In the short term, the firms selling AI services can set the prices, but the economic costs of compute are something they do not control. (In fact they'd prefer those costs to come down, even as their demand for hardware and energy is pushing costs up.) The quoted figures were based on API pricing, which as you say is somewhat arbitrary. But like I said, I think it's fair to assume the true costs are currently higher - AI firms are prone to underpricing tokens as they chase market share and customer adoption/dependency. At some point that underpricing is surely going to end as investors seek a path to profitability. While it's fair to treat Anthropic's quoted figures with a pinch of salt, I doubt they're totally disconnected from reality. They probably serve as a decent lower bound for the true costs. Even looking at things cynically, it's not exactly in Anthropic's interest to admit their model is a very expensive way of hunting bugs.