I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit
I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit
我认为 Anthropic 和 OpenAI 已经找到了产品市场契合点 (Product-Market Fit)
27th May 2026 2026年5月27日
Anthropic are strongly rumored to be about to have their first profitable quarter. Stories are circulating of companies surprised at how expensive their LLM bills are becoming from usage by their staff. I think this is because OpenAI and Anthropic have both found product-market fit. 有强烈传言称，Anthropic 即将迎来其首个盈利季度。坊间流传着一些故事，称许多公司对其员工使用大语言模型（LLM）所产生的巨额账单感到震惊。我认为这是因为 OpenAI 和 Anthropic 都已经找到了产品市场契合点。
Enterprise customers are now paying API prices. I think they’ve found product-market fit. And they’re ramping up. The AI-failure stories around this are pretty thin. We also know the labs are spending a lot. API revenue is becoming less important. April is a new inflection point. 企业客户现在正按 API 价格付费。我认为他们已经找到了产品市场契合点，并且正在加大投入。围绕此事的“AI 失败”案例其实站不住脚。我们也知道这些实验室投入巨大。API 收入正变得不那么重要，而四月是一个新的转折点。
I currently subscribe to the $100/month Max plan from Anthropic and the $100/month Pro plan from OpenAI. If you are a heavy user of coding agents these plans are a fantastic deal. I just ran the ccusage tool on my laptop to get an estimate of how much I would have spent if I were to pay for API tokens in the past 30 days and got: $1,199.79 for Anthropic Claude Code; $980.37 for OpenAI Codex. That’s $2,180.16 worth of tokens for $200—not bad at all!
我目前订阅了 Anthropic 每月 100 美元的 Max 套餐和 OpenAI 每月 100 美元的 Pro 套餐。如果你是编程智能体（coding agents）的重度用户，这些套餐非常划算。我刚刚在笔记本电脑上运行了 ccusage 工具，估算了一下如果过去 30 天我按 API Token 付费需要花多少钱，结果是：Anthropic Claude Code 为 1,199.79 美元，OpenAI Codex 为 980.37 美元。这意味着我只花了 200 美元就使用了价值 2,180.16 美元的 Token——这简直太棒了！
I’m a moderately heavy user of these tools, but I’m certainly not running agents every hour of the day and night. I had assumed that companies making extensive use of agents were getting similar discounts. It turns out I could not have been more wrong about that. 我算是这些工具的中重度用户，但我肯定没有没日没夜地运行智能体。我曾以为那些大量使用智能体的公司也能享受到类似的折扣。事实证明，我大错特错了。
I haven’t been able to track down the exact date, but at some point in the last six months Anthropic switched their Enterprise plan (originally “Claude seats include enough usage for a typical workday” back in August 2025) to $20/seat/month plus API pricing for usage. This story about the change from The Information is dated Apr 14, 2026, but cites an Anthropic spokesperson claiming that the pricing change occurred in November 2025. Existing customers are finding out about the change as they renew their contracts. 我无法查证确切日期，但在过去六个月里的某个时间点，Anthropic 将其企业版套餐（2025 年 8 月时原定为“Claude 席位包含足以应付典型工作日的用量”）改为每月每席位 20 美元，外加按 API 用量计费。The Information 关于此项变动的报道日期为 2026 年 4 月 14 日，但援引 Anthropic 发言人的话称，价格调整发生在 2025 年 11 月。现有客户在续签合同时才发现这一变化。
OpenAI made a similar pricing change in April. The Codex rate card (Internet Archive copy) currently says: Note: On April 2, 2026, we updated Codex pricing to align with API token usage, instead of per-message pricing. This change was applicable to new and existing Plus, Pro, ChatGPT Business and new ChatGPT Enterprise plans. On April 23, 2026, we made this update for all existing ChatGPT Enterprise plans as well, inclusive of Edu, Health, Gov, and ChatGPT for Teachers. OpenAI 在四月份也进行了类似的定价调整。Codex 的费率表（互联网存档副本）目前显示：注：2026 年 4 月 2 日，我们将 Codex 定价更新为与 API Token 用量挂钩，而非按消息计费。此变更适用于新的和现有的 Plus、Pro、ChatGPT Business 以及新的 ChatGPT Enterprise 套餐。2026 年 4 月 23 日，我们将此更新应用于所有现有的 ChatGPT Enterprise 套餐，包括教育、医疗、政府以及教师版 ChatGPT。
It’s a little harder to decode as they quote prices in “credits”, but as far as I can tell those credit costs are an exact match for the API token costs listed for those models. All of which is to say that as of April 2026 the “Enterprise” cost for both OpenAI Codex and Anthropic Claude Code/Cowork is the same as the listed API price. 这有点难解读，因为他们用“积分”（credits）来报价，但据我观察，这些积分成本与这些模型列出的 API Token 成本完全一致。总而言之，截至 2026 年 4 月，OpenAI Codex 和 Anthropic Claude Code/Cowork 的“企业级”成本与列出的 API 价格相同。
GPT-5.5 (released April 23rd) is 2x the API price of GPT-5.4. Opus 4.7 (April 16th) is around 1.4x the price of Opus 4.6 when you take their new tokenizer into account. So April saw both leading model companies release new frontier models with a higher API price, and both companies now have measures to lock their enterprise customers (who tend to sign year-long deals) at those API prices, not the previous extreme discounts. GPT-5.5（4 月 23 日发布）的 API 价格是 GPT-5.4 的两倍。考虑到新的分词器（tokenizer），Opus 4.7（4 月 16 日发布）的价格约为 Opus 4.6 的 1.4 倍。因此，四月份这两家领先的模型公司都发布了 API 价格更高的新前沿模型，并且两家公司现在都有措施将企业客户（通常签署年度合同）锁定在这些 API 价格上，而不是之前的超低折扣价。
I think they’ve found product-market fit
我认为他们已经找到了产品市场契合点
Why these sudden aggressive moves on pricing? Both Anthropic and OpenAI are planning to IPO, but I suspect there’s a more important factor here: I think they’ve finally found product-market fit, with the coding/general-purpose agent products embodied by Claude Code/Cowork and Codex. 为什么定价上会有如此激进的举动？Anthropic 和 OpenAI 都在计划 IPO，但我怀疑这里有一个更重要的因素：我认为他们终于通过 Claude Code/Cowork 和 Codex 所体现的编程/通用智能体产品，找到了产品市场契合点。
Tools like ChatGPT are wildly popular, but that wild popularity has been difficult to turn into revenue. In February OpenAI boasted more than 900 million weekly active users for ChatGPT, but only 50 million—5.6% of that—were paying consumer subscribers. Charging $10-$20/month per user is an OK business, but you’d need 1-2 billion subscribers sticking around for four years to cover $1 trillion in infrastructure. 像 ChatGPT 这样的工具非常受欢迎，但这种巨大的受欢迎程度很难转化为收入。二月份，OpenAI 宣称 ChatGPT 每周活跃用户超过 9 亿，但只有 5000 万（占比 5.6%）是付费订阅用户。向每位用户每月收取 10-20 美元是一门尚可的生意，但你需要 10 到 20 亿订阅用户持续付费四年，才能覆盖 1 万亿美元的基础设施成本。
Companies spending $200+/month/user will get you there a whole lot faster—and as noted above, as a power-user I’m at ~$1,000/month in API costs per vendor already. Coding agents really did change everything. These are tools which burn vastly more tokens, but are also quickly becoming daily drivers for the work carried out by extremely well-compensated professionals. 公司每月为每位用户支付 200 美元以上，能让你更快达到目标——正如上面提到的，作为一个重度用户，我每个供应商的 API 成本已经达到每月约 1000 美元。编程智能体确实改变了一切。这些工具消耗的 Token 多得多，但也正迅速成为高薪专业人士日常工作的核心驱动力。
Right now that’s still mostly software engineers, but a coding agent is a tool that can automate anything you can do by typing commands into a computer… so they are clearly applicable to a much wider set of skilled knowledge workers. As I’ve discussed on this site at length, the models released in November 2025 elevated agents to being genuinely useful. We’ve had six months to get used to that idea now—it’s no wonder companies are beginning to spend real money on this technology. 目前这主要还是软件工程师在使用，但编程智能体是一种可以自动化任何通过在计算机上输入命令完成的工作的工具……因此，它们显然适用于更广泛的熟练知识工作者。正如我在此网站上详细讨论的那样，2025 年 11 月发布的模型将智能体提升到了真正有用的水平。我们已经有六个月的时间来适应这个概念了——难怪企业开始在这项技术上投入真金白银。
You could argue that ChatGPT achieved product-market fit when it became the fastest-growing consumer app in history back in February 2023… but it certainly wasn’t making any actual money back then. Coding agents plus enterprise pricing marks the point when these companies start making very real revenue. Maybe even enough to start covering their costs! 你可以说 ChatGPT 在 2023 年 2 月成为历史上增长最快的消费者应用时就实现了产品市场契合……但那时它肯定没赚到什么真钱。编程智能体加上企业级定价，标志着这些公司开始产生真正收入的时刻。甚至可能足以开始覆盖他们的成本了！
And they’re ramping up
并且他们正在加大投入
As further evidence that enterprise agents represent product-market fit for these companies, consider their open job listings. OpenAI have 703 open jobs right now, of which I’d categorize 229 (32.6%) as relating to enterprise sales and support—account executives, “Go To Market”, “Forward Deployed Engineers” and the like. Anthropic have 390 open jobs, 105 (26.9%) of which look enterprisey to me. It’s pleasingly ironic that these AI labs have picked a business model with such a heavy demand on human labor—enterprise sales contracts don’t close themselves without a whole lot of humans in the mix! 作为企业级智能体代表了这些公司产品市场契合点的进一步证据，看看他们的招聘信息。OpenAI 目前有 703 个空缺职位，其中我将 229 个（32.6%）归类为与企业销售和支持相关的职位——如客户经理、“市场进入”（Go To Market）、“前线部署工程师”等。Anthropic 有 390 个空缺职位，其中 105 个（26.9%）在我看来属于企业级业务。令人感到讽刺的是，这些 AI 实验室选择了一种对人力需求如此巨大的商业模式——如果没有大量人员参与，企业销售合同是不会自动成交的！