Once I realized that Anthropic is a token merchant, I start to understand Anthropic’s decision more. They are always finding reasons for you to use more tokens through them unless the users revolt or demand some guardrails.
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.
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.
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.
no amount of alignment will stop aomeone drom just shutting up.
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.