Comment by bustah

That rate limit improvement people are noticing? It's not Anthropic raising limits. It's Anthropic kicking ~135K OpenClaw instances off subscription credits on April 4.

OpenClaw sessions bypassed Claude Code's prompt cache, so each one was burning 10-20x more compute per task. A single instance could rack up $1K-$5K/day in API-equivalent compute on a $200/mo Max plan. 60% of active sessions were running on subscription credits, so that's a massive amount of load just... gone from the shared pool.

Google did the same thing to AI Ultra subscribers the same week, but without any warning. Anthropic at least gave notice.

Full analysis with 16 citations here: https://sloppish.com/the-borrowed-cloud.html

The real problem is that flat-rate subscriptions for AI compute were always a gym-membership bet. Sell to people who won't max it out. Autonomous agents broke that model completely. This won't be the last repricing.