Comment by asgraham
3 days ago
Are you arguing that eventually a competitor will emerge that does support OpenClaw with a subscription model? Wouldn’t that just be more expensive for the exact same reason Anthropic is banning it?
3 days ago
Are you arguing that eventually a competitor will emerge that does support OpenClaw with a subscription model? Wouldn’t that just be more expensive for the exact same reason Anthropic is banning it?
OpenAI have literally gone out of their way to explicitly support this sort of thing. As they did with OpenCode.
Honestly, this just looks like what Dylan of SemiAnalysis suggested on Dwarkesh – that they've massively under-provisioned capacity / under-spent on infrastructure.
That would honestly be a comforting answer if true, because I would gladly take 'we can't afford to do this right now' over 'we are self-preferencing, and the FTC should really take a look at us, even if we're technically not a monopoly right now, since we're the only strongly-instruction-following model in town and we clearly know it'.
OpenAi is burning cash to stay relevant aiui, i.e. they will keep subsidizing
You can use these tools with most providers today, just no subscription plan. If you have enough spend, you can likely get bulk deals
> we are self-preferencing, and the FTC should really take a look at us, even if we're technically not a monopoly right now
Tell me you have zero clue what a monopoly is or what the law is, without telling me.
Monopoly law relies on broad categories, not narrow ones. You can’t call Microsoft a monopoly because they are the only company that makes Windows. You can’t call Amazon a monopoly because they are the only company that makes AmazonBasics. You can’t call Anthropic a monopoly because their product is 20% better for your use case, otherwise by definition no company has any incentive to do a good job at anything.
Somehow this was coming up a few years ago where people kept saying that Apple could face antitrust because they were the only company who made iOS and controlled the App Store. Given that android exists, and has roughly equal market share, that didn’t make much sense to me, but I kept seeing it being discussed.
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> Tell me you have zero clue what a monopoly is or what the law is, without telling me.
Monopoly law is subject to reinterpretation over time and anybody who has studied the history of it knows this. The only people argue for "strict" interpretations of current monopoly law are those who currently benefit from the status quo.
> Monopoly law relies on broad categories, not narrow ones.
And this is currently a gigantic problem. Because of relying on broad categories to define "monopoly", every single supply chain has been allowed to collapse into a small handful of suppliers who have no downstream capacity thanks to Always Late Inventory(tm). This prevents businesses from mounting effective competition since their upstream suppliers have no ability to support such activities thanks to over-optimization.
To be effective on the modern incarnation of businesses, monopoly law needs to bust every single consolidated narrow vertical over and over and over until they have enough downstream capacity to support competition again.
Well, Apple did recently lose as they're the monopolist in their walled garden for app distribution.
Oh, give me a break. I know the law around this incredibly well. Reasonable people can disagree about whether the law is appropriate. The whole point of laws is that they should match intent – and as for '20%': "tell me you don't understand how a small quantitative gap can result in a step change in capability."
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Some of the Chinese labs with cheaper per token costs do support it, like say minimax: https://agent.minimax.io/max-claw
I haven't tried it to see if it's any good but it's $20/mo.
Doesn't OpenAI allow this today?
It's a good way to win market share and build goodwill, but one has to wonder whether this class of usage is marginally profitable for them (or anyone) and how sustainable their lenient policies will be for them long term.
Kimi seems to support this with their 39 usd a month plan.
You mean whether another competitor will emerge? Right now we have OpenAI.
The real threat that Anthropic sees as real competitors in the long term, are the AI labs building open weight models, especially the AI labs in China.