Interesting article, full of speculation and some logical follows, but feels like it feels short of admitting what the true conclusion is. Model building companies can build thinner wrapper / harness and can offer better prices than third party companies (the article assumes it costs anthropic same price per token as it does for their customers) because their costs per token is lower than app layer companies. Anthropic has a decent margin (likely higher than openai) on sale of every token, and with more scale, they can sell at a lower cost (or some unlimited plans with limits that keeps out 1%-5% of the power users).

I don't agree with the Cognition conclusion either. Enterprises are fighting super hard to not have a long term buying contract when they know SOTA (app or model) is different every 6 months. They are keeping their switching costs low and making sure they own the workflow, not the tool. This is even more prominent after Slack restricted API usage for enterprise customers.

Making money on the infra is possible, but that again misunderstands the pricing power of Anthropic. Lovable, Replit etc. work because of Claude. Openai had codex, google had jules, both aren't as good in terms of taste compared to Claude. It's not the cli form factor which people love, it's the outcome they like. When Anthropic sees the money being left on the table in infra play, they will offer the same (at presumably better rates given Amazon is an investor) and likely repeat this strategy. Abstraction is a good play, only if you abstract it to the maximum possible levels.