Anthropic distillation math: $500M buys ~516T tokens at Opus blended $0.97/M
zephyr_z9 · x · 2026-09-20
A back-of-envelope analysis: Opus's blended cost is $0.97 per million tokens, and a cited thread claims a decent chunk of Anthropic's business is China and Meta distillation plus under-optimized tokenmaxxing. At $500M (0.7% of ARR) spent on distillation, buyers would get 516 trillion tokens — a lot to weigh against OpenAI and open-source catching up at a $1T valuation.
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