Anthropic made a smart business decision to mostly focus on enterprise customers rather than regular consumers. Only around 10% of their revenue comes from their heavily subsidized subscription plans. The remaining 90%ish comes from API and enterprise usage billed at per-token rates, which is something that's actually profitable for them. They have a decent margin on token rates. It's R&D, hardware, and subscriptions that are putting them in the red at the moment.
I suspect they'll discontinue subscriptions some time after their IPO. Even though subscriptions are only responsible for 10% of revenue, they consume 42% of their inference compute power (https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/10/06/anthropic-claude-subscription-plan-provides-more-value-than-openais-study-says/5301470)
In comparison, around 70% of OpenAI's revenue comes from subscriptions. Without subsidized subscriptions, they'd lose most of their customers.