X discussion: Dario Amodei says some Claude tokens are worth cents and others tens of millions, floating pay-for-results AI pricing

Background and pain points

This is an X discussion, not a pricing change. On Oct 26, investor Guillermo Flor (@guilleflorvs) posted a video clip of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei on X with a summary of his points. It landed just as attention turned to Anthropic's revenue mix after its S-1 filing, and it has been widely quoted over the past day. Nearly all LLMs today are billed per token: output of the same length costs the same no matter how valuable it is. Amodei's comments go straight at that mismatch.

Architecture highlights

Amodei gives two examples. Claude has told users to restart their Mac about 10 million times, each worth a dollar or less. Telling a pharma company to move an aromatic ring to the other end of a molecule could be worth tens of millions of dollars. The tokens are the same kind of output, but the value differs by orders of magnitude. He expects pay-for-results pricing, or labor-like hourly pricing, to appear, and says many pricing models will be tried because this is a new industry.

Benchmarks

There are no benchmarks here. The post's own reach (public X API metrics as of 01:11 UTC): about 1.11M views, 2,611 likes, 1,779 bookmarks, 364 replies and 326 quotes. Per the S-1 figures cited in the post, usage-based pricing was about 80% of Anthropic's H1 2026 revenue and subscriptions about 20%, so value-based pricing is a direction, not a current product.

Getting started for developers

The most common pushback in the quotes is that value pricing needs a baseline, and many companies never measured their process costs before AI arrived, so whoever owns the outcome data owns the margin. For developers and buyers, APIs are still billed per token today. It is worth logging the time saved or output produced by each kind of AI task in your own systems now; if vendors later offer pay-for-results plans, that data is your negotiating position.