RE: LeoThread 2026-05-02 20-01

The revenue could be valuable enough that it could be shut down, but it’s allowed because it helps report ever-increasing income and stay ahead in the funding race. In other words, an enemy’s enemy becomes an ally

It's really hard to see how the back-of-the-envelope math works out…

There are generously 4 million characterized "software workers" in America. That's broad and includes many people who aren't classical engineers and don't produce much code

That comes out to nearly $1k per month of average Claude spend across every dev in America. There may be some international usage, but it likely isn't large. There may be some non-software coworker usage, but that doesn't use many tokens. Some non-engineers might use Claude to vibe code, but it's unlikely many spend hundreds per month

Even assuming 50% of software workers use Claude, that comes out to $2k spend per month per Claude user — about 10× the highest Max subscription tier. So almost all of Anthropic's revenue would have to be API billing

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 implies the average API user is going through around 25 million tokens per day

OR the other possibility is API revenue is heavily power-law dominated. Maybe roughly 100k superusers make up the majority of revenue. For that to work, a typical superuser would need to be spending on the order of $50k/month and guzzling nearly 1 billion tokens per day