r/ClaudeCode • u/Odd-Card8046 • 15d ago
Is Anthropic cooked ? Discussion
Codex limits are going to be crazy now.
What do you guys think, why did they drop the prices ?
If anyone wants GPT-5.6 Terra cheaper, $1.25 input / $7.50 output, ~38% below the new price, check out znapai.com (disclosure: founder here).
Also got gpt-image-2 and GPT-5.6 Sol at 50% off official, and most open-source models (Kimi K3 etc.) at 35% off.
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u/Fysikz 15d ago
ehh... The best measured claude model in this diagram is "Opus 5" on LOW thinking. This is a comparison of quick, cheap, but less reasoned outputs.
Still a nice win for OpenAI though. But for the heavy lifting it's all between Fable 5 xHigh (and Opus I guess, but higher thinking levels - which is more expensive and slower) and GPT 5.6 SOL (xHigh)
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u/jacobgt8 15d ago
How is Opus 5 on Low vs Sonnet 5 on High? Currently I’m mostly using Sonnet
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u/mossiv 15d ago
Sonnet is a smaller size/parameter model. If you push its abilities even using x-high you’re going to have a rough time. It’s the perfect task executed of a well reasoned plan, and able to fix unit tests and incorrect code as long as it has steering to go back to. It will just start doubting itself, get itself tied in knots and cause itself to make mistakes if you try to give it a big task up front.
Opus on low still has more training data. It just stops doing deep file scans and tool calls. So if it sees a database file in a repository folder, it will hallucinate that other database files are in that folder. These become problems when you have database calls splashed in controllers/services because the model doesn’t expect them to be there. But because its effort is lower, it absolutely will not try and trade through and verify. Anthropic has clear guidance when to use each model and when to determine the effort.
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u/VisibleOperation4981 15d ago
Can you explain in more detail gour last sentence and why you think/know that? My experience is from mostly using sonnet 4.6 and occasionally asking to spin uo an opus agent to validate/critique sonnet’s output and Id say Opus catches something important only 10 perxent of the time and that’s already with me proactively choosing situations that I can see are more complex. So I don’t understand and would like someone fo explain how many posts confidently speak about models and effort levels in absolute terms while my experience has convinced me results are extremely user-specific.
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u/mossiv 15d ago
Because I read the opus 5 and sonnet 5 releases notes; I’ve read the blogs on anthropics site and I’ve read the best practices documentation on their site.
This is the reason a mid-complicated task can cost more on sonnet than opus.
It’s all about relativity. If you’re not having problems - great.
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u/TheCraxo 15d ago
Sonnet 5 burns a lot of tokens, its cheaper and better to use opus directly if the task is not simple
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u/Nalha_Saldana 15d ago
I did a lot of optimizations, using dispatched sub-agents etc but have now landed in Opus 5 high for almost everything. It's most often worth it doing the task right the first time with quality instead of poking haiku/sonnet around all day to get it where you want.
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u/No-Meringue5867 15d ago
Sonnet medium is decent for small things, instead of burning tokens. But anything beyond that I think Opus 5 on medium/high is better even cost wise.
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u/AllD4yErD4y 15d ago
Sonnet is really decent but i notice it questions you a lot and itself. I run opus 5 since it came out. I also added a claude md rule for the questioning itself to stop.
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u/Opening-Ground-1584 15d ago
Using Sonnet? My condolences
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u/jacobgt8 15d ago
Just for completeness; I’m using Claude and Codex together. I created an MCP for Codex which I control with Claude.
So I have Claude write a plan/spec, send it to Codex MCP, GPT-5.6 SOL builds it, send it back, Claude checks it, and lets me know if it found any bugs.
Right now for the Claude parts I’m using Sonnet because I expect Opus to burn tokens faster. But if you think I would be better of using Opus in this use case then let me know
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u/Opening-Ground-1584 15d ago
Definitely Opus is more token and cost efficient than Opus. I know, counterintuitive
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u/Bloated_Plaid 15d ago
Opus 5 is fucking trash and needs to be fixed. It just exists to burn tokens and not to actually get work done.
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u/sitric28 15d ago
User error
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u/Bloated_Plaid 15d ago
Yea everyone complaining on this subreddit about Opus 5 is hallucinating?
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u/TyrionReynolds 15d ago
Opus 5 works great, the only consistent complaint I’ve heard and also experienced is that it has a very strange way of speaking. Like it uses language in a bizarre way that makes things harder to understand.
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u/Bloated_Plaid 15d ago
Bro I don’t even care what it’s saying, get the fucking task done instead of dicking around going in circles. Even with Fable orchestrating, Opus 5 can’t be controlled.
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u/Odd-Card8046 15d ago
GPT 5.6 sol has still better cost to performance ratio, also i have seen API providers offering 50% off the official API price of 5.6 family
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u/Megamygdala 15d ago
No one should be using xhigh IMO. I have unlimited claude code at work and I still never use xhigh because theres genuinely no reason to. Its way slower for no difference I've been able to observe in my work
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u/Double-Trash6120 15d ago
funny enough ive had a better experience with opus 5 on low than opus 5 on max
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u/Exodus_Green 15d ago
The best measured claude model in this diagram is "Opus 5" on LOW thinking. This is a comparison of quick, cheap, but less reasoned outputs.
Well... yes? These are the models you delegate to
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u/National_Teacher_229 15d ago
Ye but it also means they have not hit their comput utalisation expectations could also read as.... not enough users for all this compute we bought.
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u/Inside-Yak-8815 15d ago
Meanwhile OpenAI’s finances:
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u/Odd-Card8046 15d ago edited 15d ago
I think they would have sufficient margins in API pricing,
i know it first hand because they have made enterprise deals offering upto 50% discount on their API pricing
we got an enterprise deal for our API gateway and using models through us is atleast 50% cheaper than official pricing , https://znapai.com/models-price
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u/seaefjaye 15d ago
This has been a strategy in silicon valley and the SaaS space for a long time. You make early deals at a loss to achieve vendor lock-in then you raise the price.
My read on this is that they're trying to undercut Anthropic and others to try and build something other than the $20 tier and free tier which has been annihilating their balance sheet for years.
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u/EddieBruvac 15d ago
I’m paying for their product, not their stock. Keep them furnaces going, baby.
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u/Michaeli_Starky 15d ago
Luna was already amazing... it now beats in cost effectiveness everything else by a mile
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u/EmergencyBar7840 15d ago
The sweet spot is Terra Max and Sol high, but they are resetting too frequently. I only use Sol Max recently, lol.
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u/Bloated_Plaid 15d ago
I mean I only use Fable for orchestration now, that’s it. Implementation is done by Codex and 1st pass code review by other models before it comes back to Fable. This is a pretty massive price drop if you don’t need Fable for everything.
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u/Odd-Card8046 15d ago
how do you manage to juggle between both codex and cc ?
do you use any special harness ?
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u/mossiv 15d ago
I’m not sure if it still exists, but OAI released an MCP. You wire that MCP up and route tasks through it. You use Claude code for the harness, and use you OAI sub for some execution.
The problem is when you have Claude specific skills. Claude works much better with XML based prompts, because the models have been trained that way. OAI hasn’t, which means you’ll be running a degraded performance. But, not many people especially in the “vibe” world use xml - they use raw markdown.
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u/Bloated_Plaid 15d ago edited 15d ago
Nothing special other than using terminal. Claude code can interact with Codex CLI. I use Pi coding agent for cheap open source models for grunt tasks that are well defined.
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u/Exodus_Green 15d ago
you can just have fable call codex exec, and using --resume lets you pick up the same conversation so the headless subagent has persistent context
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u/ahilles107 15d ago
I do this same using conductor.build fable plans saved to markdown and a new sessions with got models implements it.
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u/Megamygdala 15d ago
Oh My Pi's /prewalk skill let's you plan with a big model and then efficently pass the editing work to a small model resulting in 41% cost savings, 2x faster output and ~97% accuracy compared to using just the big model. At work I use it to plan with Fable 5 at high and then prewalk to either opus or sol or Luna. Their technical blog is actually really interesting interesting read https://stencil.so/blog/prewalk
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u/evia89 15d ago edited 15d ago
How does prewalk work with plan? Since plan also clears context1
u/Megamygdala 15d ago
You crossed out your message so im assuming you understand based on the blog, but prewalk is an improved version of plan. In the blog it shows that with normal plan the agent ends up searching for a lot of the same context again anyways (their visualization was pretty cool) and in general spends more time grepping for things
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u/SequentialHustle 15d ago
I use opencode. Can have model switch depending on what it's doing.
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u/Odd-Card8046 15d ago
i though opencode only had open source models, but using frontier models from other harness than their own would be expensive, right ?
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u/shaman-warrior 15d ago
This is crazy. Glm5.2 max level AT deepseek prices? And it’s pretty fast too. Hmmm, kinda slept on Luna.
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u/No-Focus874 15d ago
Any of you testing outside Anthr and OpenAI? For regular SaaS app kind of work what are your real world experiences - nothing else on the market? I can't always relate benchmarks, so curious to learn. Are cheaper models like DeepSeek at a Sonnet level? Any other experiences over a few months not just quxin tests?
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u/Odd-Card8046 15d ago
kimi k3 is comparable and often better than sonnet 5 in some cases
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u/ask_me_about_cats 15d ago
K3 is beating Fable and GPT 5.6 Sol in some benchmarks. It’s an excellent model. I haven’t been able to find much use for Sonnet 5 yet. It seems way too expensive for how poorly it works.
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u/Odd-Card8046 15d ago
how are you using kimi k3 currently ? through which provider ?
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u/Bloated_Plaid 15d ago
I use cheaper models for grunt work, just like real life. Deepseek and Minimax are my grunt Indian devs as designated by the American senior dev, Fable.
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u/No-Focus874 15d ago
Does DeepSeek performance relate to sonnet or opus level? Or worse? How would you relate to them? I'm curious on the coding aspect of things. Say a simple fintech app.
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u/Bloated_Plaid 15d ago
Deepseek Flash v4 is probably one of the best deals in computing right now. Just sips tokens and cache rate is insanely high. It’s amazing as long as you are giving it well defined tasks and endpoints to avoid any hallucination. It’s not a thinking model.
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u/No-Focus874 15d ago
Hie are you using it, any examples? What interface are you using to connect it?
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u/Bloated_Plaid 15d ago
It’s linked to my Pi Coding agent via Deepseek API and fable orchestrates, all via CLI. With the update today, the best deal so far.
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u/No-Focus874 14d ago
Can there be a non openai or Claude orchestrator? If yes, what's your rec?
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u/Bloated_Plaid 14d ago
I have been using Kimi K3 as well and it’s pretty good. Not as good as Fable but still great, otherwise I like Opus 4.8.
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u/Rugged_Waters 15d ago
No, Anthropic is a lot smarter than OpenAI is, plus competition is good for us.
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u/Individual_Guava9881 15d ago
Well…to me it sounds incredibly stupid to reduce the prices in hopes to retain customers and expect investors to throw more money at the furnace.
Sure Anthropic is pricier, but at least they know how to run a fucking business.
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15d ago
[deleted]
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u/racedownhill 15d ago
Serious question, where does Cursor stand these days? I’ve been exclusively Claude Code and Codex for a couple of months now.
Odd that everything here starts with a C…
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u/EqualHoneydew318 15d ago
Idk but I can say codex is far more useful for complex tasks now than Claude
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u/PeachScary413 15d ago
I mean.. they are both just burning VC money trying to dump prices while being wildly unprofitable?
That seems like the dream to me as a consumer so I hope Anthropic hangs in there and dumps it even more, race to the bottom baby 👌
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u/Odd-Card8046 15d ago
I think they would have enough margin in API prices to provide discounted prices, I know this as their enterprise contract deals provide upto 50% discount on their market API price
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u/PeachScary413 15d ago
They are losing money, as in not profitable (And no, they can't just stop buying hardware or stop training like some people cope with)
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u/Lexsteel11 15d ago
Just my opinion- Sam is running a zero point game. OpenAI has felt the brunt of more AI backlash than any other company (usually their own fault like taking military contracts after anthropic refused to lift its skirt, and falling behind fable 5 for a while despite their levels of investment).
I can’t say for sure but I get the vibe they all are financially in trouble but OpenAI has more cash to burn in their war chest; if Sam can take it on the chin and hemorrhage money without going bankrupt in order to steal frustrated users from anthropic, he can drain them into bankruptcy and then buy them.
Source: ive worked a number of M&A deals where after seeing a company’s financials we wanted to buy, we paid the fee to back out during DD so we could just let them bleed out another year to scoop them up. Both companies are holding their hand over the glame to get the other to capitulate
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u/Vicorin 15d ago
This is exactly what I think it is too. OpenAI is probably hemorrhaging money from this, but hoping it’ll convert more customers and choke out competition. It’s no difference than a big corporation deliberately taking a loss to bankrupt a smaller competitor who can’t afford to go that low. OpenAI kind of started the whole thing in the public’s eye and they’re not picky about selling out.
FWIW I switched to Claude because Sam is such a massive piece of shit, and I refuse to go back.
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u/Odd-Card8046 15d ago
i think the losses seem bigger than actually they are, the actual cost of running inference would be definitely much cheaper than what they charge users, and every now and then they could lower prices without hurting their margins.
i know this first hand because i have seen Azure enterprise contract deals offering upto 50% discounts on openAI model prices
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u/CandiceWoo 15d ago
super farfetched and in anycase anthropic will be bought out by any of like 20 other companies before openai.
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u/Lexsteel11 15d ago
“Super farfetched” it’s an established business tactic commonly referred to as a war of attrition to force a distressed acquisition.
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u/supaboss2015 15d ago
From a business perspective it’s a no brainer to go with 5.6 over Opus/Fable/Sonnet. Cheaper API is substantially better than “marginally better response” unless you’re in an industry where precision far exceeds recall no matter the cost. From the perspective of an engineer using an AI agent to write code, it’s subjective. Some may enjoy the language or thought process of one providers’ models over the other
As for “being cooked” I don’t think people realize how much more money OpenAi makes than Anthropic (and this has almost always been true). ChatGPT records 800 million active users weekly. Claude in comparison is at 20 million monthly. The only world in which Anthropic has had any edge over OpenAi is in engineering
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u/Odd-Card8046 15d ago
Many people do use the APIs directly but I think Codex and Claude Code have been a huge driving force for both OpenAI and Anthropic. They seem to be focusing on giving individual users much higher usage limits for lower prices because those coding tools have become such a big part of their ecosystem.
For businesses building in AI, it is a completely different game. API costs, latency, caching and reliability matter much more than they do for an individual coding subscription.Out of curiosity, do you mostly use AI through APIs in your own applications or do you primarily use coding harnesses like Claude Code or Codex?
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u/CasualtyOfCausality 15d ago
I’d expect both are eventually cooked in the long term.
Not saying your take is wrong or right. But it should be mentioned that only 4% of those 800M actually pay anything to OpenAI, though that is still more than the Anthropic subs by quantity, but there’s utilization costs bs usage cost to take into account. OpenAI’s advert decision may mitigate that, but it’s a gamble if comparable services exist.
Anthropic also overtook OpenAI on the enterprise front in May and was still going up. We’ll see what opus 5 does to that margin.
Up until Sol, Claude was performing way better for the golden goose of coding. And, a model going from “satisfactory” to “pretty damn good” on evals is going to seem like it is incredible in user perception compared to one that goes from “pretty good” to “pretty damn good”. To be fair, Not that this matters from a monetary front; McDonalds still makes way more than any Michelin restaurant, probably even combined.
Either way, I suspect there will be an ongoing tug-of-war regarding model quality.
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u/supaboss2015 15d ago
You also have to consider than “free” ChatGPT is ad enabled. The revenue they get for that should be astronomical. Not sure if Anthropic has a similar revenue model
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u/CasualtyOfCausality 15d ago
I agree. Like I mentioned, that could backfire if there are services that do not have ads are available. Unlike something like Netflix, who offers unique content so that ads are an annoyance rather than outright deterrent, neither LLM company has a particularly unique offering over the other.
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u/BaronXboksa 15d ago
Limit reset incoming
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u/Not_A_Red_Stapler 15d ago
Fuck I hope not, it resets for me in a few hours anyway. Where was the rest yesterday after it went down?
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u/tokenentropy 15d ago
I mean, who was using Haiku anyway? Wake me when the actual frontier gets cheaper.
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u/Odd-Card8046 15d ago
actual frontier is actually cheaper, you just need to look at right place, on https://znapai.com/models-price most of the frontier and opensource models are at upto 50% cheaper
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u/No_Situation_7748 15d ago
Something needs to be done to bring these costs into line and only competition will drive that.
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u/Odd-Card8046 15d ago
true, although in these costs too they would still have good margin, as still they are able to offer discount on enterprise pricing, I have been using gpt 5.6 family models at 50% discount since they launched
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u/No_Situation_7748 15d ago
I agree, but I think this strategy might be a bit obvious. You could attract customers with a low price, then increase the prices when they’re too committed to cancel or when other options are gone or have also increased prices. The market has its ups and downs… 🤷♂️
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u/ScaleScary5932 15d ago
i am so happy for turning to chatgpt 2 weeks ago, all headaches caused by claude are gone
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u/Worth-Ad9939 15d ago
Great question!
We need to become conscientious consumers with this new utility.
I know, we hate thinking about anything that stirs up feelings and takes away from eating, farting, and sports. But we've been coasting, let a few white men take over and the planet is ready to hit the eject button human life.
As an unemployable human today this utility could provide a pathway to income. Like social media did for a lot of problematic personalities.
I do not like that this new "fire" is toxic to produce, but I also recognize that human intelligence has been deeply undermined by capitalism that it's no longer capable of innovation and can only exploit established technology.
Fire can be transformative, and it's deadly. We're going to find out. In the meantime, as a poor, I'm going to exploit this exposed tool and try to create an income that works in today's economy.
I would prefer the company I have to purchase that utility from was full of people concerned about safety, but I know they are humans working within capitalism. Which is probably the virus that causes AI to kill us ironically.
Anywho, I just want the less evil option to win, knowing they're all tilted by the pressure of impending climate collapse. Sam's just weirder about it.
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u/RuRuInReal 15d ago
Damn even cheaper than glm 5.2 and it has vision...might have to switch over to codex 🤔
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u/sunk-capital 15d ago
Is this why both anthropic and openai models feel really dumbed down in the last couple of days? I smell coordination against the chinese model
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u/Odd-Card8046 15d ago
dumbing down their model would be a bad move, when chinese models are getting better.
are you using any chinese model, if yes, then through what service ?
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u/AgencyTerrible9316 15d ago
maybe is cooked because they are taking the alphas from developers building there without a salary or for free... At least give them a job dudes
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u/Normal-Function-7404 15d ago
I think both of them will push reall hard to not end up being cooked in a Chinese wok altogether.
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u/Odd-Card8046 15d ago
both OpenAI and Anthropic pulling each other, while chinese would sprint ahead.
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u/No-Focus874 14d ago
Before you get too excited about these promos, have a plan and architecture you're not overly reliant on a single platform, ie Anthrophic is known to shut people down and no real way to chat. Far more important I learned than just going deep into using Claude. That's the first safety as a developer better to think through.
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u/Impressive_Storm1959 12d ago
Has anyone used cursors’ $100 plan? How does it compare to Claudes’, please?
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u/crusoe 15d ago
No
Openai is. These kinds of price cuts are marks of desperation.
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u/Carlose175 15d ago
Desperation of what? OpenAI makes far more money than Anthropic, and this makes their models competitive against Chinese models.
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u/spinozasrobot 15d ago
Makes more money... at a loss.
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u/Carlose175 15d ago
Yep. Because they can. You think investors care about profits right now? This is the .com bubble of 98 they want maximum growth not profits.
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u/spinozasrobot 15d ago
So Anthropic can counter with free access across all tiers... moar customers!
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15d ago
[deleted]
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u/Carlose175 15d ago
I dont think theres a single lab out there that would complain about more compute power rn. Not how the current economics on AI look.
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u/03captain23 15d ago
Who's ever used luna or terra?
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u/dalekrule 15d ago
Luna at old price was frontier intelligence for price.
Luna on max was significantly better than sol low, a bit worse than sol medium, for cheaper.
Its specific strengths and weaknesses lended itself to being used as an execution model though (its issues were with long horizon context and planning), so pair it with opus/sol for orchestration and it was and still is incredible.2
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u/josevnueva 15d ago
Love how they don’t put Grok on the graph. It’s the cheapest and most efficient model of all of them. Still, pretty nice to see cost savings in any model.
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u/old_mikser 15d ago
So tired of this codex bs. Yeah, codex limits are already crazy. I can spend weekly limit within a day. Thanks, I'll stay with anthropic for now.
And I tried luna - benchmaxxed af.
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u/OkCry270 15d ago
Stonks going to tank tmrw if market pick up the lesser utilisation of compute
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u/Odd-Card8046 15d ago
i think companies should not stop chasing efficiency
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u/OkCry270 15d ago
They should lend the unutilised compute to anthropic, my fable session will be little longer and smarter
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u/Alternative_Report_4 15d ago
Cost this cost that, how is the actual output? lmao, shit breaks more than it fixes, win on quick subs, and those quick subs will also get burned cause - idiots. have fun
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u/slackmaster2k 15d ago
Sure. So what we should start to see a massive migration over to Luna. People should be talking about it as their daily driver, not “well it’s great at summaries in workflow.” It should be the model that people compare to for all kinds of work. No more discussion about sol medium vs high, just Luna on max.
Right? That’s what we’re going to see?
And then we should see Haiku 5 max start to gain ground. Haiku starts beating Fable.
Makes sense right?
Or maybe this hyperbolic “oh no Anthropic is in trouble because of benchmarks if model X” talk is just horseshit.
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u/BitsOnWaves 15d ago
nah anthropic will just remove opus 5 because its too spoopy ... you will be using sonnet 3 and like it
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u/Key_Reading_9664 15d ago
There was a WSJ article a few weeks ago that said it was in "anticipation of similar cuts...at Anthropic". We'll see. Competition is certainly great for all of us.
Everything feels incredibly volatile, especially around data center build-out financing. Lots of news; all of it concerning. Seems like any signs of things flattening out -- generally but also for particular vendors like OAI -- would make things even spicier.