In this case, Anthropic. They let someone paying $200/mo use however many tokens they would charge $180k for at their current API billing.

Since Anthropic subsidizes even API tokens at something like 10:1, this decompile may have cost Anthropic on the order of $2 million.

nobody, "$180k in tokens" doesn't actually mean $180k is changing hands at any point in this process

No one paid that amount: it’s the dollar equivalent of the billions of tokens that were used by the LLMs. The “devs” only used a $200/month subscription to do the decompiling. This business model is why AI companies aren’t profitable since compute is wildly more expensive than what they’re charging users.