4 ms·

I suspect people are misdiagnosing the root cause of why Anthropic is doing this a bit. I don't think this is particularly about the financial impact of people

by nl 7mo ago

I suspect people are misdiagnosing the root cause of why Anthropic is doing this a bit. I don't think this is particularly about the financial impact of people using OpenClaw - they can adjust the amount of tokens in a subscription quite easily. I think the root cause is that Anthropic is capacity constrained so is having to make choices about the customers they want to serve and have chosen people who use Claude Code above other segments. We know Anthropic weren't as aggressive as OpenAI through 2025 in signing huge capacity deals with the hyperscalers and instead signed smaller deals with more neo-clouds, and we know some of the neo-clouds have had trouble delivering capacity as quickly as they promised. We also know Claude Code usage is growing very fast - almost certainly faster since December 2025 than Anthropic predicted 12 months ago when they were doing 12-month capacity planning. We know Anthropic has suffered from brown-outs in Claude availability. Put this all together and a reasonable hypothesis is that Anthropic is choosing which customers to service rather than raising prices.

wigglewoggle 7mo ago
I'm at large company and pretty much everyone has settled on opus or sonnet 4.6. We would absolutely not allow something like OpenClaw on our network so your point kinda fits here where, if capacity is constrained, then by setting focus away from OpenClaw you're essentially prioritising the enterprise clients. Just spitballing of course
- nl 7mo ago
  Yes exactly. I doubt they actually want to do this. They clearly see having a wide set of paying customers as valuable (otherwise they'd just raise prices) but if you are stuck having to make hard choice then I can see the attraction of this approach.
- manmal 7mo ago
  > not allow something like OpenClaw on our network And where’s the difference between the Claude Desktop app and OpenClaw at this point? Anthropic have been hard at work porting the most important features. You can easily shoot yourself in the foot with both now.
  - theshrike79 7mo ago
    We have a legal contract with Anthropic OpenClaw and OpenCode are open source projects with zero warranty and nobody to sue if they have a npm Trojan in them
    - ahtihn 7mo ago
      So you don’t use any other open source software at all then? The risk with OpenClaw et al isn't that the software itself is compromised. The risk is that what it does is fundamentally insecure and Claude Code isn't any better
      - stingraycharles 7mo ago
        That’s not the issue, the issue is that people are using their subscriptions (intended only for use with Anthropic products) with non-Anthropic products and this is simply Anthropic enforcing their ToS.
      - TeMPOraL 7mo ago
        That's table stakes. LLMs are not like traditional software for fundamental reasons, and cannot be fully secured without destroying all value they provide. Once again, despite everyone's protestations about not anthropomorphising things, LLMs are, to first approximation, best seen as little people on a chip. So with that in mind, it should be obvious why enterprise would prefer dealing with Anthropic's official products than OpenClaw - it's similar to contracting a team of software engineers from another well-known corporation and giving them keys to the castle, vs. inviting in any randos that show up at the door on any given day and can pass FizzBuzz test. Even if, in both cases, these turned out to be the same people, having an organizational/legal-level relationship changes the expectations and trust levels involved.
      - xp84 7mo ago
        Good point. When it comes to npm Trojans you’re probably more likely to find them in dumb and boring deps like Lpad.
    - 7mo ago
llm_nerd 7mo ago
>I don't think this is particularly about the financial impact of people using OpenClaw - they can adjust the amount of tokens in a subscription quite easily. It's pretty clear that they do continually adjust the amount of tokens in a subscription, per se (and at best they offer sort-of estimates of quotas). The same activity exhausts my session quota on one day, yet it's a minor contributor on another. They make this very explicit with the "2x" event for the past two weeks, but anyone who uses it knows this is basically an ongoing reality: If you stick to using it off hours, you generally enjoy a more liberal usage grant. But if they just "adjust the amount of tokens in a subscription", they would be punishing everyone for the outliers. The average normal user has spurts of usage where occasionally they need more and then there are gaps where they use little. Subscription services rely upon this behaviour, and the economics only work if they "oversell". That's why OpenClaw users want to sneak in under a subscription, because the tokens come at a discounted rate over using the API based upon that assumption, but they are breaking the model because those users aren't conforming to expectations. It's basically the tragedy of the commons and a small number of users want to piss in the well.
lavezzi 7mo ago
> I think the root cause is that Anthropic is capacity constrained so is having to make choices about the customers they want to serve and have chosen people who use Claude Code above other segments. I think that's part of it, the other part is that OpenClaw is OpenAI IP now, and Anthropic want to allow users to ensloppify the internet through their own features now instead.

by nl 7mo ago

wigglewoggle 7mo ago

I'm at large company and pretty much everyone has settled on opus or sonnet 4.6. We would absolutely not allow something like OpenClaw on our network so your point kinda fits here where, if capacity is constrained, then by setting focus away from OpenClaw you're essentially prioritising the enterprise clients. Just spitballing of course

nl 7mo ago
Yes exactly. I doubt they actually want to do this. They clearly see having a wide set of paying customers as valuable (otherwise they'd just raise prices) but if you are stuck having to make hard choice then I can see the attraction of this approach.
manmal 7mo ago
> not allow something like OpenClaw on our network And where’s the difference between the Claude Desktop app and OpenClaw at this point? Anthropic have been hard at work porting the most important features. You can easily shoot yourself in the foot with both now.
- theshrike79 7mo ago
  We have a legal contract with Anthropic OpenClaw and OpenCode are open source projects with zero warranty and nobody to sue if they have a npm Trojan in them
  - ahtihn 7mo ago
    So you don’t use any other open source software at all then? The risk with OpenClaw et al isn't that the software itself is compromised. The risk is that what it does is fundamentally insecure and Claude Code isn't any better
    - stingraycharles 7mo ago
      That’s not the issue, the issue is that people are using their subscriptions (intended only for use with Anthropic products) with non-Anthropic products and this is simply Anthropic enforcing their ToS.
    - TeMPOraL 7mo ago
      That's table stakes. LLMs are not like traditional software for fundamental reasons, and cannot be fully secured without destroying all value they provide. Once again, despite everyone's protestations about not anthropomorphising things, LLMs are, to first approximation, best seen as little people on a chip. So with that in mind, it should be obvious why enterprise would prefer dealing with Anthropic's official products than OpenClaw - it's similar to contracting a team of software engineers from another well-known corporation and giving them keys to the castle, vs. inviting in any randos that show up at the door on any given day and can pass FizzBuzz test. Even if, in both cases, these turned out to be the same people, having an organizational/legal-level relationship changes the expectations and trust levels involved.
    - xp84 7mo ago
      Good point. When it comes to npm Trojans you’re probably more likely to find them in dumb and boring deps like Lpad.
  - 7mo ago

llm_nerd 7mo ago

>I don't think this is particularly about the financial impact of people using OpenClaw - they can adjust the amount of tokens in a subscription quite easily. It's pretty clear that they do continually adjust the amount of tokens in a subscription, per se (and at best they offer sort-of estimates of quotas). The same activity exhausts my session quota on one day, yet it's a minor contributor on another. They make this very explicit with the "2x" event for the past two weeks, but anyone who uses it knows this is basically an ongoing reality: If you stick to using it off hours, you generally enjoy a more liberal usage grant. But if they just "adjust the amount of tokens in a subscription", they would be punishing everyone for the outliers. The average normal user has spurts of usage where occasionally they need more and then there are gaps where they use little. Subscription services rely upon this behaviour, and the economics only work if they "oversell". That's why OpenClaw users want to sneak in under a subscription, because the tokens come at a discounted rate over using the API based upon that assumption, but they are breaking the model because those users aren't conforming to expectations. It's basically the tragedy of the commons and a small number of users want to piss in the well.

lavezzi 7mo ago

> I think the root cause is that Anthropic is capacity constrained so is having to make choices about the customers they want to serve and have chosen people who use Claude Code above other segments. I think that's part of it, the other part is that OpenClaw is OpenAI IP now, and Anthropic want to allow users to ensloppify the internet through their own features now instead.