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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