It's probably not a "loss-leader" so much as "somewhat lower margin". Their bizdev guys are doubtless happy to make a switch between lower-margin, higher-multiple recurring revenue versus higher-margin, lower-multiple pay-as-you-go API billing. Corporate customers with contracts doubtless aren't paying like that for the API either. This is not uncommon.

When you have a "loss leader" whose sole purpose is to build up market share (e.g. put competitors out of business) that's called predatory pricing.

Every loss leader's purpose is to build up market share.

Perhaps in the generic sense that most things a business does are to build up market share that's true. But Costco isn't selling hot dogs for $1.50 in an effort to capture a large share of the hot dog market.

Do you think Anthropic followed all the ToS of every website on the internet when scraping them for training data?

You justify a wrong thing by attacking something else? Is that the only argument?

I don't feel any need to behave respectfully toward people or institutions that clearly don't respect me.

My guess is that ultimately the use of Claude code will provide the training data to make most of what you do now in Claude code irrelevant.

My guess is that ultimately the use of Claude code will provide the training data to make most of what you do irrelevant.

FTFY.

I keep hearing those claims that's they lose money on it, but I have more and more doubts about this being true.

GPU compute cost has falled down in the last two years a lot.

Poor behavior is still poor behavior even if the relevant ToS aligns with it.

Why is it poor behavior though?

Restricting users from using third party tools is commonly viewed as poor behavior. I'm not inclined to rehash that debate here, although I might respond to specific (contextually relevant) counterpoints if you feel like making them.