Anthropic is not MoviePass. Its unit economics will be fine after it decides to optimize for profitability.
All of the analysis seems to rely on:
1. Continuing to grow their share of the market.
2. Margins staying high.
3. Inference costs coming down.
4. A need for Anthropic's models specifically.
I buy 3. But 1, 2, and 4 rely on models continuing to improve at the same rate, such that you need the latest version to stay competitive. At the cut below frontier models, there's already robust competition between open source models, cheaper providers like Deepseek, more local AI alternatives, etc.
I think the case for the unit economics being fine starts to fall apart if you can't charge a large premium for your best in class model.
"Best in class" is a broad definition. Anthropic can easily charge a large premium for their "best in small class" and "best in medium class" models, for any given definition of "small" and "medium"