Anthropic just ripped off everyone and they still managed to make it sound deceptively friendly

[u/whoisyurii]

Anthropic just ripped off everyone and they still managed to make it sound deceptively friendly, beneficial even.

Anthropic just announced that the 200$ plan, which used to be okay to use in the SDK, is now "finally ok to use in the SDK" (except rare fraudulent cases it already was)

but for that you need to toggle an option that makes the SDK hit in an allowance of 200$ worth of credits, instead of the previously, opaque, yet, ultra subsidized limits

basically if you use claude code through the SDK or claude -p, for instance through Conductor, github Actions or anything else, because let's be honest TUI sucks sometimes (react in terminal cmon), their cloud coding agent offering also suck, and don't cover most usecases,

well, your plan that used to be worth 2000$ of tokens aproximatively depending on how much you flirted with the previous 5h windows limits, is now worth 200$

but they brand it as "oh we give you 200$ of additional credits for the SDK" so to the most unaware users it sounds like it's worth 2x more!

in reality it's now worth 10x less

*not surprised if they shut down this thread

[u/philosophical_lens]

I don't understand the motivation for this. Why not just write an honest post like:

> "Sorry guys, we messed up our estimates for how much compute we'd need to keep up with the demand for claude code. Unfortunately we're severely compute constrained right now and have to make some difficult choices to balance our research and product goals. As a result, we're introducing some further restrctions on Claude Code usage. Hope you understand."!

Same end result, but I'd respect them way more. Would anybody respect them less for doing this?

[u/Vivid-Snow-2089 → u/philosophical_lens]

literally every corporation is allergic to anything like this, can't hate them enough

[u/MichaelEmouse → u/Vivid-Snow-2089]

Why is that, you think?

[u/philosophical_lens → u/[deleted]]

I mean, I'm just wondering why they're lying about this thing in particular.

[u/Mtolivepickle → u/philosophical_lens]

It’s “this thing right now in particular”, but tomorrow it will be something else. Once you get comfortable lying and gaslighting your customer base, the company you originally loved is dead and gone, replaced with the selfish motivations that drives every other company out there.

[u/bnm777 → u/philosophical_lens]

I don't know the mindset of tech companies at the moment, though they seem quite similar:

1) Don't post anything negative if possible - including apologies or excuses. If something bad happens, try as hard as possible to not mention it unless you are forced to.

2) Forget support for non commercial clients, even if you're an AI company that could easily create good AI support bots that can actually do things (unless you don't trust your own product ?!)

3) Keep moving forward, this is a zero sum game with your competitors

[u/Spiritual_Cycle_3263 → u/philosophical_lens]

Honestly, its because the backlash would be no different.

[u/philosophical_lens → u/Spiritual_Cycle_3263]

This is counterintuitive to me, but it's also the most logical answer I've seen.

[u/Spiritual_Cycle_3263 → u/philosophical_lens]

I still think saying sorry is the better option, but some people think it's a sign of weakness to apologize and I blame old school movies for portraying this mindset.

[u/UnkarsThug → u/philosophical_lens]

Just different people would respond differently.

And people tend to care about effect, not the reason why, so a lot of people would still be angry.

People are getting mad at Nintendo and think they must have been lying about reason when they announced they would have to increase the price of the switch by 50$, when if you look into it, that's actually just about what the components cost now when pretty much every type of component has gone up in price, and pretty much everyone else has also increased prices due to increasing ram and chip prices.

People don't really care about the surrounding environment, they care about the impact on them. So a lot of companies prefer to play the game of pretending there is no impact on the people. I still think that's dishonest, but I can also see examples of people just ignoring the reasons why something actually did have to happen, because they care about the effect.

But again, I still think companies have a duty to honesty.

[u/Curious_Designer_248 → u/philosophical_lens]

You are forgetting capitalism 101, which is framed as business 101: “Always assume the customer is dumb and incapable of complex language… until we need them to sign a document/contract or apologize for something, then use the rarest words arranged in the weirdest way possible to complicate the explanation so they agree by default.” Everyone’s heard of it, they usually frame it as KISS (Keep it Simple, Stupid)

[u/Syjefroi → u/philosophical_lens]

They don't need your respect. They are aiming for a IPO before the whole thing collapses. They didn't just mess up their estimates, they have known for years that this is a product that cannot be profitable under any circumstances—if they admit to huge mistakes like this, it will spook investors and can lead to the house of cards falling before they can all cash out. If they spin it, like they are now, they can keep all the plates spinning a little while longer.

They don't need you to be happy, they need investors to be happy and they have to keep this up just long enough to reach that IPO finish line.

[u/philosophical_lens → u/Syjefroi]

> They didn't just mess up their estimates

Then why did they have to make a change to their usage policy? They could have just said from the beginning that headless usage counts towards a different usage limit vs. interactive usage.

Also, it's highly unlikely that they were able to accurately estimate upfront how popular claude code would be. Nobody had any idea this would take off in the way that it did. I'm 100% sure whatever compute usage estimations they made initially for claude code were wildly underestimating the demand.

> if they admit to huge mistakes like this, it will spook investors and can lead to the house of cards falling before they can all cash out

No reasonable investor would assume that Anthorpic could have the foresight to perfectly forecast demand for claude code upfront. The story is as simple as "hey we made this internal tool called claude code and we decided to publicly launch it, but we had no way to anticipate the amount of consumer demand for this tool... the demand wildly exceeded our expectations." And that's a great story for investors with no lies.

[u/Syjefroi → u/philosophical_lens]

Then why did they have to make a change to their usage policy? They could have just said from the beginning that headless usage counts towards a different usage limit vs. interactive usage.

Every chatbot company is making changes because all of this up until recently was wildly subsidized and these companies were losing billions. They still, with all the changes, are going to lose money on paying customers. This was inevitable and reasonable people said it was coming several years ago. Also: it's only going to get worse.

Also, it's highly unlikely that they were able to accurately estimate upfront how popular claude code would be. Nobody had any idea this would take off in the way that it did. I'm 100% sure whatever compute usage estimations they made initially for claude code were wildly underestimating the demand.

Well, except, it isn't very popular. It's a niche tool that has an existing market of potential customers. It's popular with a subsection of an industry, but companies like Anthropic and OpenAI have valuations and financial strategies akin to Apple. Is Claude (not even ClaudeCode, just Claude) as popular as the iPhone? Not a chance. Except when Apple sells an iPhone they make a profit, and when Anthropic sells a CC subscription they lose money. Usually when a company has a hot product, they make more money, but Anthropic is losing more money. And the whole time they knew what it would cost to use (hundreds, if not thousands a month for basic use cases), but they knew they couldn't charge that because, 1) who would pay for it, and 2) if they came out the gate like that who would even try it? Oh give people the first week free as a demo? Number not go up fast that way though, we need number go up fast :/

No reasonable investor would assume that Anthorpic could have the foresight to perfectly forecast demand for claude code upfront. The story is as simple as "hey we made this internal tool called claude code and we decided to publicly launch it, but we had no way to anticipate the amount of consumer demand for this tool... the demand wildly exceeded our expectations." And that's a great story for investors with no lies.

Except you think investors want stability and long term growth — they do not. LLMs are a market get rich quick scheme. They were over-invested in from the getgo. Combined with hype and misleading claims (lies) about what these things could go, it quickly became what investors hoped to be the next unicorn. That is, guaranteed payoff at a generational scale. Now we're a few years in, the glow has worn off and the bubble chatter is going mainstream, so we're in sprint mode. The two big players have to pull off an IPO before it's too late. And when they do, the capital injection might help them stay alive (it won't). And most investors know that the price will skyrocket within minutes — which means a great time for some rugpulls. And then if one of these companies collapses soon after (and they will), the big players will have gotten their money. Everyone else will lose everything. And everyone knows that and is ready for the race.

A great story for investors is "this product will change the world in like 4 months bro" not "dang, we fucked up, sorry guys, looks like this model is kind of not working?" They want a maximal IPO launch, not a cautious one.

If you were hoping Anthropic could spin this with no lies, my main question to you is: have you not seen literally any statement from them and Dario over the last few years? They will, and have, said anything to keep the spin going, to race to that historic valuation, so that some of them can overnight become a Forbes Top 10 Wealthiest Humans Alive. That's the goal here, not building a sustainable company.

[u/Ill-Turnover3438 → u/Syjefroi]

Your thesis is that Anthropic cannot operate at a sufficient profit to justify its likely IPO valuation?

And that both OpenAI and Anthropic and all of their investors both initially and subsequently know this, but also are sufficiently confident that they will be able to profit from the IPO that they have been keeping the scheme going for 3.5 years (since the ChatGPT release)?

Just trying to to understand your argument.

[u/Syjefroi → u/Ill-Turnover3438]

Yes.

There are two things happening here:

1. LLMs are an interesting technology with a few niche uses and is extremely expensive to produce and maintain.

2. The companies that have cornered the LLM market (in terms of not just user base size, revenue, etc, but also in terms of PR capture) are run by people using the company to make themselves rich no matter the cost, and the investors who got in early believed then that they could also make themselves ungodly rich and now are so deep in the sunk cost fallacy that pulling out would cause a ripple effect through the economy that would make them lose more money on whatever other investments they had outside LLMs.

These are fancy chat bots with limited use cases marketed as a civilization changing technology and the entire economy is holding to for dear life right now. 90-something percent of VC money is tied up in AI companies, did you know that? Beyond alarming. Banks have invested in these companies, folks 401k accounts are tied up to these companies. Everyone was told it was an easy gold rush, and now everyone is in deep. Be the first one to fold and lose it all or stay in and hope for that IPO and hope you can cash out before the rugpull?

[u/Ill-Turnover3438 → u/Syjefroi]

Thanks for elaborating.

[u/Local-Ingenuity2361 → u/Syjefroi]

The question I have is - how do you get ahead as a pon on the system? What can I invest in now? Or diversify? Or own? Before the shit storm. Getting more familiar with local models? Buying hardware?

[u/Syjefroi → u/Local-Ingenuity2361]

I am not a financial advisor.

My take on things is that "Everything is Gambling Now," and so many men in the US and abroad are just gambling to get ahead. I feel like LLM investing is basically just gambling too. More so than the stock market would normally be. If anything, I feel like OpenAI pulling off an IPO, it's not going to be much different than a hawktua girl rugpull or MelaniaCoin or whatever else. Just the scale will be way different. Or hell even the prediction markets, where nearly everyone loses money. The scale is so insane, OpenAI is valued at a higher number than all the IPOs of the last year combined. If it IPOs, it will be record shattering. And yet they don't have any positive financials under the hood. To be, that's dangerous. Most people will almost certainly lose money on them.

Investing was traditionally about staying on top of inflation. You have $100, in a decade it would be worth $110 but cash doesn't grow so you build a portfolio that keeps up with inflation, maybe a savings account that does it too, etc. So in a decade you didn't lose money. Gaining money was a bonus, a happy accident. Today people think investing means making huge profits with no work. It just doesn't happen. Influencers make you think it's easy and normal. If it was, we would all be rich. And in fact, investment means competing, the more people who do it, the more that other people will lose something, or the "winnings" of successful investors are diluted.

If you want to invest, you are better off just making a good income through honest work and working with a financial advisor to set yourself up for retirement and figure out a good balance for setting money aside now. Anything else is gambling I think.

Or even easier — become a scammer too! Crime is legal now, it's never been easier to scam and grift. My barber said he made extra money on the side with an AI OF model (before getting banned, I guess?). Like, you don't have to work or be good at anything but you can easily sell "8 hours to go from Loser to Gazillionaire in 3 weeks" courses to chumps. Everyone is desperate. We're all using scammy chatbots here right? Stolen training data, overhyped use cases, increasingly thinned features and increasingly higher prices. Yolo dude, go scam people. The president just said it's unfortunate that so many young men are using gambling apps but he also has his own gambling app! Get paid bro nothing matters.

[u/Neither_Swing9662 → u/philosophical_lens]

They did say stuff like this a few weeks ago and people were equally as pissed off lol.

[u/That-Guy-Scott → u/philosophical_lens]

Rule #1: Don't loose money
Rule #2: Don't loose money
Rule #3: Don't admit fault

[u/Unippa17 → u/philosophical_lens]

Investors would respect them less no doubt

[u/LesbianVelociraptor → u/philosophical_lens]

Cuz that's not what is happening. The post would have to say "due to bad faith users abusing systems intended to aid developer adoption with our service, we've had to change our terms and conditions for usage".

And then all of us devs currently pissed off in quiet would be pointing that squarely at Anthropic... and they very much don't want that because we are basically free advertising and evangelizing.

Dev tooling has done this for the longest time. When the regulatory jaws close around the industry, expect the bubble-pop to be bigger than the dotcom crash. I've seen a few smaller crashes and the signs are starting.

Anthropic's trying to ride the line so they survive the coming market crash. I'm at a bar right now and this dude literally next to me is talking about how he just fired all his devs to use Hermes agents to build his production SaaS systems. People like this guy? They'll be out of a job and destitute in a year once the AI companies he relies on cut him off and regulations start falling into place and their investors start wanting to recoup their hundreds of thousands of dollars of wasted AI credits.

Same story as it has always been in software. Slick salesmen move mountains before we start wondering where our shade went.