They would have to raise the price of inference (and not just inference but actual contracts) 4x, within a year or so, for PaaS not to run out of cash. But nobody wants to pay that much money, and there are a swath of companies all over the world who will do it for
much, much less. People will stick with them out of irrational fears (fear of the unknown, fear of missing out) until it gets too painful. And when people start leaving, what then? Anthropic's hope is that they can make a moat so high everyone is trapped. But it's actually not hard to replace Claude with a competitor.
They can get more efficient, but inference efficiency doesn't map linearly to cost efficiency. Firstly because software is a gas; if you give people more compute (for the same price), they immediately use it all up. But second, if you spend $50BN, you still have to make $50BN to break even. They could make inference cost $0.00000001, but that isn't going to cover their costs. That's what's driving their cost right now - they're trying to collect enough cash from people at the table to pay the bill, without the price scaring everyone out of the restaurant.
So they can't raise the price without scaring people off, and they can't lower the price and pay the bill.
