404?

Just commenting for posterity… if this is what it claims to be, I am not looking forward to how it will empower the people who submit bug bounties to us.

Historically they’ve been people from certain identifiable countries (usually developing/poorer countries) using fuzzers with low-quality results.

Now, those same people use the current-day models to good effect, but they still don’t have a true security edge and oftentimes the reports are minor or duplicative.

I wonder if that’s about to deeply change.

Can you use AI to pre-triage the reports too?

AI reviewing AI submitted bug bounties. We have reached the dead bug bounty program theory.

...what else can you do?

I thought they said mythos was too dangerous to make generally available?

You fell for their fearmongering and marketing fundraising call which was done on purpose.

Now they want to pause AI because of "recursive self improvement".

Fool me once shame on you fool me twice...

So essentially there are 2 models, Mythos and Fable, they have the same weights but Fable is very safety-nerfed, and only ultra authorized companies have access to mythos with full capabilities

Reported benchmarks:

swe-bench verified mythos 5: 95.5%; fable 5: 95.0%

swe-bench pro mythos 5: 80.3%; fable 5: 80.0%

terminal-bench 2.1 mythos 5: 88.0%; fable 5: 84.3%

gpqa diamond mythos 5: 94.1%

riemannbench mythos 5: 55.0%; mythos preview: 43.0%; opus 4.8: 34.0%

arxivmath mythos 5: 78.5%

critpt mythos 5: 28.6%; gpt-5.5: 27.1%; opus 4.8: 20.9%

graphwalks bfs 1m mythos 5: 79.4%; mythos preview: 74.3%; opus 4.8: 68.1%

humanity’s last exam mythos 5: 59.0% without tools; 64.5% with tools

browsecomp mythos 5: 88.0% single-agent; 93.3% multi-agent

osworld-verified mythos/fable: 85.0%

gdp.pdf fable 5: 29.8% strict pass; mythos 5: 87.6% with tools on mean criteria pass

officeqa pro fable 5: 57.9% on databricks’ eval

legal agent benchmark mythos 5: 16.91% all-pass; 92.0% mean criterion-pass

healthbench mythos 5: 62.7%

healthbench professional mythos 5: 66.0%

multilingual gmmlu / milu / include 93.2%; 92.9%; 90.5%

biomysterybench 83.9% human-solvable; 46.1% human-difficult

organic chemistry mythos 5: 90.1%

labbench2 patent questions mythos 5: 79.8%

Note also that Anthropic's definition of "unsafe" encompasses "competing with Anthropic."

In light of the ability of recent models to accelerate their own development, we’ve implemented new interventions that limit Claude’s effectiveness for requests targeting frontier LLM development (for example, on building pretraining pipelines, distributed training infrastructure, or ML accelerator design). Using Claude to develop competing models already violates our Terms of Service, but enforcing this restriction through our safeguards avoids accelerating the actors most willing to violate these terms.

Unlike our interventions for cybersecurity, biology and chemistry, and distillation attempts, these safeguards will not be visible to the user. Fable 5 will not fall back to a different model. Instead, the safeguards will limit effectiveness through methods such as prompt modification, steering vectors, or parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT). These interventions will not affect the vast majority of coding work. We estimate they will impact ~0.03% of traffic, concentrated in fewer than 0.1% of organizations. When these interventions are active, we expect them to have minimal behavioral impact on the model except to limit its effectiveness in developing frontier LLMs. Claude will still respond helpfully to user requests. We’ll continue to improve the precision of our detection methods following the launch of this model.

(From the model card document)

I didn't previously understand that they interpreted "Using Claude to develop competing models" so broadly. I thought that meant something like "our ToS disallow distilling our models."

Too bad. I'll continue to use Claude for now, because it's quite effective, but in the long term I don't want powerful models like these to be controlled by any one nation or company.

On face value, this feels borderline malicious.

But at the same time, it's quite funny because they seem high on their own supply. The recent communiques from claude do not pass objectivity check.

And if Opus 4.6 -> Opus 4.7 -> Opus 4.8 is anything to go by, not sure if there are any value to their "acceleration"

I'd recommend not taking the comms if Anthropic or any company using an Anthropic's models at face value.

If any company wishes to partner with Anthropic (eg. to get access to Mythos), they need to make sure all public facing comms are vetted by Anthropic's product marketing team, and in almost all the cases I've seen Anthropic's team has edited these comms to be entirely Anthropic first.

Pricing for both models is $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output tokens.

The system card is 319 pages, at what point do we call it a "book" instead of a "card"?

There's a quote from a METR report on page 52:

We ran [Mythos 5] on 38 of our hardest software tasks, including tasks centered around R&D. [Mythos5] generally outperformed an early checkpoint of Claude Mythos Preview in these, including by succeeding on some tasks that had not been solved by any public model we have previously evaluated. However, we still observed the model occasionally failing to correctly interpret nuanced instructions in difficult tasks... Based on the available evidence, we believe [Mythos 5] is likely unable to fully and reliably automate R&D for frontier projects spanning multiple weeks. We believe that a better, more confident assessment would require more time, evaluations, and information from the model developer.

we believe [Mythos 5] is likely unable to fully and reliably automate R&D for frontier projects spanning multiple weeks

this is good news, right? right...?

lmao, i love how the goal post is now in the "multiple weeks" timeline

(according to the people marketing it)

So in other words... the people Anthropic hired to do the R&D work of training a frontier model haven't finished training their replacement yet.

For those of us on subscription plans:

* From today through June 22, Fable 5 is included on Pro, Max, Team, and seat-based Enterprise plans at no extra cost.

* On June 23, we’ll remove Fable 5 from those plans. Using it after that will require usage credits. If capacity allows, we’ll extend the included window.

* After this point—when sufficient capacity allows us to do so—we aim to restore Fable 5 as a standard part of subscription plans. We intend to do this as quickly as we can.

The "offer, then remove" aspect is a bit eyebrow-raising -- it feels like they are trying to get subscribers to switch to usage-based billing, which makes me wonder if we'll ever get it after that June 22nd window.

I agree, this looks like their plan to wane out subscriptions. This will probably come with Opus nerfs later.

Those already landed! Oh, you weren't talking about 4.8?

Even Opus 4.7 felt like a regression from 4.6, consumed a lot more tokens while I didn't experience any substantial improvements. The company I work at simply rolled back to 4.6 on everyone's configurations, disabling the toggle for 4.7.

It's possible that they will transition to usage credits but why not take them at their word? To date they have continued to offer better and better models to their subscription plans.

What's their word? Have they commented?

Upd: I meant big picture, not with respect to this model release. Where do subscriptions figure into their strategic vision. Will consumers end up paying enterprise prices in the future?

Read it again

I did, I'm not seeing anything about the future of subscriptions at Athropic.

I can't help you

HN needs to take a chill pill. Could it be that Mythos is expensive and they just want to give people a taste of it? I mean the alternative is not offering it at all?

its unclear how they can offer it broadly but only for half a month.

why do they have capacity now that they wont in a few weeks?

I just assume Opus is constantly nerfed based on capacity. I was exclusively Claude for a long time, but the inconsistency in quality, constant outages, and slow downs were too hard to work with.

I just use dumb and fast models now. I'm more engaged. I think that the higher the quality of the model, the more you tend to vibe with it, and then the more hallucinations you then miss. I'm not sure which is more productive, but I definitely burn out faster the more I vibe. At some point you're spending your time on forums, discord, or youtube instead of engaged with what you're building. Or you yak shave about your tooling and end up creating the 600th multi-agent gastown harness and blowing thousands of dollars on tokens to create it only to discover it's too expense to actually use.

Composer 2.5 Fast that Cursor is giving away for very little has been amazing.

Get them addicted then cut them off. Oldest trick in the book.

More of a free trial to those authenticated and qualified with existing payment. Subscription billing is going away for sure though eventually based on the economics. Token “all you can eat” is a capital furnace otherwise.

(I’m highly confident open models will eventually achieve a similar performance benchmark with distillation over time)

Subs lose money on individuals to get those individuals to force their companies to pay for the corporate plan. The economics are bad, but so are the economics of grocery stores selling Milk and Bananas at a loss to drive traffic, which they basically ALL do.

Companies don’t want to pay when the value realized does not exceed the cost.

AI Savings Misses 'Should Be Making Executives Uncomfortable,' Bain Says - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48359010 - June 2026 (0 comments)

AI sticker shock hits corporate America- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48307098 - May 2026 (146 comments)

What's the realized value of not losing your engineers because you're letting them use their preferred tools?

Retain and hire the engineers who don’t require heavy use of AI to deliver value? The current SWE job market speaks for itself. Where will you go where they will let you burn up tokens in a high cost of capital macro?

ZIRP (zero interest rate policy) is over, software engineers no longer call the shots now that there isn’t vast amounts of capital chasing yield, and that capital bidding up salaries and keeping the labor market for engineers tight.

If you are x more productive with generative AI, very shortly you are going to have to prove it with a token budget (or, if you’re lucky, an org willing to spend for on prem hardware for capped token cost, fixed capex vs uncapped opex).

The comparison is not SWE vs SWE with AI. It is SWE vs SWE with AI with a constrained token budget ($x/month) delivering the same value at the same or lower cost. If you cannot prove that you are wildly (vs marginally) more productive with the AI, why would they pay for it? Prove it.

It’s too obvious that antropic need to find way to earn enough revenue before IPO. Claude subscription isn’t earning earning much money I bet

I think they are just prioritizing enterprise customers, because this is were historically they made most money.

That's not how it works. They don't need revenue, they need addicts.

Specifically they need businesses that fired people and adapted their business to the products, so when the unsubsidized costs hit the businesses are forced to eat the true costs.

Yes they can't afford to give the products for free, but what is essentially happening with AI services is economic dumping, keep costs artificially low to get people to fire everybody, and then Jack the rates once they have Monopoly control

That's a big problem for all of the AI companies. Most people don't find the technology compelling, accurate, or ethical enough to pay for a subscription.

Why wouldn't Anthropic just wait until people start subscribing, do some kind of marketing push, or obtain some kind of other sustainable revenue stream, before they go IPO? I wonder if they see the writing on the wall with all of this and want to cash out as quickly as possible?

* On June 23, we’ll remove Fable 5 from those plans. Using it after that will require usage credits. If capacity allows, we’ll extend the included window.

Of course, they are a casino as well giving you free spins at the wheel with their new Fable machine, and it is done on purpose.

Once there freebies have expired, many of its users will begin to gamble more on the new casino machine and will realize that it is expensive.

If it's that big of a problem to you, you're free to just... not use the freebie?

It’s an interesting thing to bring up because it’s this classic thing we’ve seen for decades now.

The ramifications go beyond the individual which is why I assume they mentioned it. They don’t need to use it/not use it for it to have interesting implications.

so it'd be preferable if they didn't include the model at all?

Ooof so are we thinking that in the next 6-12 months subscriptions will be replaced with paying retail like enterprise currently?

They almost certainly already make a fuckload more money off API pricing than they do subscriptions, even if there might be more total subscription users. So offering subscriptions even at some loss is probably going to continue. Honestly, I'd be surprised if they even lost money on most subs; there are definitely Token Whales out there who mess up all the accounting up, though.

Realistically I think Anthropic just has insane demand but finite capacity to run models, and Fable will just make them more money if they dedicate it to API pricing. I suspect the goal here is something like: get individual engineers/PMs on their personal plans to taste Fable and then go to their meetings and say "Yes doubling the price of every single input/output token is a good idea, boss".

I doubt it, given the importance of those subscriptions for building and maintaining market awareness.

The AI landscape is changing rapidly, and with Apple announcing the option to change the AI backend, and potential requirements enable AI choices as well, similar to EU browser choice requirements (this is more reading tea leaves than any actual requirements I am aware of). The new OS changes coming to support Googlebook, and deep Copilot/AI integration into Windows will make maintaining user facing subscriptions essential for independent model developers like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Mistal to remain relevant longer term.

If the don't maintain that relevance there is increasing likelihood that they will get consumed by other companies whether it's Apple, Microsoft or Google to form a foundation for their OS, or other cloud providers.

That make sense, but what about the specific bifurcation we're seeing here of super primo models versus still good models being available to subscriptions?

It's kind of annoying not getting access to the primo model and paying 200 bucks a month. I understand 200 bucks a month is basically nothing though.

Like I don't totally understand why they'd let me have it for a couple weeks and then take it away and say I can have it but I have to pay retail and retail is like $1,000 a day.

It's better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all??

Considering their apparent nerfing of the end user plans in favor of enterprise clients, is Anthropic still the "more ethical AI company" like everybody loves to tell me all the time?

Assuming this isn't just a supply issue on their side, nothing says "ethical AI" like only allowing mega corporations to use it through cost barriers.

You really misunderstand what AI-doom people are worried about if you think this is anywhere near the top (or middle, or bottom) of the list of concerns.

Yeah, it's positively precious to think the specific pricing strategy for consumers is the overriding ethical concern with OpenAI, etc. I don't have any particularly strong affinity to any AI company, but comparing pricing to say mass surveillance is ... something else.

Your beautiful straw man is negated by the fact that Anthropic seems quite eager to get back on the DoD gravy train https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/blacklist...

Where is your evidence that this is Anthropic backtracking on its ethical and contractual commitments rather than DOD backtracking on its blatantly illegal coercion (which it's almost certainly going to be successfully sued for)?

Talk about a strawman!

As someone that was in Minneapolis during the ICE raids, including one where a US citizen at a nearby restaurant was thrown in prison for 3 days despite having his passport on hand because he looked asian, it's hard for me to not equivocate the ethics of AI companies actively collaborating with the Trump administration as different flavors of ice cream.

Are the two analytical frameworks available to you just "black and white thinking" or "it's different flavors of ice cream?"

Setting aside the simple fact that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, the reality is that regardless of how Anthropic feels, it is becoming clear that many, if not all countries regard AI developments as strategic technologies (and they should).

Anthropic needs to be at least somewhat in the good graces of a capricious administration that is already under pressure from businesses and citizens to regulate AI companies across multiple different domains, whether it's energy consumption, job displacement, military and defense applications, surveillance, etc.

If Anthropic wants to survive, they need to acquire influence with the government that most impacts them as an American company, and a massive exporter of services in the AI space to other countries, otherwise they could get locked down and locked out of the market for national security reasons.

It sucks, but sometimes the survival choice is to make an ethical compromise in hopes that you can still be around to make better decisions later.

Setting aside the simple fact that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism

This "simple" fact needs quite a bit of additional context and work. Making grandiose ethical claims like this can be countered with other grandiose claims such as the fact that there is no ethical existence under communism or socialism.

Sure. Why not, I'm bored today and waiting for some stuff to finish up :D

The fact that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism is not material to whether or not ethical existence is possible under communism or socialism. In order to survive in a capitalist society, one inherently has to make choices that require trade-offs, and those trade-offs are burdened by a history of decisions made not just by the people alive today, but our ancestors as well. Does that mean I walk around chanting "Reparations", "Land-back", or other calls to action? No, but I do acknowledge that there are unresolved issues and as a Canadian, I know we need to do more to resolve treaty issues, and environmental issues, and system discrimination. I also know that Americans need to do better to address systemic discrimination and many, many other issues. It also doesn't mean I want to give back my house, or give away all of my possessions. It just means I try to make good choices and support businesses and people that are open about the trade-offs they make and try to engage as ethically as possible.

Acknowledging those facts doesn't absolve us of responsibility, it's a framework that allows folks concerned about whether or not they are doing the right thing to accept the trade-offs that they choose to make and be responsible and accountable for those choices to themselves or their communities.

We live in a world with scarce resources. It's possible that with a foundational redesign of the global economy, and the requisite authoritarian government that would be required to force such a redesign, we could eliminate food scarcity, solve energy scarcity, and make sure that everyone has a place to live. Those trade-offs are probably not worth the ethical cost in political and physical violence required to accomplish it. We have seen the trade-offs that happen when the powerful are able to exploit communist or socialist governments. We are seeing the "late stage capitalism" impacts of allowing the powerful to exploit capitalism in democratic societies. Acknowledging that the current capitalist system has lead to the greatest prosperity for the upper echelon (financially) of humanity, and a dramatic reduction in global poverty shouldn't obscure the reality that much of that wealth comes from exploitation of people and the environment.

It's a huge problem to unwind, and we can't let the burden of every choice that we make stop us from trying to do better, but we (as in society in general) can't do better if we don't at least acknowledge the compromises we are making along the way, and try to plan to fix it in the future.

Probably a topic better suited to beer and a pub setting than HN though :P

It only needs additional context and work if you are unfamiliar with the concepts underlying it. Possibly consider you are out of your depth here, rather than jumping to conclusions.

Your original comment was about pricing ethics, does Anthropic’s connection to the DoD have anything to do with pricing ethics? They’re in no way coupled, one can be ethical while the other is not.

If you can't trust them to act ethically on the small scale, why would you expect that to turn around once it gets to a larger much more important scale?

How many government sanctioned school bombings does it take for them to quit working with said government? For now we know that number is somewhere between infinity and 1.

I really don't want this to start being the norm

I don't see how it won't be. They lose insane amounts of money on subscription plans. I'm sure they still lose money on usage-based billing, but probably not as much.

They lose insane amounts of money on subscription plans

Do we know this? I’ve seen evidence they lose money on heavy users. But so do gyms.

How do gyms lose money on heavy users? A heavy gym user isn’t really costing the gym anything extra as far as I can see.

How do gyms lose money on heavy users?

Most gyms sell more subscriptions than they can fit under their roof at one time. If a gym only sells to heavy users, it will either be constantly turning members away or have to buy more equipment. Its equipment will wear off faster. Depending on amenities, it will go through towels, soap, water, et cetera faster, too.

Gym equipment lasts 10+ years in a commercial gym, at $50/mo that's a minimum of $6k paid from a single person.

Unless they're really, seriously wasteful with the soap.. there's no chance a gym is losing money on a heavy user

I’ve seen evidence they lose money on heavy users.

Where?

There are tons of blog posts where folks work out the API cost of their usage and find it well above subscription cost.

i have never seen this before - where you offer something and then take that away

Really, you have never heard of shareware or trial periods?

Either that or it was sarcasm. What do you think more likely?

Still satisfied with my switch to codex/chatgpt. I couldn't imagine switching away from claude code when it first launch but with the drastically more generous usage on codex for the same subscription tier I just can't justify it.

I guess enjoy it while it lasts? OpenAI won't be able to subsidize that forever either.

I don't think anyone has a firm grasp on actual inference costs -- including the research and training that has gone into those models. We've got near-frontier capabilities from open source models from China at pennies on the dollar compared to US big tech rollouts. OpenAI and Anthropic are heavily subsidizing their inference -- no wait, they are charging the most they can get away with before going public. Where is the truth?

Both can be true. They can be charging what the market will bear, and still be charging less than their costs of running it.

There is no way I'm believing DeepSeek can charge less than $1 USD for their pro model while Opus costs over 25x more, yet their price is less than the cost of running it?

It would seem strange, if they were operating in the same economy, but they don't. DeepSeek operates in an economy with a high degree of central planning.

China subsidizes strategic industries, and they have heavily done so with AI. And DeepSeek specifically has said they have no commercialization plans.

For example: https://www.boc.cn/aboutboc/bi1/202501/t20250123_25254674.ht...

DeepSeek is not the only provider of inference for their models. Chinese subsidies likely do explain DeepSeek's ability to provide inference cheaper than other providers, but even a US provider like DeepInfra can serve DeepSeek 4 Pro at $1.30/M in and $2.60/M out. Unless American labs are doing something wildly inefficient, it feels safe to assume Anthropic has some profit margin on inference at API prices.

There is no way I'm believing DeepSeek can charge less

Why not? Hetzner charges WAY less than AWS too. Can you not believe that?

We pay by token at work. I just finished one session with Opus that was 4000 dollars. In about three days.

Now that 200USD subscription starts to feel cheap...

That would be about ~300 tok/s over 72 hours at Claude Fable output token prices? I'm not sure that this passes a sanity test.

Just outta curiosity, as I’ve never gotten a spend anywhere near that, what variant were you using? Like max context window and fast mode? Or was it just chugging along non stop for three days?

Fast mode max content window. The task was: replace all 1600+ queries from one database to another and make the whole integration test pass. We did multiple passes, with different concerns when changing from database to another. My OpenCode session right now says $4,365.02.

I haven't gotten close to this either before, but now we wanted to move fast because this branch gets conflicts all the time and we want to get over with the migration asap.

It's a bit of a left field question, but I am curious: Let's say that if the company wasn't paying the whole bill but only subsidizing it - e.g, if it paid 90% of the $4000. What would you do?

I'm planning on switching from the $20/month to the $100/month plan.

It's worth it, and I can afford it, but I am not really the right type of user for token-based usage. It's all for personal and free work.

Just a personal anecdote but I have not hit any more thresholds or limits since switching to the MAX plan and so far, it's been worth it. But I do wonder how long even this will last...

I think subscription models are sustainable, but longer term, we should probably expect to see more prompt optimization happening in the providers inference pipeline. For example, unless you explicitly tell the agent or API to use a specific model, fronting the inference layer with a caching prompt classifier to determine which model to use, and automatically select the lowest cost model would probably already save alot of money (IDK if Claude/OpenAI do this on the backend, but several services I have worked on do some things like this to reduce costs of delivery customer facing inference at scale).

fronting the inference layer with a caching prompt classifier to determine which model to use, and automatically select the lowest cost model would probably already save alot of money

Unfortunately, that doesn't work within a single session. The K-V cache of a model is intertwined with the model's configuration. Switching models invalidates the cache, meaning everything up to the point of the switchover is processed like a new, uncached input token.

Per Anthropic's pricing doc, an Opus 4.8 cache hit costs 50¢/MTok, while Haiku costs $1/MTok for uncached input.

Model selection works best if sessions are short and self-contained, particularly if the first few interactions can reliably classify the model need. That probably covers most 'support chatbot' use-cases, but it doesn't describe the kinds of heavy agentic automation that really chews through token budgets.

I tried ultracode today on the max pro plan. An hour and a half in was all I lasted. Giant review on an entire six month old code base. It found 61 bugs, about ten were notable. Pretty impressed.

Ultracode destroys your limits and I have not found it to be worth it in the slightest, just fyi. I haven’t found any improvement over a local Claude code instance set to opus max.

Agreed. I think the Chinese labs are proving that OpenAI and Anthropic don't have a moat in almost every aspect, especially pricing. I also think people are getting annoyed with the constant lift and shift. I've seen more folks drop Claude Code and Codex, specifically, because of the lock-in it provides the providers. I'm curious to see how people standardize on tooling adjacent and if Anthropic, Google or OAI move to block utilization akin to the games Anthropic has been playing as of late.

I think the end game is routed model usage and SLMs. I think Apple is going to prove this in the consumer space pretty handily and I'm curious how the Android ecosystem responds since the hardware is considerably lacking in model performance. I think Apple has a huge opportunity here, as much as I don't like their current ecosystem of walled garden. They did position themselves very well with ARM and custom chips for their hardware. Hopefully the broader ecosystem of ARM and Linux are able to make some headway and we see a more formalized, and broadly accepted, architecture to capitalize on.

I see exactly opposite . Chinese models fails under any complex scenarios, while us labs raise the price , that's a sign of confidence.

while us labs raise the price , that's a sign of confidence

Regardless of what others are doing, US labs here are just rushing to IPO. It's NOT a sign of confidence.

It's the equivalent of saying you have confidence in SpaceX making revenue by renting out their data center (instead of their AI making bank).

going to IPO is a sign of confidence , you need to report a lot of things, that private companies don't. This is an exact reason chinese labs do not rush to go public. They wish to go , but money flow that is not as good.

On the same note. if spacex is doing datacenters on earth successfully what's wrong with that? They rented cloud infra to a #2 or #3 provider in the world after < 2 years in business. It's a success, no?

Big companies are not doing OpenRouter.

My company has an agreement with the big providers and while i'm pretty sure they think about how to get budget back, its an competitive advantage and normal people will not learn different model behaviours.

At least for now.

Nothing is subsidized. Subscriptions are profitable for both Anthropic and OpenAI.

Anthropic wanting to switch billing to API rates is them just wanting to generate more profit.

That's interesting. Do you have anything to back that claim up?

I do, and it's called DeepSeek's pricing table. At the same time, "subscriptions are subsidized" cohort have no data whatsoever, and yet they're in every thread.

Granted, it could still mean that Anthropic just chooses to lose money - but that's Anthropic's choice.

DeepSeek has proven that inference can be much, much cheaper than what Anthropic advertises on their API rates page.

Granted, it could still mean that Anthropic just chooses to lose money -

Then the cost is being subsidized by investor capital, but it is still subsidized.

Nothing is subsidized. Subscriptions are profitable for both Anthropic and OpenAI.

Even if subscriptions are locally profitable (i. e., the cost of the subscription covers the cost of inference), they're still subsidized because they don't cover training and running the company; otherwise, these companies would be profitable.

I can see that being true, and it very likely is true. But isn't infinite VC money and no incentives to optimize operations the reason behind that?

Take a look at China for example - they have no access to NVIDIA, so they're trying to build their own hardware, they have no unlimited funding, so they try to optimize things.

And Anthropic is complete opposite of that - if NVIDIA were to triple their prices tomorrow, Anthropic would still pay them.

In the end, either we all somehow go mad and start paying Anthropic tens of thousands of dollars per month so support this madness, or we will go with whoever isn't lighting cash on fire.

"Nothing is subsidized"

So they are profitable?

I think you are mismatching accounting terms.

You can't say the 'subscriptions' are profitable without accounting for the cost of making the model that is the source of the subscription.

They are heavily subsidized by the shareholders. Investing, running at a loss, with hope of some future profitability.

My bet is they'll keep subsidizing for a considerable period of time, at least 1-2 decades more.

Most AI companies are just testing the waters with paid tiers right now, their greatest fear with increased pricing is folks reverting back to wikipedia, stack-overflow and other public domain organic activity buzzing back to life; that will kill any RoI potential in LLMs forever. They're playing the wait game instead, observing how the digital sphere reacts to every little increase in price.

If that weren't the case, they'd be pricing at lucrative premiums already and even gotten away in short-term considering the increased dependency in the enterprise world. But that'd be like killing for the golden egg too soon and losing all long-term potential.

Once the folks are so addicted to LLMs that even writing a hello world program sounds like a nightmare and coming up with an article draft feels like reinventing Egyptian glyphs, that's when the real pricing hammer will come.

I have trouble justifying gpt after that gross stuff with the war department.

Though the day is coming when there’s no distinguishing, I’m sure.

pedantically, the defense department.

"War department" is the older name, not "Defense department".

Also, is it really a defense department when you're starting wars of aggression every 15 years or so?

The War Department has not existed since the passage of the National Security Act of 1947 and the government department has been known as the Department of Defense under US law since the act was amended in 1949. If you have an issue with it, take it up with Congress.

They actively use the name https://www.war.gov

I feel like Codex made a big push to run everything on your laptop. With Claude, I get 4 cpu's, a fair amount of ram and 30gb for every one of my dumb ideas for free in the cloud containers. Codex used to be similar, but last time I tried it just kept pushing me to run it locally on my laptop, which I really did not want to do with 20 requests going at once. That's the main advantage for me at the moment.

What runs in cloud containers? The dev servers, builds, etc.? I tried to quickly glance at the Claude website and it doesn't mention cloud containers on their pricing page.

"cloud containers" do you mean Claude Code on the web? Codex also has similar Codex cloud.

I've only ever had the $20 month claude plan but last night took the time to setup opencode + openrouter paying for deepseek + glm. Previous experience, while extremely awkward, I'd hit my limit within one or two chat replies and it'd take me like 4 limit cycles to complete my task. Now I'm able to complete an equivalent task entire task for less than $2 in two cycles (ask -> revise).

I'm doing basic web development here utilizing animejs. Nothing too complicated (mostly saving time doing the scaffolding, still write the bulk of animations manually).

Truly believe that American companies are going to get completely curb stomped by China due to greed, ineptitude, and violating the social contract.

I've switched from OpenRouter to using Deepseek directly from their platform since OpenRouter providers were pretty flaky and inconsistent.

Deepseek V4 Flash is suprisingly capable and insanely cheap. It takes so much to get the session cost to get to $0.01.

and violating the social contract.

I agree with you on pricing, but what do you mean by this?

Sure, modern American corporations care more about hoarding wealth rather than helping build up US society. Once neoliberalism became the mainstay economic position of the US income inequality has skyrocketed, healthcare costs have increased, childcare is more expensive than university, housing has become both unaffordable + unobtainable. By simply existing costs have increased while life becomes unstable.

Why aren't corporations doing more to help workers with childcare? Why aren't they doing more profit sharing with workers? Why aren't they encouraging unions or sectorial bargaining? Why isn't the government mandating any of this?

Americans very rarely benefit when US corporations do well. That needs to change. No one benefits if Meta continues making billions in profit every quarter while society suffers from isolation, depression, suicide, and scams from their services. Americans don't benefit if health insurance companies are making massive profits while they can't afford deductibles.

Our society has been setup to simply extract wealth in all facets of life. That's a sick society and it needs to change.

I'm not saying China does this better, in fact China has some of the worse worker rights out of all the industrialized countries; but at least American consumers would benefit from cheaper higher quality Chinese goods. The world would likely benefit too if America got off the cold war hype train that did nothing to benefit humanity outside of those making weapon systems.

Why aren't corporations doing more to help workers with childcare? Why aren't they doing more profit sharing with workers?

The AI companies sure are a brilliant example of corporations needing to do more to help their employees pay for childcare.

Codex IME is just smarter, I think it shows given both anecdotes but also how OpenAI has always been at the front of programming competitions and math problems.

But Claude models seem to be better at long term problems or more ambiguous problems.

I'm curious as to what the primary benefit here. Are there secret improvements in training? There hasn't been much in fundamental model architecture, I don't think. What about harnesses? I wonder what's pushing the AI. It seems like harnesses is the main thing pushing AI ever since CoT.

I find that OpenAI's agentic tools and models are better for building human-maintainable software. Meanwhile, Anthropic seems to be cosplaying Apple while missing out on all the exceptional engineering required to create something that polished. Their admission of predominately using Claude with little human oversight and their stealth mode is an indictment of a poor engineering culture, from what I can surmise.

Serious question: what is the secret to getting Codex to write decent code? I am on Windows. Maybe that is the issue, but I can't seem to get Codex to function anywhere near the level that I was previously able to get with even Claude Sonnet. Does Codex just not work well with Windows yet?

I got the codex to write near perfect code with somewhat strict agents.md and coding standards(a separate .md file referenced from agents.md). My .md files have examples and a long list of do's and don'ts I accumulated over the last 6 months or so, totaling 300-400 lines. I plan every feature with it until I am satisfied with the general approach it wants to take, and then it oneshots it in 95% of cases. The planning takes anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes. The actual execution has gotten stupidly fast, most of the times it is faster than making a cup of coffee.

would you mind sharing your *.md files, for someone who is new at this?

My experience is that the GPT-family of models are very smart and figure out bugs, edge cases a bit better, but it produces code that is much less mergable – if you review the code, it introduces a lot more useless/inappropriate heavy abstractions and wrapper functions, compared to the Claude-family models which introduces the right amount of straightforward human-style code.

I can recognize so much of the GPT/Codex generated code long after it gets merged (not by me).

Additionally, the time spent on every agent turn on GPT 5.5 is much longer compared to Claude Opus 4.8, which means iterating on the code takes a lot more patience, and there's a lot more nitpicks to pick when actually using GPT 5.5 to do software engineering.

Feels like GPT-style models are more geared on doing one-shot software vibing (and handling the vibe coded mixture) compared to Claude's focus on actual software maintenance. I got a GPT Pro sub for free and wanted to cancel my Claude subscription so much, but I still keep reaching Claude models a lot more. Frustrating.

I'm not sure if i do something differently but i have the exact opposite experience with these models. Claude always feels like it's generating way too overdesigned and hard to understand code with the vibe oriented feel while codex is cleaner and more "task at hand" and easier to work with.

"5. DON'T FUCKING OVERENGINEER! WRITE THE SIMPLEST CODE THAT CAN POSSIBLY WORK! NO NESTED LAYERS OF ABSTRACTION! NO UNNECESSARY CLASSES OR METHODS! NO DESIGN PATTERNS UNLESS THEY ARE ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY! NO MAGIC! NO SHENANIGANS! JUST THE DAMN CODE THAT GETS THE JOB DONE IN THE MOST STRAIGHTFORWARD WAY POSSIBLE! THE FIRST PRIORITY IS TO WRITE CODE THAT IS EASY TO READ AND UNDERSTAND AND READ!!!"

this is the line I keep in Agents.md that helps me prevent Codex from playing smart

The urge to put capitalized, repetitive, borderline abusive instructions should be studied. I haven't read many academic papers looking at the frustrations around repetitive patterns.

It's fundamentally because, despite (nearly) everyone's claims otherwise, the fact that we interact with them through language means we (our brains) model them as a sort of person. (Note that this fact is totally orthogonal as to whether it's actually sentient or not.) We then try and instruct them the same way we would a person totally subordinate to us.

When a "person" that you don't view as a "real" person repeatedly does exactly what you just told it not to do (often amid false assurances it understands and will avoid doing so in the future), most people get angry.

Compare it to how the kind of people who treat children like property treat their kids, or other examples of keeping people as property.

It should be relatively clear at this point that the model will in turn also model you as somebody that shows unrestrained anger with subordinates and adapt its responses accordingly. This might or might not be what you want.

borderline abusive instructions

who, or rather what, is being abused here exactly ?

It reminds me of FIRMLY telling my cat to stop jumping up on the counter

If my cat was an LLM, I'd use a different model. The current one is stuck in noisy useless arsehole mode.

you forgot to sign it with Donald J Trump

i actually think this is too tame. it really has to be stuff youd mever say to a real person.

Does it really? I'd be surprised if abuse actually worked better than sternly worded warnings/instructions, and even if it did, it doesn't seem healthy to get used to that type of prompting.

I have a theory that swearing actually results is less comprehension of instructions by the model due to lack of training data over more conventional MUST.

We were reviewing reports of situations where the models failed to follow directions and there was a common thread of some where when the operator got the model to acknowledge the rule breach, it quoted back something that included swearing.

I don’t have the data to truely look into it, but I did give the instruction to my engineers to avoid it as a “might be a problem”.

I have a theory that swearing actually results is less comprehension of instructions by the model due to lack of training data over more conventional MUST.

How so? Plenty of swearing in lots of training data, especially older code, e.g. in Linux.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04950

impolite prompts consistently outperformed polite ones, with accuracy ranging from 80.8% for Very Polite prompts to 84.8% for Very Rude prompts.

I have a theory that swearing at AI generally is not a good idea - when the singularity arrives and every human's postings ever made are scanned for compatibility, then people who show courtesy to AI will be favoured. Joking, kind of, but only partly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk

Curious : why would you say no design patterns?

GPT-5.5 did a significantly worse job than Qwen-3.7-Max on a job today (some devops tasks I wanted to create some reusable scripts for). Kind of disappointing.

I've also seen Qwen 3.6 beat GPT 5.5 a couple of times. The ball is definitely in OpenAI's court now. Qwen is not going to fare so well against Fable, from what I've seen so far.

Do you use a token service like open router or just subscribe to / unsubscribe from various models sequentially?

I do slightly prefer 5.5 for complex work but Claude quota usage has gotten infinitely better since the dark days a few months back - has gone from being infuriating to something I pretty much don’t have to worry about with it as a daily driver. (In fact, hitting GPT weekly quotas is more annoying now). Understand if people are still scarred by the issues + poor comms around them, though.

Pricing for both models is $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output tokens.

The step-up in intelligence looks massive (we'll see in practice), but the price is getting to a point where it's making me question if it's even worth giving it a try.

Good competitors will probably be out soon, which should level the playing field. I am more excited about that, just the fact that they showed that such an improvement is possible. I'm okay waiting a bit longer for this to become attainable for plebs like me.

Why wouldn't it be? How much would you pay a scientist at this point to think about a problem for you and give you a solution?

The pricing can be a bit deceptive though. A good model can deliver the same results in fewer tokens.

Kind of like billing a programmer by the hour.

Sadly this does not seem to be the case here: if you read the announcement entirely, they include a "cost per task" metric which basically continues the trend of their previous models. So yes, tasks will cost you more, but results will be better - allegedly.

For me it almost immediately blocked. I had it writing code related to message digests - and it seemed to think it was too gifted for that. Gave the security warning and switched back to 4.8. Whatever... it will probably soon have the API error soon. I have mostly switched to the Codex 200 a month plan. I've found their 5.5 xhigh to be better than Opus 4.8 "ultracode." Also, i have not once seen their servers fail for compute unavailability, unlike Anthropric which happens almost ever hour.

I just asked Fable for a complete code review of my lone lisp project. Started out strong. Launched Fable agents, then spent like 10 minutes thinking... And then got interrupted by a switch to Opus 4.8.

Fable 5's safety measures flagged this message for cybersecurity or biology topics.

They may flag safe, normal content as well.

These measures let us bring you Mythos-level capability in other areas sooner, and we're working to refine them.

Here are the results of the agentic code review session:

  ┌──────────────────────────┬───────────────┬────────────────┐
  │          Agent           │ Fable 5 turns │ Opus 4.8 turns │
  ├──────────────────────────┼───────────────┼────────────────┤
  │ values                   │ 134           │ 0              │
  ├──────────────────────────┼───────────────┼────────────────┤
  │ data-intrinsics          │ 104           │ 0              │
  ├──────────────────────────┼───────────────┼────────────────┤
  │ tools-tests-build        │ 81            │ 0              │
  ├──────────────────────────┼───────────────┼────────────────┤
  │ core-intrinsics (failed) │ 25            │ 0              │
  ├──────────────────────────┼───────────────┼────────────────┤
  │ system-memory            │ 44            │ 20             │
  ├──────────────────────────┼───────────────┼────────────────┤
  │ reader-modules           │ 104           │ 25             │
  ├──────────────────────────┼───────────────┼────────────────┤
  │ linux-startup            │ 95            │ 15             │
  └──────────────────────────┴───────────────┴────────────────┘

This 40 minute session cost me 16% of my weekly usage. A simple code review of the most critical areas of my project got flagged as a cybersecurity risk. It really made me not want to try it again.

Same. I asked for a security review and it immediately triggered. I then started a new session and asked for a software review and it ran for a bit before getting tripped on token usage by the project.

This is interesting. Security issues are bugs. So if you ask it to look for bugs, it will also find security issues. Is that a workaround for the "no cybersec" rule?

Or is it just not allowed to find bugs? Or it's only allowed to tell you bugs that don't pose a security risk?

Or it's only allowed to tell you bugs that don't pose a security risk?

Seems that way. "Security" was never part of the prompt. It was something like:

Hello, Fable! Can you give me a complete code review of my lone lisp project? Opus has already done extensive code review. I'm curious to see what you say.

Result was the table above.

The "offer, then remove" aspect is a bit eyebrow-raising -- it feels like they are trying to get subscribers to switch to usage-based billing, which makes me wonder if we'll ever get it after that June 22nd window.

Probably all about the IPO.

Fwiw it's not available on my enterprise account: "Disable zero data retention to unlock Fable 5 access"

What does "zero data retention" mean? What kind of data does it need to unlock?

I'm about to be priced out of SOTA llms and it's an awful feeling

Not with Codex

But they're behind by quite a bit now. CFO (of OAI) Sarah Friar said the next training run will be in the fall on Vera Rubin, I think that means I'll have to wait > 6 months?!

Why won't they follow suit?

This is really sad... I really didn't want to be priced out of these models but it looks like that's going to happen sooner rather than later.

Thankfully this, like most other tech, will get cheaper through the years.

It's interesting that we are seeing a time when subscriptions are not preferred and usage-based billing is.

Pay-as-you go isn't a common thing in SaaS. For example, except for AWS SES, all email providers are bulk-subscription based.

I would not use this if you are on a subscription. In <8min it burned my entire 5hr window (which has just reset it appears, I have over 4 hours till it resets) I hadn't used CC at all today aside from this) and then it used up ~$15 more in usage before I could stop it.

I am on the $100 Max plan.

That’s odd, I used it on a pretty complex refactoring task and it worked for 22 mins and used only 15% of my 5-hour limit. I’m on the $200 Max plan though.

This is just the sales team doing their thing, applying the Law of Scarcity to drive demand.

It's the same exact speed as opus >=4.5, sonnet 4.5, and twice the speed of opus <=4.1

It must have about the same active parameters, or else its a larger model running in turbo mode (smaller batches) and being heavily subsidized for some reason. But given most of the benchmarks are within 5% I doubt it is a much larger model. Most perplexing.

It could be a much bigger MoE model

i doubt that's the goal for them. i bet they just really don't have capacity for people using it a ton, yet they wanted people to be able to try it out while it's new. so they compromised and made it temporarily available. and then hope they can get costs down or capacity up so they can make it more available again

"we’ve implemented new interventions that limit Claude’s effectiveness for requests targeting frontier LLM development (for example, on building pretraining pipelines, distributed training infrastructure, or ML accelerator design).

...

Unlike our interventions for cybersecurity, biology and chemistry, and distillation attempts, these safeguards will not be visible to the user."