At this point I think Dario is just in his wellness retreat adjusting a revenue/profit dial.
Increase the price by 70% and then cut it by 50%, resulting in a 15% cut that sounds like a major deal.
It's still questionable but I don't think it's in the same ballpark as what you describe.
Its not 'nefarious' in that its in their best business interests.
But it'd be difficult to take anyone serious who thinks Anthropic's motivation was to improve the UX, and the other effect were by accident. At the time they specifically started blocking based on openclaw prompt text. Its a walled-garden tactic.
A walled garden is nefarious to people who do not want to be inside one.
So what? When you care about optimising the entire experience, you offer sane defaults.
When you prevent people from changing the defaults, it's about control, not experience.
The nefarious part is because it's non optional. They could give you an option and compete by being better, instead you're given the finger as the option is taken from you. Competition is hard and banning people to create more FUD serves business need better.
You've obviously been gaslit so badly you're desperate to find a way to defend a shitty move and pretend it's the only way to increase usability. But you don't have to deny really! You're allowed to admit control is easier for a company than competition, and that they didn't have to, but did because it increases their control of the ecosystem.
If you want to defend someone, good? But at least save it for someone who actually deserves it. They don't; and you insult you and your readers intelligence by trying.
The only issue is that Anthropic optimizes the entire experience for their bottom line. User experience and price only suffer becaue of that.
It’s like that saying “What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away”, but in this case it is one company.
There is definitely a conflict of interest.
I fully agree.
> It's the same conflict of interest quite literally any business has.
I know that you know what I meant ;) In the long term it is just as you say - overcharging (eventually corrected by competition forces), but in the short term it can be additional revenue, blamed on a bug, but making some manager look good.
no amount of alignment will stop aomeone drom just shutting up.
On the other hand, the newer variants also tend to benchmark higher so it's not quite a clean argument of "hey the new version eats more tokens"
Its rather frustrating, slower tokens and more tokens.
Edit: consumer Claude subs are the 5%. I’d bet most all of CC subs lump in under enterprise.
- API & Enterprise: 75% to 85% of total revenue.
- Business Subscriptions: Roughly 10% to 15%.
- Individual Subscriptions: About 5%.I don't fully agree with the premise that they intentionally increase system prompts, but the enterprise plan usage is going to make that a huge income for Anthropic.
Anthropic is fine, as long as someone else (a clueless employer drinking Dario Koolaid) is paying for it. But the moment you have to pay for it, people just bail and go for DeepSeek, Kimmi, OpenRouter, OpenCode Go and other alternatives that give more bang for the buck than Anthropic.
I now have unlimited Anthropic and OpenAI plans at work because CEOs bought the hype.
But for personal projects $10/mo OpenCode Go serves me with DeepSeek V4 Flash, MiMo 2.5 and GLM 5.2.
Also I think it’s well known that OpenAI is the much less expensive option (in tokens and $$). For the same $20 you get a lot more mileage.
Curious if folks have strong opinions about the overall UX of OpenCode vs CC…
Also i doubt there was jira ticket with “make llm more verbose”, rather ticket with “bug makes llms too verbose” gets prioritised taking revenue impact into account.
Especially since compute is such a scarce resource.
And people paying $100 or $200 are much more likely to max it out for purely psychological reasons - it crosses that threshold where I want to see my money's worth in full. Whereas people on $20 subs are more likely to be there just to get access to better models and features, and are not necessarily even doing any substantial work.
Your gym members who got a subscription aspirationally and don't show up are absolutely subsidizing the power lifter who is introducing wear on (tens of?) thousands of dollars of equipment three times a week, but if the regulars weren't there you wouldn't have sold those subscriptions at all. Without a poster child there's no poster.
When using Pi, one way to significantly reduce input tokens it yields is to ignore common bookkeeping "dot directories", such as `.git`. How to do so can be found with the following interactive Pi prompt:
How do I configure Pi to ignore git related artifacts, such
as the project's .git directory?
Not sure if intentionally meant as a reference, but it gives "I use Arch btw" vibes.
and the interesting thing about system prompt wastage is its a cost that scales non linearly with subagent use.
OTOH, this makes typical subscriptions usages consume more tokens, which are included in their flat fee.
This sounds more like incompetence than malice.
To remind Goodhart's law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".
..also to parent's point, yes the upsell is only appealing once user run's out of tokens.
I mean, that's a very weak argument? Isn't a much more plausible explanation that with your tooling you'll have more of a lock-in than with just your model?
They get lock-in, and through that lock-in are more effectively able to inflate token usage.