Perhaps my enterprise cynicism is not warranted, but my other comments refer to accurate descriptions of reality: Anthropic wants to place their opaque system between you and any computational task that you wish to perform. Do you contest this or think it is not accurate?
Why do you think that Anthropic wants fewer tokens inputted and outputted?
Because they sell subscriptions and tokens cost them compute, and their margin lives in the difference between what your subscription pays in and what you cost them in compute.
They have also been supply constrained on compute and if users cost them less in compute they can more subscriptions and less customer frustration.
I agree they want you to have a subscription. That doesn't mean they aren't aligned with their subscribers.
Subscriptions are a very small part of their overall revenue (estimates have been between 5% and 20% based on financial reporting). Enterprise users are charged per-token, and maximal input/output tokens nets them maximal revenue.
They still want you to hit the cache because their margin is higher on cache hits. That's actual compute they don't have to pay for and they don't have to have capacity for because they are supply limited on the compute side.
And the unit economics need to be there because there are competitors in the space. They can't just skin you on tokens or you'll jump ship.
Of course we are all guessing, but both things can be true: they don't want you to hit the cache, because cache writes are more profitable than cache reads, and they are supply limited on the compute. Pre-filling input tokens is very different from decoding, so when they claim they are supply limited on compute, do they mean mostly for decode or also for pre-fill (or only for pre-fill)?
I can imagine there are coding tasks where small edits to an existing huge codebase mostly consists of some small tool calls + processing a lot of input tokens, in e.g. a 20 to 1 ratio of input to output tokens.
This issue suggests that 74% of the charged input tokens could actually have been cache reads if claude code hadn't busted the cache. On the input side of things, this increased the cost (or count towards allowance) by ~3x (given that cost of cache write is 1.25 the unit price, and read is 0.1x the unit price).
OpenAI has a different cache pricing strategy, where cached reads are only 0.5x the cost, but cache writes do not cost extra.
Not sure how the unit economics play out claude vs openai, but it's safe to say that caching costs play a huuuge factor in this. It seems to be one of anthropic's USPs as a frontier-AI lab. They charge a premium for cache-writes (on top of the inflated token usage compared to OpenAI that was recently reported), but significantly discount the cache reads. The lack of care in tackling issues related to cache-busting is therefore really bad and suspicious.
Why do you think that Anthropic wants fewer tokens inputted and outputted?