundated and swamped with users.

Sideline LLMs have free compute and offer cheap prices to draw in crowd. Becomes flavor of the month LLM.

Back to step one.

It should be pretty clear by now that token prices are predominately a function of available compute.

To be fair, their growth is ridiculously insane. I don't know how else that can be described

They've been really struggling all of 2026. All of these "limited time" promos, just to have less usage than codex, and the shenanigans around "peak hour" reduction earlier in the year.

Their revenue has increased dramatically. The run rate was 9B in Dec, 19B in Mar, 47B in May. It's now at 65B.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-17/anthropic...

Annualized. Which is another word for made-up.

Made up in the sense of "we estimate that revenue will not shring in the midterm".

Made up?

https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/accounting/r...

> As it extrapolates the current financial information and performance there is an implied assumption that the present financial environment will not change significantly in the future.

Yes, but their "run rate" assumes the current level continues unchanged, right? If revenue per month goes down then the projected run rate is optimistic. However, revenue has been increasing, so the reported run rates have underestimated revenue.

I think the better question is how much more than $65B/year revenue they need to cover what they are spending on capex and model development. I would bet money their revenue in the next year is over $75B (vs $65B), but also that their amortized costs exceed their revenue.

I think their capex will exceed their revenue, but $65B is a lot to spend on training runs!

I suspect it's more likely they will spend the extra money on hardware and infrastructure (data centers) either directly or via suppliers.

If you don't understand a concept, perhaps restrain yourself from commenting on it.

Meanwhile my $100/mo subscription allows me to spank Claude all day doing the work of 4 coders and never hit any limits.

This is my experience as well -- unless I'm using Fable. That one burns through tokens like a lightsaber through butter.

It’s like we’re hot-spotting, but across providers rather than across infrastructure!

Currently (and regularly) down, indeed.