To not clickbait the HN audience, the core of my conclusion is:
Despite the inherent advantages Anthropic should have, there is an absence of external benchmarks that show a meaningful advantage on the Pareto frontier of cost vs. performance, even small.
As a PBC, the intent of the company is not only profit, but it's hard to analyze the counterfactuals of if Anthropic were a pure for-profit or a non-profit
Pretty much every major American inference provider claims to make a profit on API-based inference. Consumer plans might be subsidized overall, but it's hard to say since they're a black box and some consumers don't fully use their plans
Despite the inherent advantages Anthropic should have, there is an absence of external benchmarks that show a meaningful advantage on the Pareto frontier of cost vs. performance, even small.