Comment by kar1181
1 day ago
Anthropic want you to use claude code cli badly and are prepared to be very generous if you do. People want to take that generosity without the reciprocity.
I don't normally like to come down on the side of the megabigcorp but in this case anthropic aren't being evil. Not yet anyway.
I think they are.
The key question is about why they want to you to use the CLI. If you're not the customer, you're the product.
There's also a monopolistic aspect to this. Having the best model isn't something over can legally exploit to gain advantage in adjacent markets.
It reeks of "Windows isn't done until Lotus won't run," Windows showing spurious error messages for DR-DOS, and Borland C++ losing to the then-inferior Visual C++ due to late support of new Windows features. And Internet Explorer bundling versus Netscape.
Yes, Microsoft badly wanted you to use Office, Visual C++, MS-DOS, and IE, but using Windows to get that was illegal.
Microsoft lost in court, paid a nominal fine, and executives were crying all the way to the bank.
If you're not the customer, you're the product.
You are the customer, you're paying them directly.
We are both in this case..
Well they are doing the same to website owners who rely on human visitors for their revenue streams.
Both scraping and on-demand agent-driven interactions erode that. So you could look at people doing the same to them as a sort of poetic justice, from a purely moral standpoint at least.
Assuming the actual price for many user is closer to 1k USD/mth than to 200 USD/mth, and the actual price is closer to their target margin to be a viable business, they're practically subsidising usage after 200 USD/mth. Together with other AI-TECH doing the same, they fabricate a false sense of "AI is capable AND affordable", which imo is evil.
There is nothing evil about prioritizing customer acquisition over immediate profit.
And yet in many cases there are regulations against it. Almost as though behavior that warps the market is generally undesirable.
4 replies →