业界盛传 Anthropic 即将迎来首个盈利季度。有传闻称，一些公司惊讶地发现，员工使用大语言模型产生的账单费用高得惊人。我认为这是因为 OpenAI 和 Anthropic 都找到了产品市场契合点。
- 企业客户现在按 API 价格付费
- 我认为它们找到了产品市场契合点
- 并且它们正在加速推进
- 围绕这一点的 AI 失败案例其实相当少
- 我们也知道这些实验室投入巨大
- API 收入的重要性正在下降
- 四月是一个新的转折点
企业客户现在按 API 价格付费
我目前订阅了 Anthropic 每月 100 美元的 Max 套餐和 OpenAI 每月 100 美元的 Pro 套餐。如果你是编程智能体的重度用户，这些套餐非常划算。我刚刚在笔记本电脑上运行了 ccusage 工具，估算了一下如果过去 30 天按 API token 付费需要花多少钱，结果如下：
- Anthropic Claude Code 需要 1,199.79 美元
- OpenAI Codex 需要 980.37 美元
也就是说，价值 2,180.16 美元的 token 只花了 200 美元——相当划算！我算是这些工具的中度偏重度用户，但当然不是没日没夜地运行智能体。
我原以为那些大量使用智能体的公司也能享受类似的折扣。结果发现我大错特错了。
我没能查到确切日期，但在过去六个月的某个时间点，Anthropic 将其企业套餐（2025 年 8 月时还是“Claude 席位包含足够典型工作日使用的用量”）改为每席位每月 20 美元加上按用量收取 API 费用。The Information 关于这一变化的报道日期是 2026 年 4 月 14 日，但援引 Anthropic 发言人的说法称，定价变化发生在 2025 年 11 月。现有客户在续约时才发现这一变化。
OpenAI 在 4 月也做出了类似的定价调整。Codex 费率卡（Internet Archive 存档）目前显示：
注意：2026 年 4 月 2 日，我们更新了 Codex 定价，改为与 API token 用量对齐，而非按消息数量定价。此变更适用于新老 Plus、Pro、ChatGPT Business 以及新的 ChatGPT Enterprise 套餐。
2026 年 4 月 23 日，我们也将此更新应用于所有现有的 ChatGPT Enterprise 计划，包括 Edu、Health、Gov 以及 ChatGPT for Teachers。
这有点难解读，因为他们用“积分”来报价，但据我所知，这些积分成本与这些模型列出的 API token 成本完全一致。
总而言之，截至 2026 年 4 月，OpenAI Codex 和 Anthropic Claude Code/Cowork 的“企业版”成本与列出的 API 价格相同。
GPT-5.5（4 月 23 日发布）的 API 价格是 GPT-5.4 的两倍。考虑到新的 tokenizer，Opus 4.7（4 月 16 日发布）的价格大约是 Opus 4.6 的 1.4 倍。
因此，4 月份两家领先的模型公司都发布了 API 价格更高的新前沿模型，并且两家公司现在都采取措施，将其企业客户（通常签订年度合同）锁定在这些 API 价格上，而不是之前的大幅折扣。
我认为他们已经找到了产品-市场契合点。
为什么突然在定价上采取如此激进的举措？Anthropic 和 OpenAI 都计划上市，但我怀疑有一个更重要的因素：我认为他们终于找到了产品-市场契合点，具体体现在 Claude Code/Cowork 和 Codex 所代表的编码/通用智能体产品上。
像 ChatGPT 这样的工具非常受欢迎，但这种巨大的受欢迎程度很难转化为收入。2 月份，OpenAI 宣称 ChatGPT 每周活跃用户超过 9 亿，但其中只有 5000 万（占 5.6%）是付费消费者订阅用户。
向每位用户每月收取 10-20 美元是一门不错的生意，但你需要 10-20 亿订阅用户持续付费四年，才能覆盖 1 万亿美元的基础设施成本。
让公司为每位用户每月支付 200 美元以上，会快得多地达到这个目标——正如上文所述，作为一名重度用户，我目前在每个供应商的 API 成本上每月已经花费约 1000 美元。
编程智能体确实改变了一切。这些工具虽然消耗的模型 token 数量大幅增加，但也正迅速成为高薪专业人士日常工作的得力助手。目前主要使用者仍是软件工程师，但编程智能体是一种能够自动化任何通过键盘输入命令在计算机上完成的操作的工具……因此，它们显然适用于更广泛的技能型知识工作者。
正如我在本网站上详细讨论过的，2025 年 11 月发布的模型将智能体提升到了真正有用的水平。如今我们已经用了六个月来适应这一概念——难怪企业开始在这项技术上投入真金白银。
你可以说，ChatGPT 在 2023 年 2 月成为史上增长最快的消费级应用时，就实现了产品-市场契合……但那时它肯定还没赚到真金白银。编程智能体加上企业级定价，标志着这些公司开始获得非常可观的收入。甚至可能足以开始覆盖他们的成本！
而且他们正在加速推进。
作为企业级智能体代表这些公司实现产品-市场契合的进一步证据，不妨看看他们公开的招聘职位。
OpenAI 目前有 703 个在招职位，其中我认为有 229 个（32.6%）与企业销售和支持相关——包括客户经理、“市场进入”、“前向部署工程师”等。
Anthropic 有 390 个在招职位，其中 105 个（26.9%）在我看来属于企业级岗位。
颇具讽刺意味且令人欣慰的是，这些 AI 实验室选择了一种对人力需求极大的商业模式——企业销售合同可不会在没有大量人员参与的情况下自动达成！
（我通过使用 Claude Code 抓取他们的招聘网站来进行这项分析，然后让它利用 Datasette 的 JSON API 将数据导入 Datasette Cloud，我在那里使用 Datasette Agent 进行分析，并在此处导出。这就是“吃自家狗粮”！）
关于 AI 失败的故事则相当稀少。
我开始深入调查此事，是因为越来越多报道声称大公司正在敲响警钟，因为他们的 AI 使用成本已经变得非常高昂。
在我看来，这些被广泛引用的报道中，大多数都显得相当夸大其词。
讨论最热烈的是优步，依据是一篇报道称其首席技术官普拉文·内帕利·纳加表示，优步“在2026年刚过几个月就用完了全年的AI预算”，这主要归功于Claude Code。
考虑到Claude Code直到11月才真正变得好用，2025年制定的预算未能预测到2026年对该工具的需求，对我来说完全不意外！
优步首席运营官安德鲁·麦克唐纳在《快速响应》播客上的言论进一步助长了这则新闻。我找到了那段内容，其实信息量不大。以下是安德鲁的原话：
但有时你去找高级工程负责人，问他们：有多少原本被搁置的项目，因为生产效率的提升——比如上个季度我们25%的代码提交是通过Claude Code完成的——而被重新提上日程？
目前还无法建立这种直接关联，对吧？我认为或许隐含地表明有更多功能正在交付。但很难在某个数据与“我们现在实际多交付了25%有用的消费者功能”之间划等号，对吧？这条线很难画清楚。
[...] 因此，如果你无法直接证明这些投入与向用户交付了多少有用功能和特性之间的关联，那么这笔交易就更难自圆其说了。
不知怎的，这段内容竟变成了“优步首席运营官表示，为AI疯狂烧钱越来越难证明其合理性”这样的头条新闻，因为关于AI失败的报道市场依然巨大。
2026年5月29日更新：根据麦迪逊·米尔斯的建议，我对上述引文进行了编辑，增加了以“更难自圆其说”结尾的最后一段——此前我引用的部分在“很难画清楚”处就结束了。以下是MacWhisper提供的完整未编辑转录文本。
另一个与此相关的热门故事是，微软开始取消Claude Code的许可证，表面上是为了鼓励其工程师优先使用自家Copilot CLI智能体进行内部测试——但《The Verge》记者汤姆·沃伦表示，“消息人士告诉我，这也是一个财务决策”，触发因素是微软财年于6月30日结束。
我认为这两则故事都支持我的“产品-市场契合”假说。关于产品定价，我听过最好的建议是：你的客户应该倒吸一口气，然后说“成交”。优步的预算超支和微软的席位取消，看起来正是这种效应在实际中的体现。
我们还知道，各大实验室投入巨大。
大型 AI 实验室在训练和推理上花费了数十亿美元。可靠的数字很难获取，但奇怪的是，我们从最近的 SpaceX S-1 文件中得到了一个关于这些金额的巨大线索：
[...] 2026 年 5 月，我们与 Anthropic PBC（“Anthropic”）——一家专注于人工智能研发的公益公司——签订了云服务协议，内容涉及 COLOSSUS 和 COLOSSUS II 的计算能力访问权限。根据这些协议，客户已同意在 2029 年 5 月之前，每月向我们支付 12.5 亿美元 [...]
Anthropic 的公告称，这笔交易意味着他们可以“提高 Claude Code 和 Claude API 的使用限制”，这强烈暗示 Colossus 正被用于推理，而非模型训练。
Anthropic 已经从其他供应商那里获得了大量的计算资源。他们愿意仅从一家供应商那里每月花费 12.5 亿美元来获取额外容量，这暗示了这些推理预算已经变得多么庞大。
API 收入正变得不那么重要。
过去两年，我的印象是 OpenAI 的收入更多来自订阅，而 Anthropic 的收入更多来自其 API。
Anthropic 的 API 收入历来相当依赖少数几个大型 API 客户——2025 年 8 月 VentureBeat 的一篇报道援引“知情人士”的话称，仅 Cursor 和 GitHub Copilot 就贡献了该公司当时 40 亿美元收入中的 12 亿美元。
如今，传闻 Anthropic 第二季度收入将达到 109 亿美元，甚至可能首次实现盈利。
这种向企业级业务的转向表明，各大实验室已经意识到真正的利润在于绕过中间商。Anthropic 的 Claude Code 直接与 Cursor 和 Copilot 竞争。难怪 Cursor 正在投资开发自己的模型！
四月是一个新的转折点
我曾将 2025 年 11 月称为“十一月转折点”，因为当时 GPT-5.1 和 Opus 4.5，结合它们各自的编程智能体框架，已经变得足够出色——出色到我们在过去六个月里一直在适应那些能够可靠完成有用工作的智能体系统。
我认为 2026 年 4 月是一个新的转折点，其带来的收入影响已经开始显现，这有利于前沿 AI 实验室，并对大型公司的预算产生了实质性冲击。
当 Anthropic 和 OpenAI 即将进行的 IPO 的 S-1 文件为我们提供一些真实、经过审计的数据供我们深入研究时，我们就能确切知道这一刻有多真实。
2026 年 5 月 27 日
更多近期文章
- Kimi K3，以及我们仍能从鹈鹕基准测试中学到什么 - 2026 年 7 月 16 日
- 新的 GPT-5.6 系列：Luna、Terra、Sol - 2026 年 7 月 9 日
- sqlite-utils 4.0，现已支持数据库模式迁移 - 2026 年 7 月 7 日
我认为 Anthropic 和 OpenAI 已找到产品市场契合点，作者 Simon Willison，发布于 2026 年 5 月 27 日。
claude-cowork
november-2025-inflection
datasette-agent
uber
Anthropic are strongly rumored to be about to have their first profitable quarter. Stories are circulating of companies surprised at how expensive their LLM bills are becoming from usage by their staff. I think this is because OpenAI and Anthropic have both found product-market fit.
- Enterprise customers are now paying API prices
- I think they’ve found product-market fit
- And they’re ramping up
- The AI-failure stories around this are pretty thin
- We also know the labs are spending a lot
- API revenue is becoming less important
- April is a new inflection point
Enterprise customers are now paying API prices
I currently subscribe to the $100/month Max plan from Anthropic and the $100/month Pro plan from OpenAI. If you are a heavy user of coding agents these plans are a fantastic deal. I just ran the ccusage tool on my laptop to get an estimate of how much I would have spent if I were to pay for API tokens in the past 30 days and got:
- $1,199.79 for Anthropic Claude Code
- $980.37 for OpenAI Codex
That’s $2,180.16 worth of tokens for $200—not bad at all! I’m a moderately heavy user of these tools, but I’m certainly not running agents every hour of the day and night.
I had assumed that companies making extensive use of agents were getting similar discounts. It turns out I could not have been more wrong about that.
I haven’t been able to track down the exact date, but at some point in the last six months Anthropic switched their Enterprise plan (originally “Claude seats include enough usage for a typical workday” back in August 2025) to $20/seat/month plus API pricing for usage. This story about the change from The Information is dated Apr 14, 2026, but cites an Anthropic spokesperson claiming that the pricing change occurred in November 2025. Existing customers are finding out about the change as they renew their contracts.
OpenAI made a similar pricing change in April. The Codex rate card (Internet Archive copy) currently says:
Note: On April 2, 2026, we updated Codex pricing to align with API token usage, instead of per-message pricing. This change was applicable to new and existing Plus, Pro, ChatGPT Business and new ChatGPT Enterprise plans.
On April 23, 2026, we made this update for all existing ChatGPT Enterprise plans as well, inclusive of Edu, Health, Gov, and ChatGPT for Teachers.
It’s a little harder to decode as they quote prices in “credits”, but as far as I can tell those credit costs are an exact match for the API token costs listed for those models.
All of which is to say that as of April 2026 the “Enterprise” cost for both OpenAI Codex and Anthropic Claude Code/Cowork is the same as the listed API price.
GPT-5.5 (released April 23rd) is 2x the API price of GPT-5.4. Opus 4.7 (April 16th) is around 1.4x the price of Opus 4.6 when you take their new tokenizer into account.
So April saw both leading model companies release new frontier models with a higher API price, and both companies now have measures to lock their enterprise customers (who tend to sign year-long deals) at those API prices, not the previous extreme discounts.
I think they’ve found product-market fit
Why these sudden aggressive moves on pricing? Both Anthropic and OpenAI are planning to IPO, but I suspect there’s a more important factor here: I think they’ve finally found product-market fit, with the coding/general-purpose agent products embodied by Claude Code/Cowork and Codex.
Tools like ChatGPT are wildly popular, but that wild popularity has been difficult to turn into revenue. In February OpenAI boasted more than 900 million weekly active users for ChatGPT, but only 50 million—5.6% of that—were paying consumer subscribers.
Charging $10-$20/month per user is an OK business, but you’d need 1-2 billion subscribers sticking around for four years to cover $1 trillion in infrastructure.
Companies spending $200+/month/user will get you there a whole lot faster—and as noted above, as a power-user I’m at ~$1,000/month in API costs per vendor already.
Coding agents really did change everything. These are tools which burn vastly more tokens, but are also quickly becoming daily drivers for the work carried out by extremely well-compensated professionals. Right now that’s still mostly software engineers, but a coding agent is a tool that can automate anything you can do by typing commands into a computer... so they are clearly applicable to a much wider set of skilled knowledge workers.
As I’ve discussed on this site at length, the models released in November 2025 elevated agents to being genuinely useful. We’ve had six months to get used to that idea now—it’s no wonder companies are beginning to spend real money on this technology.
You could argue that ChatGPT achieved product-market fit when it became the fastest-growing consumer app in history back in February 2023... but it certainly wasn’t making any actual money back then. Coding agents plus enterprise pricing marks the point when these companies start making very real revenue. Maybe even enough to start covering their costs!
And they’re ramping up
As further evidence that enterprise agents represent product-market fit for these companies, consider their open job listings.
OpenAI have 703 open jobs right now, of which I’d categorize 229 (32.6%) as relating to enterprise sales and support—account executives, “Go To Market”, “Forward Deployed Engineers” and the like.
Anthropic have 390 open jobs, 105 (26.9%) of which look enterprisey to me.
It’s pleasingly ironic that these AI labs have picked a business model with such a heavy demand on human labor—enterprise sales contracts don’t close themselves without a whole lot of humans in the mix!
(I ran this analysis by scraping their job sites with Claude Code, then having it use Datasette’s JSON API to pipe that data into Datasette Cloud where I used Datasette Agent for the analysis, exported here. Dogfood!)
The AI-failure stories around this are pretty thin
I started digging into this in response to a growing volume of stories claiming that large companies were sounding the alarm because their AI usage costs had grown so large.
The most widely cited of these stories appear quite overblown to me.
The most discussed has been Uber, based on this report where CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga indicated that Uber had “maxed out its full year AI budget just a few months into 2026”, mostly thanks to Claude Code.
Given that Claude Code only got really good in November it’s entirely unsurprising to me that a budget set in 2025 may have failed to predict demand for that tool in 2026!
That Uber story was further fueled by comments made by Uber’s COO, Andrew Macdonald, on the Rapid Response podcast. I tracked down the segment and there really isn’t much there. Here’s what Andrew said:
But then you sometimes go and talk to your senior engineering leaders and you’re saying, OK, how many projects that were on the cutting room floor got moved above the line because of the productivity gains because 25% of our code commits were via Claude Code last quarter?
That link is not there yet, right? I think maybe implicitly there’s more that is getting shipped. But it’s very hard to draw a line between one of those stats and, OK, now we’re actually producing like 25% more useful consumer features, right? And that line is hard to draw.
[...] And so if you’re not actually able to draw a direct line to how much useful features and functionality you’re shipping to your users, that trade becomes harder to justify.
Somehow this fragment turned into headlines like Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify the money spent on AI tokenmaxxing, because the market for stories about AI failures remains enormous.
Update 29th May 2026: I edited the above quote to add that last paragraph ending in “becomes harder to justify” on the suggestion of Madison Mills—previously my quoted section stopped at “hard to draw”. Here’s the full unedited transcript from MacWhisper.
The other popular story around this is Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses, ostensibly to encourage their engineers to dogfood their own Copilot CLI agent instead—but The Verge reporter Tom Warren says “sources tell me the decision is also a financial one”, triggered by the June 30th end of Microsoft’s financial year.
I think both of these stories support my “product-market fit” hypothesis. The best advice I ever heard on pricing a product was that your customer should suck air through their teeth and then say yes. Uber’s budget overrun and Microsoft’s seat cancellations look like that effect playing out in practice.
We also know the labs are spending a lot
The big AI labs spend billions of dollars on both training and inference. Credible figures are hard to come by, but we did get one huge hint as to the figures involved from, oddly enough, the recent SpaceX S-1:
[...] in May 2026, we entered into Cloud Services Agreements with Anthropic PBC (“Anthropic”), an AI research and development public benefit corporation, with respect to access to compute capacity across COLOSSUS and COLOSSUS II. Pursuant to these agreements, the customer has agreed to pay us $1.25 billion per month through May 2029 [...]
The Anthropic announcement said that this deal meant they could “increase our usage limits for Claude Code and the Claude API”, heavily implying that Colossus is being used for inference, not model training.
Anthropic already have vast amounts of compute from other providers. The fact that they’re willing to spend $1.25 billion per month for extra capacity from just one of their vendors hints at how big these inference budgets have become.
API revenue is becoming less important
Over the past two years my impression has been that OpenAI made more of their income from subscription revenue while Anthropic made more from their API.
Anthropic’s API revenue was historically quite dependent on a small number of large API customers—this VentureBeat story from August 2025 quotes “sources familiar with the matter” suggesting that just Cursor and GitHub Copilot were responsible for $1.2 billion of the company’s then-$4 billion revenue.
Today Anthropic are rumored to hit $10.9 billion in the second quarter, potentially even operating at a profit for the first time.
This pivot-to-Enterprise suggests that the labs have realized that the real money lies in cutting out the middlemen. Anthropic’s Claude Code directly competes with Cursor and Copilot. No wonder Cursor are investing in their own models!
April is a new inflection point
I’ve called November 2025 the November inflection point because that was when GPT-5.1 and Opus 4.5, combined with their respective coding agent harnesses, got good—good enough that we’ve spent the last six months adapting to agent systems that can reliably get useful work done.
I think April 2026 is a new inflection point where the revenue implications of this have started to land, to the benefit of the frontier AI labs and with material impacts on the budgets of large companies.
We’ll know for sure how real this moment is when the S-1 documents for the upcoming Anthropic and OpenAI IPOs give us some real, audited numbers to get our teeth into.
27th May 2026
More recent articles
- Kimi K3, and what we can still learn from the pelican benchmark - 16th July 2026
- The new GPT-5.6 family: Luna, Terra, Sol - 9th July 2026
- sqlite-utils 4.0, now with database schema migrations - 7th July 2026
This is I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit by Simon Willison, posted on 27th May 2026.
claude-cowork
november-2025-inflection
datasette-agent
uber