SemiAnalysis puts the compute each Claude Max subscriber actually burns at $8,000 of API list-rate tokens, and Codex users closer to $14,000. Although serving costs are roughly a quarter of the list price, the actual loss per plan amounts to a few thousand dollars. Still a serious burn rate.
But every Max session produces a detailed record of how people work through real problems, the kind you cannot get just by buying tokens. Anthropic recently extended 30-day data retention to accounts that previously kept nothing. This kind of data only gets more valuable and harder to get.