Anthropic is cutting Claude prices, but its costs are rising faster

Claude is getting cheaper to use, but it is costing Anthropic more to run. In its latest quarter, the company's computing expenses grew faster than its revenue. It swung from an operating profit to an operating loss, according to an amended filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, as reported by Decrypt.

What changed

Anthropic said usage growth was partly offset by about $600 million from price reductions on new model versions and contractual discounts. That does not mean $600 million disappeared. It is the amount by which cuts and discounts held back revenue growth that came from heavier use.

• Revenue grew about 47% in the quarter.
• Compute and infrastructure costs rose about 77%, from $5.56 billion to $9.86 billion.
• The company went from a $974 million operating profit to a $567 million operating loss.

Why costs are rising

Anthropic spent roughly 58 cents on computing for every dollar of revenue, up from 48 cents a quarter earlier. That figure includes research, training and internal work, so it is not a profit margin on each customer request.

Timing also hurts. Anthropic usually reserves computing capacity 12 to 18 months before it is available, so much of the spending is fixed in the short term. The quarter included $5 billion of compute under short-term deals, which the company says cost significantly more than comparable capacity bought through multiyear contracts.

The cheaper models

Claude Opus 5.5 lowered token prices compared with Opus 5. Tokens are the small chunks of text that AI services charge for. Anthropic also launched Haiku 5.5 in October as a much cheaper model for high-volume work.

The company says Fable 5.1 cut the cost of typical workloads by around 25%. It says Opus 5.5 cut customers' cost per task by roughly 40% compared with Opus 5. Those savings come from both lower prices and efficiency gains, not flat discounts on every task.

What it means for users

For now, cheaper models help a budget. The bet is that lower prices and better models will push customers to use more, and Anthropic says that has happened after past releases. The risk is that costs keep climbing faster than sales.

Anthropic's IPO filing, which signals it is preparing to go public, puts its lease and purchasing commitments at about $895.4 billion, nearly all for computing and infrastructure. Reuters has reported the filing raised questions about whether infrastructure partners can secure the financing to deliver that capacity.

What happens next

Demand for Claude is still growing quickly. The open question is whether Anthropic can cut prices faster than the cost of building and running its models falls. Decrypt notes that OpenAI, also preparing an IPO, offers a competitive model with a more generous usage quota. That competition is the main thing keeping Anthropic from raising prices. The filing does not say whether prices or limits will change.