But these dummy companies only exist on paper, you would of course not duplicate any actual work for them.

That "clever hack" you just thought up is called "fraud" and is very illegal. Anthropic could cut you off as soon as they found out, and if they wanted, sue you for infringement, the way Oracle and Microsoft do.

https://xkcd.com/1494/

(Also, I don't know about other countries but the IRS would have some questions for you after a few years of running a corp that doesn't appear to actually do anything).

I think railway or construction companies do just create some corporation for each project, so it can't be illegal per se. What's going to stop you from just creating a company for each project (splitting when projects become to large). You can also keep a reasonable number of companies around and just allocate tasks and resources as necessary.

I actually believed that having a ton of subcompanies, IS already how any larger company operates.

You have tax and management overhead for all of these companies, it's not free, and certainly costs more than just using the enterprise plan. Plus Anthropic can sue you arguing the corporate structure is just a workaround to avoid paying the enterprise plan, and you'd probably just settle out of court anyway and have to switch to the enterprise plan.

The reason _some_ (but certainly not all, or even the majority) large companies break up into subsidiaries is usually for liability purposes (so one mistake by one part of the conglomerate can't expose other parts to the full risk).

Only in the sense that all companies legally exist only on paper - splitting a large company in many legally discinct 149-employee legal entities is possible (some industries have practices like that, e.g. construction and real estate sometimes spawn a separate company for each major building) but would absolutely create lots of very real work and other costs for legal, tax, general finance and HR functions. And simply faking many 149-employee LLCs while not having them actually be real entities is both unlikely to succeed (like, B2B transactions can't be pseudonymous, Anthropic knows your company's registration data) and would also technically be criminal fraud so high (personal!) risk for the small gain in API pricing.

> splitting a large company in many legally discinct 149-employee legal entities is possible

Sure it might be work to set up the first subcompanies, but once you have that can't you just replace the company name in all the legal texts? Also I think large companies already do have tons of subcompanies, so I guess that cost already got paid?

> And simply faking many 149-employee LLCs while not having them actually be real entities is both unlikely to succeed

You do not need to fake it, you can just rent it?