Anthropic revenue example suggests open weights are less threatening than release cadence

teortaxesTex · x · 2026-07-21

A quote-tweet argues that frontier labs should stop fearing open source because their margins are mostly insulated from it.

The cited thread claims Opus 4.6 once drove about 75% of Anthropic's API revenue, and nearly 80% in Fast Mode.
It says the previous Opus generation fell from 10% of revenue to 0.2% over five quarters as its price dropped from $35 to $3 per million tokens.
The takeaway: release cadence and the latest model, not open weights, are what quickly erode the rents of older models.
It also argues that even if open weights capture some share, the effect is bounded because customers pay for the product layer and the capability frontier, not the weights themselves.

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