Comment by chickensong
2 days ago
Your core customers are clearly having a blast building their own custom interfaces, so obviously the thing to do is update TOS and put a stop to it! Good job lol.
I know, I know, customer experience, ecosystem, gardens, moats, CC isn't fat, just big boned, I get it. Still a dick move. This policy is souring the relationship, and basically saying that Claude isn't a keeper.
I'll keep my eye-watering sub for now because it's still working out, but this ensures I won't feel bad about leaving when the time comes.
Update: yes yes, API, I know. No, I don't want that. I just want the expensive predictable bill, not metered corporate pricing just to hack on my client.
They'll all do this eventually.
We're in the part of the market cycle where everyone fights for marketshare by selling dollar bills for 50 cents.
When a winner emerges they'll pull the rug out from under you and try to wall off their garden.
Anthropic just forgot that we're still in the "functioning market competition" phase of AI and not yet in the "unstoppable monopoly" phase.
"Naveen Rao, the Gen AI VP of Databricks, phrased it quite well:
all closed AI model providers will stop selling APIs in the next 2-3 years. Only open models will be available via APIs (…) Closed model providers are trying to build non-commodity capabilities and they need great UIs to deliver those. It's not just a model anymore, but an app with a UI for a purpose."
~ https://vintagedata.org/blog/posts/model-is-the-product A. Doria
> new Amp Free (10$) access is also closed up since of last night
Not going to happen.
Unstoppable monopoly will be extremely hard to pull off given the number of quality open (weights) alternatives.
I only use LLMs through OpenRouter and switch somewhat randomly between frontier models; they each have some amount of personality but I wouldn't mind much if half of them disappeared overnight, as long as the other half remained available.
I'm old, so I remember saying the same thing about Google and search.
I hope you're right!
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This is saying we have hundreds of open source OSes and Windows will never be a monopoly.
Software always gets monopoly simply by usage. Every time a model gets used by esoteric use cases, it gets more training data (that a decentralized open weight model doesn't get) and it starts developing its moat.
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OpenRouter falls in the acceptable use category. They targeting users that are misusing their Claude OAuth token on non-Anthropic products.
They will [try to] ban open weights for ethics / security reasons: to stop spammers, to protect children, to stop fascism, to defend minorities. Take your pick; it won't matter why, it will only matter which media case can they thrust in the spotlight first.
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> They'll all do this eventually
And if the frontier continues favouring centralised solutions, they'll get it. If, on the other hand, scaling asymptotes, the competition will be running locally. Just looking at how much Claude complains about me not paying for SSO-tier subscriptions to data tools when they work perfectly fine in a browser is starting to make running a slower, less-capable model locally competitive with it in some research contexts.
Imagine having a finite pool of GPUs worth more than their weight in gold, and an infinite pool of users obsessed with running as many queries against those GPUs in parallel as possible, mostly to review and generate copious amounts of spam content primarily for the purposes of feeling modern, and all in return for which they offer you $20 per month. If you let them, you must incur as much credit liability as OpenAI. If you don't, you get destroyed online.
It almost makes me feel sorry for Dario despite fundamentally disliking him as a person.
Hello old friend, I've been expecting you.
First of all, custom harness parallel agent people are so far from the norm, and certainly not on the $20 plan, which doesn't even make sense because you'd hit token limit in about 90 seconds.
Second, token limits. Does Anthropic secretly have over-subscription issues? Don't know, don't care. If I'm paying a blistering monthly fee, I should be able to use up to the limit.
Now I know you've got a clear view of the typical user, but FWIW, I'm just an aging hacker using CC to build some personal projects (feeling modern ofc) but still driving, no yolo or gas town style. I've reached the point where I have a nice workflow, and CC is pretty decent, but it feels like it's putting on weight and adding things I don't want or need.
I think LLMs are an exciting new interface to computers, but I don't want to be tied to someone else's idea of a client, especially not one that's changing so rapidly. I'd like to roll my own client to interface with the model, or maybe try out some other alternatives, but that's against the TOS, because: reasons.
And no, I'm not interested in paying metered corporate rates for API access. I pay for a Max account, it's expensive, but predictable.
The issue is Anthropic is trying for force users into using their tool, but that's not going to work for something so generic as interfacing with an LLM. Some folks want emacs while others want vim, and there will never be a consensus on the best editor (it's nvim btw), because developers are opinionated and have strong preferences for how they interface with computers. I switched to CC maybe a year ago and haven't looked back, but this is a major disappointment. I don't give a shit about Anthropic's credit liability, I just want the freedom to hack on my own client.
You're not "rolling your own client." You're using a subscription that prices in a specific usage pattern, the one mediated by their client, and trying to route around it to extract more value than you're paying for. That's not hacking, it's arbitrage, and pretending it's about editor philosophy is cope.
Anthropic sells two products: a consumer subscription with a UI, and an API with metered pricing. You want the API product at the subscription price. That's not a principled stance about interface freedom, it's just wanting something for less than it costs.
The nvim analogy doesn't land either. Nobody's stopping you from writing your own client. You just have to pay API rates for it, because that's the product that matches what you're describing. The subscription subsidises the cost per token by constraining how you use it. Remove the constraint, the economics break. This isn't complicated.
"I don't give a shit about Anthropic's credit liability," right, but they do, because it's their business. You're not entitled to a flat-rate all-you-can-eat API just because you find metered pricing aesthetically displeasing.
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Why do you fundamentally dislike him as a person?
The only thing I've seen from him that I don't like is the "SWEs will be replaced" line (which is probably true and it's more that I don't like the factuality of it).
It’s kinda obvious he’s a well spoken shark. Personally not an issue for me, you have to be at the top of a unicorn, but it isn’t something people in general like.
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Don’t be mad at it, be happy you were able to throw some of that sweet free vc money at your hobbies instead of paying the market rate.
Oh I'm not mad, it's more of a sad clown type of thing. I'm still stoked to use it for now. We can always go back to the old ways if things don't work out.
They offer an API for people who want to build their own clients. They didn't stop people from being able to use Claude.
at a significantly higher price... which of course is why they're doing this.
That's what the API is for.
So basically you are saying Anthropic models are indispensable but you are too cheap to pay for it.
Nowhere did I say they're indispensable, and I explicitly said I'm still paying for it. If all AI companies disappear tomorrow that's fine. I'm just calling out what I think is tone-deaf move, by a company I pay a large monthly bill to.
Sure they are having a blast, they are paying 20$ instead of getting charged hundreds for forr tokens.
It's simple, follow the ToS