Mac AI rental earnings plummet: Darkbloom sees revenue drop as Anthropic token costs fall 77%
Darkbloom, a decentralized AI inference network that aggregates spare compute capacity from idle Macs, has warned its members to expect falling revenues. The primary driver is the rapid decline in Anthropic token prices, which in some instances is outpacing Moore's Law.
According to The Register, the price per million Anthropic tokens dropped by 77% in less than five months, falling from $2.65 in May to $0.62 in October 2026. This decline directly impacts Darkbloom members, whose primary client is OpenRouter. A researcher from Eigen Labs, the developer of the compute platform, noted that NVIDIA cluster output has increased approximately 20x this year, allowing data centers to cut prices by 90% while maintaining significant profit margins.
Rental Economics: From $192 to $1.23 per day
Current profitability looks optimistic only on paper. In a best-case scenario, running an M5 Pro Mac Mini with 64GB of Unified Memory could earn up to $192 per month. The median earnings of the top 50 Darkbloom operators are approximately $159.86 per month, or about $5.26 daily. However, accounting for the 77% drop in Anthropic token prices, earnings could plummet to just $36.77 per month, or roughly $1.23 per day.
The situation is further complicated by OpenRouter shifting its priorities. The service has begun prioritizing decode speed, quantization, and prefill speed. This puts owners of devices without top-tier Apple Max or Ultra chips at a disadvantage, as execution speed becomes more critical than raw compute cost. While token volumes are exploding due to agentic AI, the unit price is crashing.
Seeking New Workloads
To mitigate losses, Darkbloom is looking to diversify workloads. The network is analyzing model demand to advise members on high-demand models and is exploring tasks beyond inference, such as distributed CI/CD jobs, while seeking clients outside of OpenRouter to remain competitive.
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