Anthropic was making moderate revenue from their API tokens, but everything changed when they started bundling crazy amounts of usage credits at $20/$100/$200 claude max subscriptions relative to the API token rate, but only as long as you use their coding harness — despite claude code, back when this started at least, being an inferior coding harness compared to many open source ones.

CC is technically a free product (you can use it with any model). It's got very few popular "opinions" on how a coding harness should work, but it's by far the most popular one (including at competing LLM manufactories like OpenAI and Meta and Google). Why? If it was just that their models are 5% better, most workplaces would optimize on token (aka cost) efficiency.

Anthropic has been winning the usage of their harness, their tokens, while earning significant revenue, by significantly subsiding their token consumption.

This has earned them many things:

- prime data on how software development — simultaneously the leading beneficiary industry from LLM use, and also the most flush with cash to spend — has been using LLMs

- bringing that industry to standardize around their harness concepts. They are essentially establishing themselves as the W3C of LLM interfacing, except as a private organization.

- all dat data