There is an absolute barrage of inference providers popping up that get to $1M/mo extremely quickly.
This is the rough economics of inference providers:
Even if you rent on-demand B300s at $8/GPU-hr, many open source models (GLM 5.3, Kimi K3, DeepSeek 4.1 Flash / Pro) can get you >$10-20/GPU-hr at reasonable throughputs (100tok/s). DeepInfer from DeepSeek directly shows they can get $38/GPU-hr on off-peak hours. Every chip / model has a different throughput / interactivity curve, but there is a lot of arbitrage between even high rental spot prices and token prices. New chips (Vera Rubins) also change this meaningfully. Your ability to be making gross margin relies on your utilization and how good your stack is.
Gateways like OpenRouter, Vercel and more help solve that problem by aggregating demand to you. May inference providers discount their tokens to get longer term commits too. I've even heard stories of selling back Chinese model tokens to Chinese labs!
One thorn in the economics of these players is that many Chinese open source model labs are now asking for rev share if you're at a certain scale, espp for pre-release access to their models for day 1 support. That further pushes the threshold to be in the money.
The barrier to entry seems low and falling. There are even stories of smaller ones who can "vibe code" a way to stand up OSS models on a cluster they rent. And as a result, we're seeing 10s of such companies pop up almost every week and immediately skyrocketing revenue at low-ish gross margin and raising rounds on the back of that.
Unsurprisingly, because the actual service provided seems commodity, this eventually drives up compute prices and drives down token prices. In theory, it would seem like neoclouds who have the lowest cost of compute and themselves have started inference businesses would win the race to the bottom (Crusoe Coreweave Nebius and GMI all have inference businesses), with larger players (Modal Fireworks Baseten) being second because they are well capitalized to make bigger compute commits cheaply and have demand (high utilization), but the reality is the pie is growing so quickly that even upstarts are absolutely crushing it and growing aggressively (inference dot net, DeepInfra, Wafer, Relace, Morph).
Strategies vary across the board: neoclouds want to serve inference, inference players want to be neoclouds and do higher margin reserved instances / post training, and some want to go heterogeneous hardware or creatively flexible compute constructs.
The risks are: do open source models continue to be competitive? Will their creators rent seek more? Will their shape change compute needs? How do different chips change economics? Who gets compute in a supply crunch?
Below is a aggressive sketch of how gross margin scales with utilization for various models / chip sets.
For now, there are many inference providers and they’re all ripping!
I’ve left Anthropic after more than a year of working on Claude Code and seeing it scale larger than I ever imagined.
I have really loved working at Ant and believe deeply in the mission, and most of all, the idea of a race to the top.
The idea that if we work hard and responsibly, we can raise the bar and inspire others to great outcomes. And if we all push each other to be better, things can be radically good. I will carry the spirit of this with me forever.
My colleagues at Anthropic are the most talented, thoughtful, competent, and earnest people I have ever met. I am glad they are at the wheel and trust them deeply.
To the community on X, thank you for everything. You’ve made this the most fun (and sometimes stressful) job I’ve ever had.
For me, it is time for a bit of a break before diving into something new.
If you want more excellent Claude Code content, you should follow @addyosmani , @lydiahallie, @_catwu, @ClaudeDevs and of course @bcherny who started it all.
@ReignSwords The guide's third exception covers that case. If the main agent keeps picking the wrong tool or the instructions conflict, keep that one as a subagent. Since their own break showed up in only one of two runs, I'd run the eval a few times before deciding.
Anthropic's Applied AI team now says most subagents should be folded back into one main agent loop. One customer's single loop ran roughly 2x faster than its multi-agent harness.
The guide came out Oct 22 on Anthropic's site. Across several enterprise deployments, they found one agent with skills frequently beat both the giant single prompt and the subagent design on quality, often at lower cost and latency per task.
Their reasoning is simple. Every handoff returns a summary, so detail leaks out at each step. They call it a telephone game. Skills and tools now load on demand, so a long prompt is no longer a reason to split. Claude Code's system prompt for newer models was cut by over 80% this way.
Subagents still have three jobs: measurable context bloat, parallel work that needs fresh throwaway context, and an agent that keeps picking the wrong tool or has conflicting instructions.
The migration order is concrete. Build an end-to-end eval first, even 10 golden examples. Merge the subagents that always run together. Then turn the rest into skills plus MCP tools, one at a time, and compare scores. Past 30 to 50 tool definitions, tool choice tends to degrade.
The best detail is their own failure. Folding one subagent into a sample support agent cut latency but broke a flow that used to pass. The main agent held the order lookup tool, so it answered by itself and never asked the shipping subagent when the package would arrive. The break appeared in just one of two runs, so run every eval more than once.
I think the line worth checking against your own system is that many enterprise agents are drawn from the org chart, one team, one subagent. If you run one of those, your call logs will show which pairs always fire together. I'd merge those first.
Tim Sweeney is criticizing Valve again over Steam’s requirement for developers to disclose their use of generative AI.
The Epic Games CEO called the policy “abhorrent,” arguing that developers are being forced to make a “political statement” that could be used against them by a “hate mob.”
Sweeney has been criticizing the policy since 2025, previously comparing the disclosure to a “Scarlet Letter” and arguing that AI will eventually be part of almost every game production process.