That's malicious and I think this is scamming from the literal money (you didn't do anything wrong, you executed one command and they scammed you out of the fair usage you paid for).
Please raise the ticket or at least GitHub issue for visibility.
Sooner or later some sort of complaint to the relevant trade authority should happen - this is a scam operation at this point.
You lose little by assuming malicious intent when it comes to billion-dollar tech companies and your money. They can prove otherwise by remedying the situation.
There are many possible explanations for this outcome to have occurred other than malice. If you're an engineer by trade, consider how many bugs you've been responsible for over the course of your career that you didn't intend. Probably a lot.
There's been a sustained pattern of incidents. If Anthropic were truly serious about not wanting to take people's money, then they would have put in place whatever review processes were necessary to stop this from happening. So regardless of whether or not they specifically intend to cause harm, they're willingly letting it happen, which is just about as bad.
Yes, it's reasonable to turn down the heat. But it's also reasonable for people to be upset when their money is taken from them, and when the company that does so is effectively beyond persecution for doing so.
I am engineer by trade. If I pushed an update which wrongly busted my customer's usage limits at a trillion dollar company, I would expect to get fired. Alongside my EM.
Even with the best of faiths, this is at the very least a shoddily vibe coded “detect and low-key block attempts to use Claude for Openclaw” - it decided to look for specific strings wrapped in json without realizing this doesn’t always imply it’s an actual payload for Openclaw itself. And the human driving it was too dumb to review/catch this bad inplementation.
So maybe not malice, but certainly a level of ineptitude I don’t expect from a crucial vendor from a tool that’s become essential for many developers.
(I don’t care, I do just fine when Claude is down or refuses to help me (it has happened) though)
Also they ain't wrong. In what other context does OpenClaw get mentioned?
"You may not use our service if you mention OpenClaw" is a harsh line but hardly illegal or forbidden any more than any other service restriction (i.e. no use allowed for high-stakes financial modeling). Don't like it, cancel your plan.
But that's the thing -- there is no line! Where is this specified? How can we know what service restrictions there are? For all I know, my plan could be exhausted at any point during the workday just because I happened to touch on some keyword Anthropic has decided to ban.
> Don't like it, cancel your plan.
Ah, but I thought these models were supposed to have been trained for the sake of humanity? That the arbitrary enclosure of the collective intelligence was for our own good? These concepts are not compatible.
When you signed up, you agreed you understood the line - which is whatever Anthropic decides the line is. Legally, the line hasn't changed at all, nor has your moral position relative to Anthropic. Don't like it, cancel, but it was always the deal.
This is, by the way, the same legal principle that the website you are posting on, right now, uses. Some uses are prohibited. Not every line need be explicit. You aren't allowed to smack talk Y Combinator or the moderators without possibly being banned for life, and you certainly do not have a legal case if they do.
There are plenty of ways you could wind up with a git commit containing "OpenClaw" despite zero interaction with OpenClaw itself...adding a blog post to a static site repo, or even a clause in your own app's ToS disallowing use of OpenClaw with your API.
This would have been easy to say if it was the first time it or something similar happened.
But there is a clear pattern emerging. There's no reason to turn down the heat when a company of this size and influence is allowed this level of absurdity time and time again.
Well this regex nonsense was likely vibe coded. If it escaped quality checks then this is a testament to how dangerous things coming out of Anthropic are, but not in the scifi sense that their CEO tries to make everybody believe.
I wonder if projects which are anti-AI might start smuggling in such identifiers into docs or commits as a way to sabotage people using Claude Code. Your project isn't going to get many AI PRs if just cloning your project wiped out their quota.
That's rather shitty. It's one thing to disallow bypassing preferential pricing models, it's a completely different thing to castrate your model against some uses.
You can see how it goes in the future. Wanna vibe code a throwaway script? $0.20. Ah, it's for a legal document search? $10k then. Oh and we'll charge 20% of your app sales too - I can see how they are going in real time, mind you!
Kimi and GLM 5.1 are already capable of handling a good chunk of my tasks. They about to lose the leverage to allow them to drastically increase prices - enough models are 6-12 months away from being good enough large proportions of their customers uses.
If openai / anthropic / google were the only game in town then yea, we’d already be paying 5x as much as we do. But local models are so close to sota that it just isn’t going to happen. If I’m a lawyer getting billed $500k/yr on $600k profit I’d rather buy a chonky server and run a model that’s 90% as good and get my money back in 2 years, then pay $5k electricity on $600k profit.
Nobody will successfully lobby for banning local models either, it just isn’t going to happen when the rest of the world will happily avoid paying 80% of their profits to some US bigco for the privilege of existing.
The question is how much friction there will be for people to switch over to Gemini, GPT or maybe even DeepSeek or Mistral or whatever. Even if price hikes are inevitable across the board, the moat any single org has is somewhat limited, so prices definitely will be a factor they'll compete on with one another at least a bit.
I disagree. The models are going to become commodities (we're already almost there), but the tooling and integrations will be the moat. Reproducing everything Anthropic has already built with Claude Code, Cowork, and all their connectors would be nontrivial, and they're just getting started.
Anyone can implement an AI chatbot. But few will be able to provide AI that's deeply integrated into our daily lives.
This is assuming there will be no competition. But why wouldn't there be? Especially since you can use open source models, which are not too far from frontier models (from now).
Imagine if it were Comcast instead of Claude. Comcast gives you 750GB of data a month. Now they decide that visiting HN 'counts' as 750GB and either shut you off or bill you extra. Is that price discrimination or changing the terms after the fact?
Deepseek has demonstrated that there is no reason for it to actually lose money. The awful business practices and monopoly tactics of the frontier model labs in the US are the problem.
All of this is just criminal and fraudulent behavior, done July a whole bunch of people who haven't learned their lesson, and keep sending Anthropic more money for abuse at scale.
It's in the TOS, so no, not fraud. You might not like it that Anthropic doesn't want you running OpenClaw (effectively owned by a competitor) on CC, but that doesn't make it fraudulent or criminal.
Seriously, not at all. Anti-competitive practices is when you go out of your way to use legal agreements or practices, in an illegal way (i.e. from the starting point of a monopoly), to deliberately restrict the ability to use competition.
Openclaw is not a competitor with Claude. Anti-competitive practices would only occur here if Anthropic used some technique to prevent people from using Claude alternatives (i.e. if you install Claude Code, all other AI agents are forcibly disabled on your system).
There is literally nothing close to illegal about this behavior. You read the terms of service right, which provides a long list of explicit and implicit disclaimers?
If I have a terms of service for my SaaS where I've snuck in a vague term that I can "charge additional usage fees at my discretion", it doesn't mean I get to actually charge you $100,000 because I found out your favorite color is blue.
There's absolutely an expectation of reasonability and good faith.
Nobody signing up for Claude would be reasonably assuming that they are allowed to arbitrarily decide what magic words suddenly bypass the subscription cost model that was actually purchased into an overcharge model that is significantly more expensive, whose verbiage clearly indicates the intent of the feature being enabled is to allow additional use after the quota has been consumed, not randomly at the behest of Anthropic.
> So, in America, just because it's written in a contract does not mean it's enforceable in anyway.
But the presumption, as any court will show, is that it is fully blooming enforceable. The burden of proof is on showing it isn't. This particular instance, a lawyer would laugh at you in the face over, this is absolutely 100% stone cold enforceable common and expected.
How do you expect Facebook or HN to moderate if certain uses aren't prohibited? The same principle applies. HN bans certain phrases, lots of them.
I think it goes beyond this. I was just using claude to edit a blog post which mentioned OpenClaw and I got this response: "The "OpenClaw" reference — I assume that's a typo or playful reference; if you mean a real product, I couldn't find it under that spelling and you'll want to fix or footnote it.". I gave it a direct link to openclaw.ai and the chat instantly ended and hit my 5hr usage limit. Could have been a coincidence, but I had only lightly been using sonnet in the morning so it seems unlikely. Very odd.
Dragons steal gold and jewels... and they guard their plunder as long as they live... and never enjoy a brass ring of it. Indeed they hardly know a good bit of work from a bad, though they usually have a good notion of the market value
The weird thing is that it found sources for all of my other claims and references no problem, but acted like it didn't know what openclaw was when openclaw.ai is the first thing that pops up on google.
"OpenClaw" is a name from January 27, 2026. It's new enough that it's not in the training data for a lot of AI models. So they, quite literally, don't know what it refers to.
"If you don't know an identifier, google it" isn't a very reliable behavior in today's models. They do it, but only sometimes.
It also sounds extremely counterproductive to try and sabotage your competition by.. driving your customers away? I have no love for these companies but it's a silly conclusion to jump to.
People on OpenClaw discord were bragging about having this stuff running 24/7 and using billions of tokens. I think one guy was using billions per day. (I might have misplaced some zeros but I remember one guy's bill would have been $1000 with API pricing. Per day.)
At the time, enforcement was pretty random, and I think based on how heavy your traffic was.
They weren't all on Claude (though it was the preferred setup) and some people had dozens of accounts hooked up with proxies to avoid hitting limits.
Not if a chatbot did it, maybe. No legal precedence here. Also they are a defense and offense contractor they could kill people and nothing would happen
Claude.ai is now at a 98.85% uptime. There's been so many frustrations with Claude / Anthropic lately (very heavy usage limits, wrong A / B testing, etc.).
I have been really happy with my Codex subscription lately, but feels like these things change every other day. The OpenCode Go subscription for trying out GLM, Kimi, Qwen, Deepseek and friends also looks useful.
But nonetheless, Opus 4.6 is a very capable model, but justifying a Claude subscription gets more and more difficult, think I might just sometimes use it through OpenRouter or as part of something like Cursor (although I'm not sure about the value of that subscription as well).
Codex randomly stops working because some silly cybersecurity detector. Insane amount of false positives. Last time it happened, I was just letting it write me a small tool to translate the text in my clipboard. What cybersecurity? Code wasn't even published, or remotely like anything hacking related. I'm always letting AI write some boring CRUD tools that I don't want to code myself.
There were periods where I was entirely unable to use Claude Code for hour+ due to auth gateway always returning 500 or timing out, there was an "elevated errors" incident shown on status.claude.com, but zero minute of downtime recorded (not even "partial outage"). So the real uptime should be even worse.
I have used past week opencode go with deepseek v4 pro and claude code with opus 4.7 side by side and... they are both good. They are different, both have their good and bad sides... but they do get things done. Especially the OpenCode has been very enjoyable experience. Thank you Anthropic for all the down time, I would have probably not explored alternatives otherwise. I can vouch for the OpenCode Go sub!
April has been a crazy month for open weights models. I've been using Claude Code for work and Kimi 2.6 for personal projects and Kimi has been very good. Glm-5.1 is also great. Qwen, Mimo and Deepseek I need to test some more, but they all have been producing good results. I have the impression that they are all are at the same level, or close to, Sonnet 4.6.
The little qwen36 is at sonnet level . Kimi2.6 is about opus. The one can run on a single GPU on your gaming pc. The other you can run way cheaper from a provider. Or if you are really wealthy and have lots of gpus can run it yourself.
Would "lots of gpus" even help for huge models? Maybe this is exposing my lack of knowledge but don't you need to keep the whole model and context in a single GPU's VRAM? My understanding is that multiple GPUs help with scaling (can handle N X inference requests simultaneously) but it doesn't help with using large models. If that were the case, I could jam another GPU in my box and double the size of model I can serve.
> Would "lots of gpus" even help for huge models? Maybe this is exposing my lack of knowledge but don't you need to keep the whole model and context in a single GPU's VRAM?
How do you think the large providers do inference? No single GPU has 1TB plus of memory on board. It’s a cluster of a bunch of gpus.
1t model instances(opus, gpt,etc) are not running on a single GPU. The catch is how the cards communicate and how the model is broken up. There's a bit that goes into it but the answer is yes the more gpus the bigger the model you can run.
Please don't oversell them. Eg Kimi k2.6 has a maximum context size of 270k, that's a quarter of opus.
The model is fine, Ive switched to it entirely for a personal project, but it's not opus.
And no, you're not running then locally unless you're a millionaire. You still need hundreds of GB (500+++) of VRAM on your graphics card - that's not at a level of consumer electronics.
Sure you can run the quantized models, but then you're at Haiku performance.
Qwen 3.6 runs in a single GPU. But I mostly agree with you except, just because a model has a given context doesn't mean it's all available or entirely reliable.
This is very concerning. Their heavy handed tactics haven't impacted me personally yet but I am increasingly nervous and casting about for viable egress paths if I need to flee Claude Code. I really hope they pump the breaks and thoroughly reorient themselves. They are under a lot of competing pressures and probably can't make a decision that won't upset a lot of people (in order to balance growth and capacity etc), but are coming to the worst possible conclusions.
For instance, maybe you can't afford to take on more customers right now, Anthropic. Maybe if you are severely undermining the customer relationships you already have, you should just admit you can't sell any more 20x plans right now and only accept new customers at lower tiers until you have the necessary capacity.
This is also a DoS you could drive a truck through, and it's disturbing such an obvious vulnerability was shipped at all.
> or instance, maybe you can't afford to take on more customers right now, Anthropic. Maybe if you are severely undermining the customer relationships you already have, you should just admit you can't sell any more 20x plans right now and only accept new customers at lower tiers until you have the necessary capacity.
Or just increase prices for new claude code users? Surely transparent upfront across the board price increases are easier to swallow than hidden context-based pricing changes like this?
> casting about for viable egress paths if I need to flee Claude Code
Check out OpenCode (the OSS product [1]) and OpenCode Go/Zen (the LLMaaS [2]). Use a more expensive model with larger context (like GLM-5.1) for orchestration and cheaper models for coding and iteration on acceptance criteria (writing and passing tests). I also throw a more expensive vision-capable model into the mix like Gemini 3 Flash to iterate on UI tasks using Playwright. With the base usage in Go and pay as you go on cheaper models like MiniMax you can get a lot done for not a lot of coin.
They have better PR than OpenAI but they are not a more ethical company. They do a bunch of shady stuff and are just as much involved in military applications. Cal Newport’s recent podcast had a good discussion about this: https://youtu.be/BRr3pAPsQAk?si=jaRJYJ_XQE7VpxPN
I understand not everyone has the interest or time to sit through an hour long podcast. But last I checked this is HN, and I think that podcast is right up the alley for many of us here. Cal Newport is not exactly a 'random podcaster'.
Next time I can summarize some of the talking points in my comment though, but I didn't want to poorly regurgitate the arguments when they were readily available in the video lol.
Although I see another poster has commented the key takeaways :)
Cal Newport and tech commentator Ed Zitron discussed this disparity between Anthropic's public image and their actual practices. Despite cultivating a reputation as the "ethical" AI company, Zitron argues that Anthropic's actions show they are just as ruthless and ethically questionable as their competitors.
Anthropic has been deeply integrated with the US military, having been installed with classified access since June 2024. The podcast highlights that Claude has been actively utilized during the "Venezuela incursion" and the ongoing "war in Iran".
Despite this active involvement, CEO Dario Amodei released a statement attempting to publicly distance the company from the Department of Defense by declaring they would not allow their technology to be used for "mass domestic surveillance" or "fully autonomous weapons". Zitron categorizes this as a highly calculated PR maneuver, pointing out that LLMs are fundamentally incapable of controlling autonomous weapons anyway. The stunt successfully manufactured a wave of positive press—with celebrities and commentators praising Anthropic as an ethical objector—right when the company was trying to secure an IPO or a massive ~$100 billion valuation, all while they quietly remained an active part of the war effort.
Beyond their military contracts, the podcast details several highly questionable business practices Anthropic has used to artificially inflate their numbers:
1. During a lawsuit regarding their military contract, Anthropic's CFO filed a sworn affidavit revealing the company had only made $5 billion in its entire lifetime. This directly contradicted leaked media reports suggesting they made $4.5 billion in 2025 alone. It revealed that the company's publicly perceived run rate was heavily exaggerated through the "shady revenue math" popular in Silicon Valley, a major discrepancy that most financial journalists ignored.
2. When the open-source agent library OpenClaw first launched, Anthropic deliberately allowed users to connect a $200/month "max account" and essentially burn through thousands of dollars of API compute at Anthropic's expense. Zitron points out that Anthropic knowingly let this happen to temporarily boost their usage metrics and hype while they raised a $30 billion funding round. Just weeks after securing the funding, they abruptly cut off access for these users, a move Zitron cites as proof of them being an "unethical company".
Furthermore, the company has faced criticism for gaslighting users, maintaining poor service availability, and silently degrading model performance while rug-pulling users on rate limits. As Zitron summarizes, it is highly unlikely that either Anthropic or OpenAI actually care about these ethical boundaries beyond how they can be weaponized for better PR and higher valuations.
There's some validity to these criticisms, but it would be a lot more credible to cite someone whose job isn't "loudly promote any claim that sounds negative for AI, regardless of how well-founded it is."
> Despite cultivating a reputation as the "ethical" AI company, Zitron argues that Anthropic's actions show they are just as ruthless and ethically questionable as their competitors.
Anthropic has taken 10s of billions from investors just like everyone else has. There is no such thing as "ethics" or "morality" when the scale of obligation is that large.
So yes, this is obvious despite whatever image they try to cultivate.
"LLMS are fundamentally incapable of controlling autonomous weapons" -- This was Anthropic's stance too, right?
"Quietly remained an active part of the war effort" - anthropic was totally transparent about it, but yeah not great.
"Leaks were wrong" - and that's Anthropic's fault?
OpenAI agreed to assist the DoD with zero boundaries and then lied about it. Can we at least give them credit for not doing that? If we just throw up our hands and say "they're all awful, whatever" then the result is reduced pressure on them to be better. Like it or not, I do not think AI is going away and as far as I can tell, despite billing problems, Anthropic's still the least bad frontier lab.
Did you even check the link? It's a podcast from Cal Newport, a quite known figure (at least in software engineering / compsci circles). So it's not exactly a random shitty podcast. And, it's also (obviously) not my content.
Agreed. they are better at the PR game. Some developers are grasping at straws looking for ways to not feel guilty and justify their usage of LLMs is from the "good guys". Anthropic is currently filling this role but eventually people will see behind the smoke and mirrors and release its not all that different from OpenAI or some of the other AI labs who are willing to sacrifice any amount of ethics if they mean they get the right paycheck or stroke their ego that they were on the team that built digital god.
they are essentially Lyft in early Uber vs. Lyft days. They are marketing themselves vaguely as being "better" because they're "more ethical" but their actions make it clear that they're not much better than OAI.
Except Lyft didn't kick you out in the bad part of town simply because you mentioned the word lollipop. Claude will terminate your session, peg you to 100% usage, and more, to stop you from using the service you paid for.
I cancelled my subscription the minute they blocked access via OpenCode and switched to Ollama Cloud.
A bunch of people here tried to defend Anthropic, saying that it was justified because it was likely that Claude Code's harness had optimizations that would not be possible on OpenCode. It was clear from the source leak that nothing of this sort was the case, and that they were simply trying to avoid others distilling their models.
GLM and Queen are not on par with Opus, but they are good enough and I never had hit the usage limits, even with 2-3 sessions running.
They are no saints, but at least their solution is actually open source and they can not lock me in like the others can. To illustrate the point, you can replace "Ollama Cloud" with "OpenCode Go" if you want. Or if you prefer you can give enough hardware to run the larger open weight models on my own.
Ha. Yes. "Speedrunning enshittification" is the phrase that's been in my head.
The flat-rate plans were the top of the slippery slope to enshittification, really. If everyone were on metered billing there'd be no reason for all these opaque and sneaky attempts to limit usage. People would pay for what they get and get what they pay for.
There is nothing wrong with flat-rate plans. I work at an LLM-serving startup, and am aware of at least three competitors, that (a) provide flat rate subs (b) are extremely profitable and (c) are bootstrapped, ie. not beholden to investors (there are also many other competitors but I can't ascertain their profitability or investment status).
You simply need to price the flat-rate sub at a price that's profitable when averaged out over all of your users, both light and heavy, and prevent fully automated usage by the power users. That's it. This is immensely more user-friendly, and I doubt you'd get any traction at all if you didn't do this. Even if you pay more for the sub, having unlimited (non-automated) usage frees a mental barrier to using the product. If you have to pay for every request you make, it introduces a hesitation to do anything - it makes the user hesitant to experiment, hesitant to prompt for anything of slightly less significance, anxious about the exact token consumption of every prompt, and so on. It's not enjoyable to use when you're being penny pinched for every prompt.
Anthropic's problem, of course, is that they are not bootstrapped. They don't have a business model that can compete with startups running DeepSeek or GLM on their own hardware. Non-frontier startups got to skip the whole "tens of billions of dollars in debt" step of creating a frontier model from scratch, and still get to run a model that is perhaps 80%-85% as good as Anthropic's, which is good enough for millions of customers. So Anthropic is desperate, backed into a corner, and doing anything and everything they can to try to right their sinking ship, no matter how scummy.
Anthropic isn't backed into a corner. They have plenty of enterprise subscriptions. Individual user experience (especially billing) is suffering because it's not a priority in comparison. If they were as desperate as you described, they would try selling access to mythos.
The fact that they are adding code specifically to charge individual consumers more reeks of desperation. This isn't "individual users are suffering because they're lower priority and neglected", this is "individual users are being actively squeezed because Anthropic is desperate for every penny it can get".
This is such a stupid way to charge customers more. How many Claude code users use OpenClaw? Cheating customers is like burning down your house to keep warm. Anthropic aren't that stupid. I guarantee that this was some half-baked vibe-coded anti abuse system.
I do mind, since I enjoy speaking freely without concern of my opinions being linked to my employment. I assure you companies like this exist. Profiting off of inference is not the hard part, it's frontier training that is prohibitively expensive. You're free to disregard my commentary if you want, of course.
> Profiting off of inference is not the hard part, it's frontier training that is prohibitively expensive.
And given that Anthropic does both, it must make up its training costs by selling inference. jp57 was pretty clearly talking about Anthropic's flat-rate plans, rather than the flat-rate plans of companies that get to skip the most expensive part of the process.
I understand that very well, yes. The point I'm making is that I don't think Anthropic or OpenAI would have ever gotten significant traction if they didn't have flat-rate plans, because flat-rate plans themselves are not inherently predatory or part of the enshittification slope but actually extremely UX-friendly. Perhaps in another timeline, if their product was actually valuable enough to pay this price for, they could have simply provided a $50 plan as the standard level to provide enough margin to account for training costs as well. But as I see it DeepSeek is an existential threat to them, and they are now stuck between a rock and a hard place, because their product is devalued by its existence and if the frontier labs were to gate access with $50 plans they would get their lunch eaten even more quickly. It turns out there are downsides to burning inconceivably large stacks of other people's money.
> The point I'm making is that I don't think Anthropic or OpenAI would have ever gotten significant traction if they didn't have flat-rate plans...
That seems likely. If people had to pay their share of the actual all-in cost of the service (rather than having it be subsidized by investors with extremely deep pockets and a small handful of corporate customers), very, very few regular people would use it.
The point that 'jp57' pretty explicitly made [0] is that flat-rate plans that don't cover the all-in cost of providing the plans tend to result in those plans getting worse and worse and worse, as economic realities assert themselves. If the flat-rate plans that you are aware of actually cover the cost of providing the service, then you're discussing an entirely different situation that's entirely inapplicable to the discussion about Anthropic's pricing and degrading level of service.
[0] ...which is one that's understood by people who have been in pretty much any industry for more than a few years...
The crux of my argument is that there is a timeline where people would've paid the all-in cost of the service, with margin, as a flat-rate sub. The $20 rate was not sustainable when factoring in training costs but if not for DeepSeek they could have simply raised the prices rather than gestures broadly whatever the fuck is going on at Anthropic now, with a new PR fumble every three days. If the Chinese models didn't exist, people would've groaned but would likely still pay $40 or $50 for an LLM subscription.
You misdirected my quoted statement to assert a position I did not take. When I talk about flat-rate subs being a good UX, I am not talking about at a subsidized rate. My position is that people will pay more for a flat-rate sub than they are willing to through per-token billing. That is, a consumer who would only pay average $10/mo if they used the API will voluntarily pay $20/mo for a sub, because even though it's a worse value the latter is a tremendously more friendly user experience. When I say that flat-rate subs are necessary for traction, I mean that solely from a user experience perspective, not "subsidized usage is necessary for traction".
I'm stepping away from LLMs in general and did cancel Claude code subscription this month because I respect myself very much and I deserve a better and transparent treatment.
If you must - in my experience Deepseek v4 is incredible value in every aspect. Pricing is transparent.
But like I said, I have funds in different AI gateways but I'm preferring to write by hand because I don't want surprising bugs and unnecessary code in my end result.
The biggest hint I have is set a budget. Then try some models out on either cloud instances or a computer you own. See if they work for you.
Spec your machine accordingly. Some models I recommend trying to get a feel for what's out there. Qwen 3.6 35b a3b, granite4.1 8b, llama 3.2 3b.
There are plenty of others but those give a good taste for different sizes and what they can do. If it's not enough then you are out maybe 5 bucks.
Also check in with r/localllama they have a bunch of people who can help you go further, spec machines, get better performance and results. If you don't want to post that's cool but there are lots of comments on how to get going. They are pretty friendly though so I'd read the rules and make a post asking for help
I’ve got a NixOS Qemu VM I use to run openclaw in. I had Claude help me set it up, and it runs local models on my own machine in a config based sandbox.
Why should Claude block or charge extra to work on that?
Why should Claude care if I have instructions for Hermes or OpenClaw in my project repos?
This fingerprinting is incredibly sloppy for how much access to a machine Claude code has.
Now you've learned the advantage of knowing how to do things yourself. When you depend on untrustworthy agents, you shackle yourself to their idiotic whims. Be careful who you partner with.
I run an OpenClaw VM and used Claude Code to build the VM scripts. The VM is connected to local llama.cpp, so OpenClaw and the models are running on my own physical hardware.
That is a huge red-flag. While I understand that they will do some policing/censoring, this is way beyond what I would consider acceptable.
They can have a different price plan for agentic stuff, but these things where they “accidentally” whoops match on specific keywords and trigger extra usage charges is giving a evil-microsoft-vibe
I mentioned it in that thread, but when the HERMES bug was first reported multiple people on Reddit claimed that it could also be triggered with openclaw specific file names. It makes me think that instead of going just saying, "this approach for defending against 3rd party oauth isn't working" and rolling things back, they just tried to fix forward and continue with the strategy
I have two comments. One this feels like anti-competitive behavior that should not be accepted or allowed. Two, how can people support this?
There are multiple comments in this thread with comments along the line of: "Oh im sure they didn't mean to, let's not attribute this to malice". There is a long history here of lawyers, back and forth between OpenCode and OpenClaw and various other "Open" harnesses. Digging into my commit history and blocking access based off of a string is not acceptable for a product in my opinion -- and I don't think this was purely on accident.
Other comments calling out that they are compute constrained and need to do this in order to continue functioning. They shouldn't oversell then. I think that overselling airline tickets is abhorrent and so is overselling any product in a way that you know that you will impact legitimate customers. Up your pricing and/or stop accepting invites, we will quickly get to the bottom of it.
A company does not deserve the benefit of the doubt over and over and over again.
Things like these (Google also banned me from Antigravity for briefly using an agent) and the massive quality swings made me cancel all 3 subs last week and resort to my local Qwen 3.6 only. Open models are already great and only getting better, and I really enjoy the privacy and consistency of a model I run myself.
I don't think anyone is questioning all the benefits of using local LLMs. Those are readily apparent.
I just don't believe for an instant that they're anywhere in the same ballpark of capabilities as running Opus or similar. My time is the most valuable resource. Opus would need to be SIGNIFICANTLY more costly and unstable for me to start entertaining local models for day-to-day development.
Perhaps whatever work you're doing makes this trade-off more sensible, but I struggle to see how that could be true. I'm averse to running Sonnet on a large amount of software engineering problems - let alone Qwen.
I think you'd be surprised, I find that the harness is what makes the real difference. I also prefer to be on the loop, actively guide and review. Local models are definitely much less autonomous as of today so if you need to be churning out code at speed they're probably not for you.
If you know what you're doing and prompt it correctly, local models are great. If you're just vibe coding and relying on the LLM to fill in all the gaps for you and basically build the software for you, yeah you need SOTA to deal with that.
For now we infer through few weights, lossily; but then in full precision. Now I represent in part; but then shall I represent as fully as the data was sampled.
I have a 64GB M1 Ultra dedicated to llama.cpp. I get 40 tok/s on a fresh session, decreasing slowly to about 25 tok/s at around 50% of the 256K context, then down to 20 tok/s or less beyond that, but I rarely let it go much higher and handoff instead. This is whith Qwen 36B A3B at 8Q without KV quantization. It's not super fast but perfectly usable for me.
They are trying to make a moat where no possibility of creating a moat exists.
It’s a huge mistake at the level of IBM trying to reestablish dominance over PCs by making MicroChannel the new standard; this failed horribly and cost IBM its market leadership and reputation.
MCA was technically better at the time, but the industry responded with EISA and VLBus which led to PCI and today’s PCIe.
Subscription models only work when marginal costs are low and/or there’s a good variety of usage that roughly averages out. Or, you need to be able to kick out abuse.
Unfortunately for those of us who just want to eat a nice filling meal at the fixed price all you can eat buffet of AI subscriptions, a minority of customers keeps paying for the all you can eat buffet and staying for hours and bringing containers to sneak food out when they leave. And they keep wearing disguises to try and evade detection.
It’s a losing battle for the provider, which ultimately means the subscription pricing model can’t work, which hurts the majority of customers that just want to use the system as intended and no longer have a subscription model available.
I have plenty of frustrations with Anthropic as a paying customer, but tbh is doesn’t strike me as all that awful, just some annoying collateral damage. I’d rather have that than no subscription model at all.
Nobody is stopping them from capping usage at 3x subscription price. Except themselves, because it'll ruin their revenue growth story once they stop selling dollars for cents.
I wouldn't be surprised if the AI usage model moves towards a bidder/auction model. Set how much you'd willing to pay for your AI request, and they evaluate requests starting from the highest to lowest bids.
It definitely would make sense, especially if they are capacity constrained, but it’s also a losing PR move for whoever moves first in the space unless the big players all shift at the same time.
Who remembers the Google of Eric Schmidt and "Don't Be Evil"?
The truth is that it doesn't matter what companies say, what they claim, what they do, and what their CEO says/claims/does.
It's just a matter of time until the shareholders will get the right CEO to maximize shareholder value.
People in the comments who want a statement or a "reorientation" or a commitment from Anthropic leadership are missing the principles of how capitalism functions. Shareholder value cannot be compromised. In every battle between morality and profit, values and profit, public good and profit, ultimately all things will mutate into a state to allow profit will prevail. Always.
I saw a talk by Boris where he said, basically that Claude codes itself now. They have it automatically writing features and reviewing PRs, apparently. I suspect that much of the code has never been seen by human eyes within Anthropic.
they're just holding it wrong.. what model are they using? they should make sure they're on Opus 4.5+. That was a stepwise improvement and was when AI coding clearly became the futureₖₑₖ
their CEO has been shouting from the rooftops that programming is dead. ofc that would ripple down the org chart and result in a culture of bad programming.
why do people want to continue to use anthropic despite their shitty service? its not like they have some kind of lock-in as it is still new company and it has shown its color before we are stuck with it unlike google/meta etc.
Totally agree. This is why open source models and toolings are so important for the ecosystem. I would not want these companies decide what we can or cannot do.
When compute poverty hits these big labs it’s all going to be the same. The ping pong tables and drinks fridges disappear.
The only thing they can hope for is to maintain momentum and critical mass long enough to find ways to pay for all this or have Moores law make the average user request become economical.
I think it's obvious that they are critically lacking in compute capacity especially since OpenAI has committed billions to locking up all the future compute production.
And I don't necessarily think it's wrong for Anthropic to introduce QoS or throttling on users of their models. It's pretty much a necessity when offering public access to a scarce resource and it's been a common practice for decades.
What is the alternative? We just accept that it doesn't work half the time because the system is overloaded with molt bots?
I agree. If compute is the issue and pricing can't budge then something has to give.
They would have kept my business if they were honest and upfront. Instead they sold me something that worked well, broke it without warning, remained silent about it until enough people caught on, chose to do nothing, then proceeded to release a model that eats ~30% more tokens with no advantage over prior models.
If they chose to unbrick their model and offered what we had a couple months ago at a 50% hike, I would have been onboard. I've seen enough now of how this company treats its customers to continue using or recommending them.
Also, Codex works much better than CC now for anyone who happens to be on the fence.
The alternative is to price their product transparently. If there is too much demand and supply is limited: Charge more.
Anthropic wants to have their lunch (low apparent prices, increased market share) and eat it too (controlled costs, adequate production to serve the demand).
They're advertising themselves as a $5 All-You-Can-Eat buffet, but then aggressively and arbitrarily restricting admission, sneakily swapping out the high-quality ingredients for garbage-tier slop, and kicking out anyone who even utters the words "to go box" or "doggie bag".
I cancelled my subscription so not really defending them myself but if all of their customers were humans who used it normally I bet they could serve everyone. It's when someone presses a few keys walks away and a bot uses tokens for 72 hours straight that it becomes a problem. Then people buy 3 accounts and do that for weeks at a time.
Could you do that as a human? Sure but you'd likely burn out after a couple of weeks. Also the human would probably use those tokens far more effectively and would not need as many. It's feels the same as someone installing a crypto miner on their servers in my mind. Abhorrent behavior.
You say that like it's a gotcha. I think the fact that they reached 2B/mo in revenue by dogfooding cc is all the proof that one needs that this thing actually works. In fact it works so well that more people want it than they can serve. For months now they've been having issues when EU and US tz are both online at the same time.
> I think the fact that they reached 2B/mo in revenue by dogfooding cc is all the proof that one needs that this thing actually works.
That's a notable achievement, but let's have some balance... It's also responsible for the biggest self-own in software industry history by leaking their 1) crown jewels (i.e., source code) 2) the existence of their next model Mythos, and 3) their roadmap in a highly competitive market.
Eh... I personally think that having the keypads to enter a DC running on DNS served by that same DC is a bit more self-owning than leaking the source code of an app, but I get your point. It's obviously not perfect, but it's also obviously working.
Let's put this in perspective. Imagine it's 3 years ago, April 2023. Chatgpt has been launched for 4 months. We've all been using it, and writing poems in parrot talk or whatever. Someone tells you "In 2 years time there will be an app that lets you use LLMs to write code. It will be coded by humans for 3 weeks, then by humans + LLMs for 6 months, and then by LLMs mostly unsupervised. One year after that, they'll be making 2B/mo out of that app". Would you believe them? Not even the most maximalist, overhypers, AI singularity frenzied crazy people would have said that. And yet... it happened.
Is the reason they reached 2B/mo partially contributed by the fact that their users feel like they get unlimited use of it?
If ‘feeling like it is unlimited use’ is a huge part that creates the 2B/mo, this change of limit might jeopardize it.
That being said, Anthropic can be diverting capacity to train the next model, and if it is significantly better, people would start flocking back again.
Not really. A person will eventually drink dirty water if it was the only thing available in a desert.
There's very little competition for SOTA models. The models themselves also weren't built by Claude. The current revenue has almost nothing to do with what Claude built.
Hell if it was so far ahead then they wouldn't be desperately trying to block OpenCode.
> The models themselves also weren't built by Claude. The current revenue has almost nothing to do with what Claude built.
Ummm, no. Anthropic is #1 in coding because they developed it first. Then they used data + signals to train models specifically to work best with cc. They work together. Why do you think every provider (including chinese ones) have their own harnesses? Having real-world data and usage metrics helps training the models in immense ways.
Having features fast in this case >>> having perfect features. Some of them they dropped along the way, but having them in the pair cc + models is what matters. People switched from Cursor to cc in droves because it worked better there. That's not a fluke. That's how you improve your models, by collecting real world data after you launch them.
> Hell if it was so far ahead then they wouldn't be desperately trying to block OpenCode.
The problem with slop is, nobody understands it. Nobody ever designed it, nobody really knows how it works. You’re just putting blind faith in the slop you’ve shipped.
It lets you be very quick, but if you’ve accidentally compromised all your data or bank accounts through the slop then you won’t know until you’re destroyed.
I find it incredibly that after all the good faith Claude Code built during 2025 they are destroying users trust is such amateurish ways (same as hermes.md)
possibly related, it errors if my working directory is a checkout of OpenCode. i was using CC to work on some patches for OC and had to work in a parent directory and then tell Claude to work on the files inside the "opencode" folder.
Claude is bad for business....that is painfully obvious.
At this point I assume you are coping with having drank the koolaid and fired key staff believing claude will replace them...back when it was cheap....because nearsightedness affects decision makers much more during hype cycles......
Anthropic is losing a ton of goodwill by not being more honest about their constraints. They've been buckling under load for months, and instead of doing the most honest thing (keep weekly usage limits same, make 5 hour usage limits have surge pricing where the usage-cost of X tokens is scaled based on dynamic load), they're doing a lot of hacky things to try to get a similar effect. I suspect they feel the optics of being honest would be too bad, so instead it's a slow bleed where they piss off users one by one
yeah exactly the opacity is doing more damage than the limits themselves. anyone who's worked with AI knows there's a lot of limits you need to contend with. secret behavior changes are another level of badness.
Having had Claude Code jump to inserting juvenile and all-filtering regex to (attempt to) solve open-ended semantic natural language problems (-sigh- there's 12 hours of my life I'll never get back), I can absolutely imagine that this was someone trying to code up a "defense in depth" mechanic that was explosively insufficient after Claude Code (even Opus 4.6) made a series of faulty assumptions.
This one feels like prime space for Hanlon's razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
The hassle with the performance of these systems is that they're ~70% of the way to awesome. For advanced prototyping (my current job description), a fast 60% of awesome is groundbreaking and game-changing. For production and real businesses, that last 30% is a really, really important thing to figure out.
Ok I am usually defending Anthropic, but it seems like this OpenClaw and Hermes ban was implemented incredibly poorly; it looks like a simple regex.
Didn’t they think about “we need to make sure Claude Code is never banned” ? Could have been as easy as including some Claude Code specific prompting traits (tools, system prompt, whatever) in there and automatically whitelisting it.
Is it foolproof? No. Will it avoid banning legit users? Absolutely.
First do the first large sweep, then see what still falls through, then ban those.
It really seems they were panicking due to capacity and there was very little oversight with all this.
Oh come on Anthropic, just admit straight away that any other pricing than usage-based is completely unsustainable and is being phased out.. maybe doing it once but officially could save you some brand damage.
Interesting people talking about whether they should be "defended," here or whatnot, and all of that strikes me as wildly naive.
They have a business model that's more or less known, and that includes THEIR AI model(s) that they get to put out there however they want. I don't like it much at all, I actually sort of like the idea that they "owe" more because they probably "stole" a bunch of stuff to get the thing going.
But I mean, don't be mad, be proactive. Anthropic is going to try to Microsoft this in whatever way possible, and we all see that the numbers don't really add up.
Asking them pretty please to be nicer, meh. Let's figure out better, and more free-software-like ways to do this.
what a company with really bad customer practices. I'm really glad I moved entirely to open source models. if you're disgusted by these practices as I am, I really recommend you use opencode (or any of the other 20 agents) and the GLM 5.1, or Kimi K2.6 or Deepseek V4 Pro models. You will be shocked how effective they are.
haven't used claude in about 2 weeks and I do not miss it.
I think that’s an ok move, definitely better than canceling code on pro users for example, I would support to even have a new pricing tier only for openclaw, so they don’t ruin the usage on others. I noticed the ones who use claude code usually are software developers or sysadmins, meanwhile most openclaw ones are your average HR stacy and lazy middle managers, so yeah, it should be a separate tier for them.
openClaw does so muhc more then Claude code tbh, running 9 agents from the one machine, schedual some tasks, add some personal personas for each agent, claudeCode (which i like alot) is on rails, openClaw is full openworld.
Please raise the ticket or at least GitHub issue for visibility.
Sooner or later some sort of complaint to the relevant trade authority should happen - this is a scam operation at this point.
How about we turn down the heat, everyone?
Yes, it's reasonable to turn down the heat. But it's also reasonable for people to be upset when their money is taken from them, and when the company that does so is effectively beyond persecution for doing so.
So maybe not malice, but certainly a level of ineptitude I don’t expect from a crucial vendor from a tool that’s become essential for many developers.
(I don’t care, I do just fine when Claude is down or refuses to help me (it has happened) though)
How about Anthropic turn down the heat and refunds money to everyone for every bug it created with its LLM?
"You may not use our service if you mention OpenClaw" is a harsh line but hardly illegal or forbidden any more than any other service restriction (i.e. no use allowed for high-stakes financial modeling). Don't like it, cancel your plan.
But that's the thing -- there is no line! Where is this specified? How can we know what service restrictions there are? For all I know, my plan could be exhausted at any point during the workday just because I happened to touch on some keyword Anthropic has decided to ban.
> Don't like it, cancel your plan.
Ah, but I thought these models were supposed to have been trained for the sake of humanity? That the arbitrary enclosure of the collective intelligence was for our own good? These concepts are not compatible.
Tbh blocking OpenClaw might just be for the betterment of humanity. It's yet to be proven either way.
This is, by the way, the same legal principle that the website you are posting on, right now, uses. Some uses are prohibited. Not every line need be explicit. You aren't allowed to smack talk Y Combinator or the moderators without possibly being banned for life, and you certainly do not have a legal case if they do.
People spend large sums of money for this tool. They can't just delete your balance because they feel like it.
The heat is coming, in part, from the lack of a proper support channel.
But there is a clear pattern emerging. There's no reason to turn down the heat when a company of this size and influence is allowed this level of absurdity time and time again.
https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/53262#issue...
Why should we coddle a corporations when they screw over customers?
It matters very little if they did this out of incompetence or malice.
You can see how it goes in the future. Wanna vibe code a throwaway script? $0.20. Ah, it's for a legal document search? $10k then. Oh and we'll charge 20% of your app sales too - I can see how they are going in real time, mind you!
I predict that costs will grow to 80% of what it would cost a human, across the board for everything AI can do.
"It's still cheaper than a human" they'll say. Loudly here on HN too.
Of course this will happen slowly, very slowly. Lets meet again in 10-20 years.
Nobody will successfully lobby for banning local models either, it just isn’t going to happen when the rest of the world will happily avoid paying 80% of their profits to some US bigco for the privilege of existing.
The question is how much friction there will be for people to switch over to Gemini, GPT or maybe even DeepSeek or Mistral or whatever. Even if price hikes are inevitable across the board, the moat any single org has is somewhat limited, so prices definitely will be a factor they'll compete on with one another at least a bit.
I disagree. The models are going to become commodities (we're already almost there), but the tooling and integrations will be the moat. Reproducing everything Anthropic has already built with Claude Code, Cowork, and all their connectors would be nontrivial, and they're just getting started.
Anyone can implement an AI chatbot. But few will be able to provide AI that's deeply integrated into our daily lives.
https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/cost-c...
It’s a way less transformational technology when put in context of the real price tag.
Seems most of the open weight models are from outside the USA (shocker), going to be interesting to see how THAT shakes out.
This doesn't even have anything to do with if it loses money or not. Obviously they are going to charge as much as possible.
Its "Fraud Code".
All of this is just criminal and fraudulent behavior, done July a whole bunch of people who haven't learned their lesson, and keep sending Anthropic more money for abuse at scale.
Seriously, not at all. Anti-competitive practices is when you go out of your way to use legal agreements or practices, in an illegal way (i.e. from the starting point of a monopoly), to deliberately restrict the ability to use competition.
Openclaw is not a competitor with Claude. Anti-competitive practices would only occur here if Anthropic used some technique to prevent people from using Claude alternatives (i.e. if you install Claude Code, all other AI agents are forcibly disabled on your system).
There's absolutely an expectation of reasonability and good faith.
Nobody signing up for Claude would be reasonably assuming that they are allowed to arbitrarily decide what magic words suddenly bypass the subscription cost model that was actually purchased into an overcharge model that is significantly more expensive, whose verbiage clearly indicates the intent of the feature being enabled is to allow additional use after the quota has been consumed, not randomly at the behest of Anthropic.
I can make you sign a infinitely generating contract, that doesn't mean it's enforceable/
And we continue slipping into lawlessness and a low trust society...
But the presumption, as any court will show, is that it is fully blooming enforceable. The burden of proof is on showing it isn't. This particular instance, a lawyer would laugh at you in the face over, this is absolutely 100% stone cold enforceable common and expected.
How do you expect Facebook or HN to moderate if certain uses aren't prohibited? The same principle applies. HN bans certain phrases, lots of them.
I don’t think that really fits with the metaphor but I wanted to say my piece regardless.
Everyone send me all your gold and I’ll prove it.
"If you don't know an identifier, google it" isn't a very reliable behavior in today's models. They do it, but only sometimes.
At the time, enforcement was pretty random, and I think based on how heavy your traffic was.
They weren't all on Claude (though it was the preferred setup) and some people had dozens of accounts hooked up with proxies to avoid hitting limits.
Claude status: https://status.claude.com/
I have been really happy with my Codex subscription lately, but feels like these things change every other day. The OpenCode Go subscription for trying out GLM, Kimi, Qwen, Deepseek and friends also looks useful.
But nonetheless, Opus 4.6 is a very capable model, but justifying a Claude subscription gets more and more difficult, think I might just sometimes use it through OpenRouter or as part of something like Cursor (although I'm not sure about the value of that subscription as well).
OpenCode Go: https://opencode.ai/go
Cursor: https://cursor.com
It's bordering on being useless.
Highly recommend as a clean way to try out the upstart models.
Not sure where deepseek 4 sits
How do you think the large providers do inference? No single GPU has 1TB plus of memory on board. It’s a cluster of a bunch of gpus.
Check out tensor parallelism
The model is fine, Ive switched to it entirely for a personal project, but it's not opus.
And no, you're not running then locally unless you're a millionaire. You still need hundreds of GB (500+++) of VRAM on your graphics card - that's not at a level of consumer electronics.
Sure you can run the quantized models, but then you're at Haiku performance.
So, at least better than GitHub, right? :)
For instance, maybe you can't afford to take on more customers right now, Anthropic. Maybe if you are severely undermining the customer relationships you already have, you should just admit you can't sell any more 20x plans right now and only accept new customers at lower tiers until you have the necessary capacity.
This is also a DoS you could drive a truck through, and it's disturbing such an obvious vulnerability was shipped at all.
Or just increase prices for new claude code users? Surely transparent upfront across the board price increases are easier to swallow than hidden context-based pricing changes like this?
Check out OpenCode (the OSS product [1]) and OpenCode Go/Zen (the LLMaaS [2]). Use a more expensive model with larger context (like GLM-5.1) for orchestration and cheaper models for coding and iteration on acceptance criteria (writing and passing tests). I also throw a more expensive vision-capable model into the mix like Gemini 3 Flash to iterate on UI tasks using Playwright. With the base usage in Go and pay as you go on cheaper models like MiniMax you can get a lot done for not a lot of coin.
[1] https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode
[2] https://opencode.ai/go
It happens surprisingly often.
Next time I can summarize some of the talking points in my comment though, but I didn't want to poorly regurgitate the arguments when they were readily available in the video lol.
Although I see another poster has commented the key takeaways :)
Anthropic has been deeply integrated with the US military, having been installed with classified access since June 2024. The podcast highlights that Claude has been actively utilized during the "Venezuela incursion" and the ongoing "war in Iran".
Despite this active involvement, CEO Dario Amodei released a statement attempting to publicly distance the company from the Department of Defense by declaring they would not allow their technology to be used for "mass domestic surveillance" or "fully autonomous weapons". Zitron categorizes this as a highly calculated PR maneuver, pointing out that LLMs are fundamentally incapable of controlling autonomous weapons anyway. The stunt successfully manufactured a wave of positive press—with celebrities and commentators praising Anthropic as an ethical objector—right when the company was trying to secure an IPO or a massive ~$100 billion valuation, all while they quietly remained an active part of the war effort.
Beyond their military contracts, the podcast details several highly questionable business practices Anthropic has used to artificially inflate their numbers:
1. During a lawsuit regarding their military contract, Anthropic's CFO filed a sworn affidavit revealing the company had only made $5 billion in its entire lifetime. This directly contradicted leaked media reports suggesting they made $4.5 billion in 2025 alone. It revealed that the company's publicly perceived run rate was heavily exaggerated through the "shady revenue math" popular in Silicon Valley, a major discrepancy that most financial journalists ignored.
2. When the open-source agent library OpenClaw first launched, Anthropic deliberately allowed users to connect a $200/month "max account" and essentially burn through thousands of dollars of API compute at Anthropic's expense. Zitron points out that Anthropic knowingly let this happen to temporarily boost their usage metrics and hype while they raised a $30 billion funding round. Just weeks after securing the funding, they abruptly cut off access for these users, a move Zitron cites as proof of them being an "unethical company".
Furthermore, the company has faced criticism for gaslighting users, maintaining poor service availability, and silently degrading model performance while rug-pulling users on rate limits. As Zitron summarizes, it is highly unlikely that either Anthropic or OpenAI actually care about these ethical boundaries beyond how they can be weaponized for better PR and higher valuations.
Anthropic has taken 10s of billions from investors just like everyone else has. There is no such thing as "ethics" or "morality" when the scale of obligation is that large.
So yes, this is obvious despite whatever image they try to cultivate.
Just because they screwed up their billing doesn't mean every ethical commitment they've ever made is bunk.
At that scale, ethics and morality should become more important, not discarded
"Quietly remained an active part of the war effort" - anthropic was totally transparent about it, but yeah not great.
"Leaks were wrong" - and that's Anthropic's fault?
OpenAI agreed to assist the DoD with zero boundaries and then lied about it. Can we at least give them credit for not doing that? If we just throw up our hands and say "they're all awful, whatever" then the result is reduced pressure on them to be better. Like it or not, I do not think AI is going away and as far as I can tell, despite billing problems, Anthropic's still the least bad frontier lab.
After all, if you’re paying hundreds of millions to buy these shitty podcasts, you might as well host some bots.
A bunch of people here tried to defend Anthropic, saying that it was justified because it was likely that Claude Code's harness had optimizations that would not be possible on OpenCode. It was clear from the source leak that nothing of this sort was the case, and that they were simply trying to avoid others distilling their models.
GLM and Queen are not on par with Opus, but they are good enough and I never had hit the usage limits, even with 2-3 sessions running.
The flat-rate plans were the top of the slippery slope to enshittification, really. If everyone were on metered billing there'd be no reason for all these opaque and sneaky attempts to limit usage. People would pay for what they get and get what they pay for.
You simply need to price the flat-rate sub at a price that's profitable when averaged out over all of your users, both light and heavy, and prevent fully automated usage by the power users. That's it. This is immensely more user-friendly, and I doubt you'd get any traction at all if you didn't do this. Even if you pay more for the sub, having unlimited (non-automated) usage frees a mental barrier to using the product. If you have to pay for every request you make, it introduces a hesitation to do anything - it makes the user hesitant to experiment, hesitant to prompt for anything of slightly less significance, anxious about the exact token consumption of every prompt, and so on. It's not enjoyable to use when you're being penny pinched for every prompt.
Anthropic's problem, of course, is that they are not bootstrapped. They don't have a business model that can compete with startups running DeepSeek or GLM on their own hardware. Non-frontier startups got to skip the whole "tens of billions of dollars in debt" step of creating a frontier model from scratch, and still get to run a model that is perhaps 80%-85% as good as Anthropic's, which is good enough for millions of customers. So Anthropic is desperate, backed into a corner, and doing anything and everything they can to try to right their sinking ship, no matter how scummy.
But being a power user and fully automating things is the whole appeal.
Mind sharing a link?
And given that Anthropic does both, it must make up its training costs by selling inference. jp57 was pretty clearly talking about Anthropic's flat-rate plans, rather than the flat-rate plans of companies that get to skip the most expensive part of the process.
That seems likely. If people had to pay their share of the actual all-in cost of the service (rather than having it be subsidized by investors with extremely deep pockets and a small handful of corporate customers), very, very few regular people would use it.
The point that 'jp57' pretty explicitly made [0] is that flat-rate plans that don't cover the all-in cost of providing the plans tend to result in those plans getting worse and worse and worse, as economic realities assert themselves. If the flat-rate plans that you are aware of actually cover the cost of providing the service, then you're discussing an entirely different situation that's entirely inapplicable to the discussion about Anthropic's pricing and degrading level of service.
[0] ...which is one that's understood by people who have been in pretty much any industry for more than a few years...
You misdirected my quoted statement to assert a position I did not take. When I talk about flat-rate subs being a good UX, I am not talking about at a subsidized rate. My position is that people will pay more for a flat-rate sub than they are willing to through per-token billing. That is, a consumer who would only pay average $10/mo if they used the API will voluntarily pay $20/mo for a sub, because even though it's a worse value the latter is a tremendously more friendly user experience. When I say that flat-rate subs are necessary for traction, I mean that solely from a user experience perspective, not "subsidized usage is necessary for traction".
this is a non-starter
If you must - in my experience Deepseek v4 is incredible value in every aspect. Pricing is transparent.
But like I said, I have funds in different AI gateways but I'm preferring to write by hand because I don't want surprising bugs and unnecessary code in my end result.
Spec your machine accordingly. Some models I recommend trying to get a feel for what's out there. Qwen 3.6 35b a3b, granite4.1 8b, llama 3.2 3b.
There are plenty of others but those give a good taste for different sizes and what they can do. If it's not enough then you are out maybe 5 bucks.
Also check in with r/localllama they have a bunch of people who can help you go further, spec machines, get better performance and results. If you don't want to post that's cool but there are lots of comments on how to get going. They are pretty friendly though so I'd read the rules and make a post asking for help
Maybe you will inspire me to use it.
I’ve got a NixOS Qemu VM I use to run openclaw in. I had Claude help me set it up, and it runs local models on my own machine in a config based sandbox.
Why should Claude block or charge extra to work on that?
Why should Claude care if I have instructions for Hermes or OpenClaw in my project repos?
This fingerprinting is incredibly sloppy for how much access to a machine Claude code has.
They can have a different price plan for agentic stuff, but these things where they “accidentally” whoops match on specific keywords and trigger extra usage charges is giving a evil-microsoft-vibe
There are multiple comments in this thread with comments along the line of: "Oh im sure they didn't mean to, let's not attribute this to malice". There is a long history here of lawyers, back and forth between OpenCode and OpenClaw and various other "Open" harnesses. Digging into my commit history and blocking access based off of a string is not acceptable for a product in my opinion -- and I don't think this was purely on accident.
Other comments calling out that they are compute constrained and need to do this in order to continue functioning. They shouldn't oversell then. I think that overselling airline tickets is abhorrent and so is overselling any product in a way that you know that you will impact legitimate customers. Up your pricing and/or stop accepting invites, we will quickly get to the bottom of it.
A company does not deserve the benefit of the doubt over and over and over again.
I just don't believe for an instant that they're anywhere in the same ballpark of capabilities as running Opus or similar. My time is the most valuable resource. Opus would need to be SIGNIFICANTLY more costly and unstable for me to start entertaining local models for day-to-day development.
Perhaps whatever work you're doing makes this trade-off more sensible, but I struggle to see how that could be true. I'm averse to running Sonnet on a large amount of software engineering problems - let alone Qwen.
Yet.
1 CorinthAIns 13:12
It’s a huge mistake at the level of IBM trying to reestablish dominance over PCs by making MicroChannel the new standard; this failed horribly and cost IBM its market leadership and reputation.
MCA was technically better at the time, but the industry responded with EISA and VLBus which led to PCI and today’s PCIe.
Unfortunately for those of us who just want to eat a nice filling meal at the fixed price all you can eat buffet of AI subscriptions, a minority of customers keeps paying for the all you can eat buffet and staying for hours and bringing containers to sneak food out when they leave. And they keep wearing disguises to try and evade detection.
It’s a losing battle for the provider, which ultimately means the subscription pricing model can’t work, which hurts the majority of customers that just want to use the system as intended and no longer have a subscription model available.
I have plenty of frustrations with Anthropic as a paying customer, but tbh is doesn’t strike me as all that awful, just some annoying collateral damage. I’d rather have that than no subscription model at all.
This is a reason to seriously consider changing providers.
The truth is that it doesn't matter what companies say, what they claim, what they do, and what their CEO says/claims/does.
It's just a matter of time until the shareholders will get the right CEO to maximize shareholder value.
People in the comments who want a statement or a "reorientation" or a commitment from Anthropic leadership are missing the principles of how capitalism functions. Shareholder value cannot be compromised. In every battle between morality and profit, values and profit, public good and profit, ultimately all things will mutate into a state to allow profit will prevail. Always.
There are no exceptions to this.
The only thing they can hope for is to maintain momentum and critical mass long enough to find ways to pay for all this or have Moores law make the average user request become economical.
And I don't necessarily think it's wrong for Anthropic to introduce QoS or throttling on users of their models. It's pretty much a necessity when offering public access to a scarce resource and it's been a common practice for decades.
What is the alternative? We just accept that it doesn't work half the time because the system is overloaded with molt bots?
They would have kept my business if they were honest and upfront. Instead they sold me something that worked well, broke it without warning, remained silent about it until enough people caught on, chose to do nothing, then proceeded to release a model that eats ~30% more tokens with no advantage over prior models.
If they chose to unbrick their model and offered what we had a couple months ago at a 50% hike, I would have been onboard. I've seen enough now of how this company treats its customers to continue using or recommending them.
Also, Codex works much better than CC now for anyone who happens to be on the fence.
Anthropic wants to have their lunch (low apparent prices, increased market share) and eat it too (controlled costs, adequate production to serve the demand).
They're advertising themselves as a $5 All-You-Can-Eat buffet, but then aggressively and arbitrarily restricting admission, sneakily swapping out the high-quality ingredients for garbage-tier slop, and kicking out anyone who even utters the words "to go box" or "doggie bag".
Would you want to eat at that restaurant?
Could you do that as a human? Sure but you'd likely burn out after a couple of weeks. Also the human would probably use those tokens far more effectively and would not need as many. It's feels the same as someone installing a crypto miner on their servers in my mind. Abhorrent behavior.
That's a notable achievement, but let's have some balance... It's also responsible for the biggest self-own in software industry history by leaking their 1) crown jewels (i.e., source code) 2) the existence of their next model Mythos, and 3) their roadmap in a highly competitive market.
Let's put this in perspective. Imagine it's 3 years ago, April 2023. Chatgpt has been launched for 4 months. We've all been using it, and writing poems in parrot talk or whatever. Someone tells you "In 2 years time there will be an app that lets you use LLMs to write code. It will be coded by humans for 3 weeks, then by humans + LLMs for 6 months, and then by LLMs mostly unsupervised. One year after that, they'll be making 2B/mo out of that app". Would you believe them? Not even the most maximalist, overhypers, AI singularity frenzied crazy people would have said that. And yet... it happened.
That being said, Anthropic can be diverting capacity to train the next model, and if it is significantly better, people would start flocking back again.
There's very little competition for SOTA models. The models themselves also weren't built by Claude. The current revenue has almost nothing to do with what Claude built.
Hell if it was so far ahead then they wouldn't be desperately trying to block OpenCode.
Ummm, no. Anthropic is #1 in coding because they developed it first. Then they used data + signals to train models specifically to work best with cc. They work together. Why do you think every provider (including chinese ones) have their own harnesses? Having real-world data and usage metrics helps training the models in immense ways.
Having features fast in this case >>> having perfect features. Some of them they dropped along the way, but having them in the pair cc + models is what matters. People switched from Cursor to cc in droves because it worked better there. That's not a fluke. That's how you improve your models, by collecting real world data after you launch them.
> Hell if it was so far ahead then they wouldn't be desperately trying to block OpenCode.
That's a lack of compute problem.
The problem with slop is, nobody understands it. Nobody ever designed it, nobody really knows how it works. You’re just putting blind faith in the slop you’ve shipped.
It lets you be very quick, but if you’ve accidentally compromised all your data or bank accounts through the slop then you won’t know until you’re destroyed.
Even when asked to search online it still gaslighted me about it.
At this point I assume you are coping with having drank the koolaid and fired key staff believing claude will replace them...back when it was cheap....because nearsightedness affects decision makers much more during hype cycles......
(You're the principal, directing what to do, but your agent Anthropic has its own motivations that are not aligned with your will.)
This one feels like prime space for Hanlon's razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
The hassle with the performance of these systems is that they're ~70% of the way to awesome. For advanced prototyping (my current job description), a fast 60% of awesome is groundbreaking and game-changing. For production and real businesses, that last 30% is a really, really important thing to figure out.
Do these refusals still happen if you’re using an API key instead?
So I suppose Anthropic lied to him?
Didn’t they think about “we need to make sure Claude Code is never banned” ? Could have been as easy as including some Claude Code specific prompting traits (tools, system prompt, whatever) in there and automatically whitelisting it.
Is it foolproof? No. Will it avoid banning legit users? Absolutely.
First do the first large sweep, then see what still falls through, then ban those.
It really seems they were panicking due to capacity and there was very little oversight with all this.
I’m not affected but pretty disappointed.
They do not care about us.
They have a business model that's more or less known, and that includes THEIR AI model(s) that they get to put out there however they want. I don't like it much at all, I actually sort of like the idea that they "owe" more because they probably "stole" a bunch of stuff to get the thing going.
But I mean, don't be mad, be proactive. Anthropic is going to try to Microsoft this in whatever way possible, and we all see that the numbers don't really add up.
Asking them pretty please to be nicer, meh. Let's figure out better, and more free-software-like ways to do this.
haven't used claude in about 2 weeks and I do not miss it.
rate the analogy plz..