I suspect it's the combination of wanting to capture market share (subsidised plans), being severely capacity limited in GPUs, and having bursty and absurd growth rates. There was speculation that Anthropic might be allocating fewer GPUs to training for a few days to allow people to use Fable.

The actual API pricing seems far more of a stable downward trend, if measuring by equivalent intelligence.

> i struggle to find an equivalent industry that has been so all over the place and obtuse

No surprises, it's fundamentally built on promises and lies