This Is How Much Anthropic and Cursor Spend On Amazon Web Services

Source: Where’s Your Ed At Date: 2025-10-20 URL: https://www.wheresyoured.at/costs/

Summary

Zitron reveals Anthropic spent $2.66B on AWS through September 2025, exceeding its estimated revenue for the same period. Anthropic’s June 2025 ‘Service Tier’ pricing doubled Cursor’s AWS bills within a month — Cursor hit $500M annualized revenue, and Anthropic responded with expensive new tiers targeting that success. Monthly costs increased 174% from January to September 2025. Zitron calls this the ‘Subprime AI Crisis’: the more successful a product built on Anthropic’s API becomes, the more aggressively Anthropic prices it.

Implications

• Platform dependency at scale is existential. Anthropic can price Cursor out of the market at any time, then compete directly with Claude Code. This is textbook platform capture.
• Anthropic’s cost-exceeds-revenue structure means every customer is subsidized. Future price increases are inevitable — the question is how many customers are locked in before they happen.
• The ‘Subprime AI Crisis’ framing: The risk is distributed like subprime mortgages — small actors taking on pricing risk they can’t quantify, with Anthropic as the originator.