Anthropic's AI Is Getting Cheaper to Use. That's Becoming a Problem for Its Business

Anthropic is making Claude cheaper to use. Its computing bill, however, is moving in the other direction.

Anthropic said revenue growth from increased usage was "partially offset by a decrease of approximately $600 million from price reductions introduced as part of new model versions and contractual discounts," according to its amended SEC filing.

Meanwhile, compute and infrastructure expenses surged from $5.56 billion to $9.86 billion, an increase of roughly 77%.

That means Anthropic spent roughly 58 cents on compute and infrastructure for every dollar of revenue, versus 48 cents a quarter earlier. The measure includes computing used for research, training, and internal operations—not just serving paying Claude customers—so it isn't a per-prompt profit margin.

The $600 million figure isn't revenue that vanished from Anthropic's books. It's the amount the company says price reductions and discounts offset revenue growth driven by higher usage.

The price of cheaper AI

The cuts are not hypothetical. Claude Opus 5.5, which lowered token prices compared with Opus 5, was recently released, being more capable than any previous model, and sometimes even up to par against Fable. Anthropic also introduced Haiku 5.5 in October, pitching a much cheaper model for high-volume work.

Anthropic says Fable 5.1 reduced the cost of typical workloads by around 25%, while Opus 5.5 brought customers' cost per task down roughly 40% compared with Opus 5. The reductions reflect both lower prices and efficiency gains, rather than straight discounts across every task. Anthropic detailed Fable's lower cache-read pricing in its model announcement.

There is a business case for that strategy: cheaper, more capable AI can encourage customers to use more of it. Anthropic says users have historically expanded consumption after such releases.

But its latest quarter also shows how difficult it is to synchronize demand with supply. Anthropic typically reserves compute capacity 12 to 18 months before it becomes available, leaving much of that spending relatively fixed in the near term. It's also infamous among AI enthusiasts because its quotas tend to deplete too easily.

The quarter included $5 billion of compute under short-term commitments that Anthropic says cost significantly more than comparable capacity secured through multiyear contracts. That expense helped push the company from a $974 million operating profit in the second quarter to a $567 million operating loss in the third.

The longer-term stakes are bigger. Anthropic's IPO filing, means the company is preparing to go public, and put the company in Wall Street's bulls eye. Its updated disclosures put aggregate lease and purchasing commitments at roughly $895.4 billion, substantially all related to compute and infrastructure.

Reuters has also reported that the filing raised questions about whether infrastructure partners can secure the financing needed to deliver all that capacity. As of now, Google and Nvidia seem to be the most benefited from Anthropic's growth as its core business depends on their infrastructure.

For now, demand for Claude is still growing rapidly. The harder question is whether Anthropic can keep making its models cheaper faster than the cost of building and running them comes down. Right now, OpenAI, which is also preparing its own IPO offers a competitive model, with many usage resets, and a more generous usage quota.

That's the main issue keeping Anthropic from rising prices.