No, it doesn't cost Anthropic $5k per Claude Code user (4 minute read)

A recent article by Forbes on Cursor claims that Anthropic's $200 per month Claude Code Max plan can consume $5,000 in compute. It is likely that the article's sources are confusing retail API prices with actual compute costs. The actual compute cost is roughly 10% of retail API prices. Most users don't come anywhere near their limits. Anthropic isn't a profitable company, but inference isn't why.