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?
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'.
You can use these tools with most providers today, just no subscription plan. If you have enough spend, you can likely get bulk deals
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.
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.
Then don’t make BS up like implying Anthropic is a monopolist for the crime of competence.
> tell me you don't understand how a small quantitative gap can result in a step change in capability
The law does not give a darn about this. Being a good competitive option does not make you a league of your own. If I invent a new flavor of shake, the Emerald Slide, am I a monopolist in shakes because I’m the only one selling Emerald Slides? If you go and then start a local business reselling shakes and I’m your only supplier, am I a monopolist then? Absolutely not.
We have a similar situation in mobile where Apple may not be considered a monopoly, but people have walked around for a decade with a supercomputer in their pocket that is wildly underused.
Things have gotten faster; things are different than they were decades ago when a lot of this was devised.
The reality of the matter is that some of us just want to see innovation actually happen apace, and not see 5, 10, or 30 years of slowdown while we litigate whether or not such a company is holding all the cards, while everyone is collectively waiting at the spigot for a company to get its shit together because we're not allowed to fix the situation.
For what it's worth, I'm hopeful that the other model providers will catch up and put us in a situation where this conversation is irrelevant.
What I'm afraid of is a situation where we see continued divergence, and we end up with another Apple situation.
That is not calling out that they are “absolutely not a monopoly by the law” in any way, shape, or form. You’re framing it as though they aren’t by a technicality, when they aren’t anywhere near discussion by even the most extreme of legal theories. You won’t find Lina Khan or Margarethe Vestager, both ousted for going too far, complaining about Anthropic.
> “We have a similar situation in mobile where Apple may not be considered a monopoly, but people have walked around for a decade with a supercomputer in their pocket that is wildly underused.”
In that we can’t run a Torrent client to download illegally redistributed media 99% of the time? Otherwise, in what way, are they underused? For the degrees of public addiction, a more underutilized phone would be a social benefit.
I'm looking forward. Things are moving very quickly. As I said above, I'm afraid of us diverging into another Apple situation in the future. If I suggest that they should be looked at and thought about, it's not for today, it's for tomorrow. If divergence continues. Because as with everything in AI, it might hit us a lot faster than people expect. Hell, given their approach to morality, I suspect that Anthropic folks have already thought deeply about these sorts of concerns. That's why it's actually a lot more in character for them to be doing this not due to self-preferencing, but due to unaffordability, which - if you look at my first post - is what I said seems to be happening.
Suffice to say that I have a graveyard of things that I think phones could have been, where unfortunately we've ended up with these - as you say - addicting consumerist messes.
Gonna stop here so I don't flood the thread. We're getting very off topic.
I haven't tried it to see if it's any good but it's $20/mo.