They may however be obligated to not give customers access to their services at a discounted rate either - predatory pricing is at least some of the time and in some jurisdictions illegal.
Predatory pricing is selling something below cost to acquire/maintain market dominance.
The Claude subscription used for Claude Code is to all appearances being sold substantially below the cost to run it, and it certainly seems that this is being done to maintain Claude Code's market dominance and force out competitors who cannot afford to subsidize LLM inference in the same way such as OpenCode.
It's not a matter of there being a public API, I don't believe they are obligated to offer one at all, it's a matter of the Claude Subscription being priced fairly so that OpenCode (on top of, say, gemini) can be competitive.
> Predatory pricing is selling something below cost to acquire/maintain market dominance.
Yet they have to acquire market dominance in a meaningful market first if you want to prosecute, otherwise it's just a failed business strategy. Like that company selling movie tickets bellow cost.
The modern consumer benefit doctrine means predatory pricing is impossible to prosecute in 99% of cases. I’m not saying it’s right, but legally it is toothless.
This is true... in the US (though there is still that 1%). Anthropic operates globally and the US isn't the only country who ever realized it might be an issue.
The API is really expensive compared to a Max subscription! So they're probably making a lot of money (or at least losing much less) via the API. I don't think it's going anywhere. Worst case scenario they could raise the price even more.
The Claude subscription (i.e. the pro and max plans, not the API) is sold at what appears to be well below cost in what appears to be a blatant attempt to preserve/create market dominance for claude code, destroying competitors by making it impossible to compete without also having a war chest of money to give away.
You’re making a big assumption. LLM providers aren’t necessarily taking a loss on the marginal cost of inference. It’s when you include R&D and training costs that it requires the capital inputs. They’ve come out and said as much.
The Claude Code plans may not be operating at a loss either. Most people don’t use up 100% of their plan. Few people do. A lot of it goes idle.
They’re not obligated to give other companies access to their services at a discounted rate.