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Posted by elmean 16 hours ago

Claude Code refuses requests or charges extra if your commits mention "OpenClaw"(twitter.com)
https://xcancel.com/theo/status/2049645973350363168
1071 points | 589 commentspage 3
taf2 11 hours ago|
Wow so like there are many services that rely on anthropics api.. if for example I inject the word openclaw into a bunch of chat bots or voice bots that might be using anthropics API would this also break them…
diego_sandoval 11 hours ago|
and HERMES.md
mcast 16 hours ago||
It sounds like Anthropic is dangerously low on compute availability if they’re prioritizing these refusals as their OKRs.
petcat 16 hours ago|
I think it's obvious that they are critically lacking in compute capacity especially since OpenAI has committed billions to locking up all the future compute production.

And I don't necessarily think it's wrong for Anthropic to introduce QoS or throttling on users of their models. It's pretty much a necessity when offering public access to a scarce resource and it's been a common practice for decades.

What is the alternative? We just accept that it doesn't work half the time because the system is overloaded with molt bots?

stldev 14 hours ago|||
I agree. If compute is the issue and pricing can't budge then something has to give.

They would have kept my business if they were honest and upfront. Instead they sold me something that worked well, broke it without warning, remained silent about it until enough people caught on, chose to do nothing, then proceeded to release a model that eats ~30% more tokens with no advantage over prior models.

If they chose to unbrick their model and offered what we had a couple months ago at a 50% hike, I would have been onboard. I've seen enough now of how this company treats its customers to continue using or recommending them.

Also, Codex works much better than CC now for anyone who happens to be on the fence.

ramoz 9 hours ago||
Codex actually feels severely lacking to me, trying to switch off Claude Code. I'm trying every day. The models honestly feel on par, but the Harness and the CLI are somewhat painful to work with.
stldev 6 hours ago||
Yeah, fair. I should've specifically asked for CC/adaptive-thinking to be returned to a working state and not the model itself.
kyboren 14 hours ago||||
The alternative is to price their product transparently. If there is too much demand and supply is limited: Charge more.

Anthropic wants to have their lunch (low apparent prices, increased market share) and eat it too (controlled costs, adequate production to serve the demand).

They're advertising themselves as a $5 All-You-Can-Eat buffet, but then aggressively and arbitrarily restricting admission, sneakily swapping out the high-quality ingredients for garbage-tier slop, and kicking out anyone who even utters the words "to go box" or "doggie bag".

Would you want to eat at that restaurant?

petcat 13 hours ago||
Then go eat at a different restaurant...

It sounds looks you're upset that something was obviously too good to be true.

ahtihn 15 hours ago||||
If they can't serve all their existing customers maybe they should stop accepting new customers until they can?
eloisius 15 hours ago|||
Maybe they could not sell more if they’re already exceeding capacity? What kind of apologism is this?
ragequittah 14 hours ago||
I cancelled my subscription so not really defending them myself but if all of their customers were humans who used it normally I bet they could serve everyone. It's when someone presses a few keys walks away and a bot uses tokens for 72 hours straight that it becomes a problem. Then people buy 3 accounts and do that for weeks at a time.

Could you do that as a human? Sure but you'd likely burn out after a couple of weeks. Also the human would probably use those tokens far more effectively and would not need as many. It's feels the same as someone installing a crypto miner on their servers in my mind. Abhorrent behavior.

aunty_helen 15 hours ago||
When compute poverty hits these big labs it’s all going to be the same. The ping pong tables and drinks fridges disappear.

The only thing they can hope for is to maintain momentum and critical mass long enough to find ways to pay for all this or have Moores law make the average user request become economical.

tomjuggler 13 hours ago||
LOL DeepSeek V4 just reduced their price to less than $1 per million tokens for Pro and people are worried about Claude
tabs_or_spaces 8 hours ago||
There's probably a few things to consider

* How much CPU/token usage does openclaw users use in general? Similarly, how much does high volume openclaw users use vs "normal" claude high volume users?

* Are there political elements we can't see that's affecting this? OpenClaw and anthropic doesn't have a good history in general and this is just a continuation of that?

Something I don't understand, there's a lot of complaints yet people are reluctant to stop using the service? Are folks already vendor locked or is it a case of "well, this doesn't seem to affect me?" The consumer behaviour of these complaints is very interesting.

jmward01 11 hours ago||
So it seems that Anthropic has a hidden list of special words that redirect billing without warning or disclosure. And when this is pointed out as a billing error they say they won't refund until it gets the HN treatment. If they can/will bill you differently based on actual use then it seems like how they determine that use is important to disclose right?
gizmodo59 9 hours ago||
There is really no reason to use Claude code anymore. Codex is much better with gpt 5.5. Not to mention, it’s open source, they play well with third parties, they don’t hold the model like mythos for elite companies, they have other good models like imagegen and I can use however the heck I want like openclaw.
tencentshill 11 hours ago|||
Another B2B win handed to Microsoft Copilot/Azure, just for being boring and consistent. It doesn't matter if your product is better if it's unreliable and inconsistent.
johanyc 9 hours ago||
Seriously why does Anthropic have so many shenanigans? I once wanted to try claude code coming from codex, but seeing these made me lose any appetite. Plus they are not open to the broader ecosystems like not reading .agents folder etc
sssilver 14 hours ago||
Who remembers the Google of Eric Schmidt and "Don't Be Evil"?

The truth is that it doesn't matter what companies say, what they claim, what they do, and what their CEO says/claims/does.

It's just a matter of time until the shareholders will get the right CEO to maximize shareholder value.

People in the comments who want a statement or a "reorientation" or a commitment from Anthropic leadership are missing the principles of how capitalism functions. Shareholder value cannot be compromised. In every battle between morality and profit, values and profit, public good and profit, ultimately all things will mutate into a state that enables profit to prevail. Always.

There are no exceptions to this.

avaer 8 hours ago||
It's hard for people to understand that often it's a choice between "do the right thing" or "pay the price" (literally).

Usually neither shareholders nor users are willing to pay the price.

gverrilla 9 hours ago||
> There are no exceptions to this.

Not in capitalism, indeed.

speedgoose 16 hours ago||
At least we can assume that Anthropic eats their own dog food. They use Claude to develop their software.
NitpickLawyer 15 hours ago|
You say that like it's a gotcha. I think the fact that they reached 2B/mo in revenue by dogfooding cc is all the proof that one needs that this thing actually works. In fact it works so well that more people want it than they can serve. For months now they've been having issues when EU and US tz are both online at the same time.
infamia 15 hours ago|||
> I think the fact that they reached 2B/mo in revenue by dogfooding cc is all the proof that one needs that this thing actually works.

That's a notable achievement, but let's have some balance... It's also responsible for the biggest self-own in software industry history by leaking their 1) crown jewels (i.e., source code) 2) the existence of their next model Mythos, and 3) their roadmap in a highly competitive market.

NitpickLawyer 15 hours ago||
Eh... I personally think that having the keypads to enter a DC running on DNS served by that same DC is a bit more self-owning than leaking the source code of an app, but I get your point. It's obviously not perfect, but it's also obviously working.

Let's put this in perspective. Imagine it's 3 years ago, April 2023. Chatgpt has been launched for 4 months. We've all been using it, and writing poems in parrot talk or whatever. Someone tells you "In 2 years time there will be an app that lets you use LLMs to write code. It will be coded by humans for 3 weeks, then by humans + LLMs for 6 months, and then by LLMs mostly unsupervised. One year after that, they'll be making 2B/mo out of that app". Would you believe them? Not even the most maximalist, overhypers, AI singularity frenzied crazy people would have said that. And yet... it happened.

claw-el 15 hours ago||||
Is the reason they reached 2B/mo partially contributed by the fact that their users feel like they get unlimited use of it? If ‘feeling like it is unlimited use’ is a huge part that creates the 2B/mo, this change of limit might jeopardize it.

That being said, Anthropic can be diverting capacity to train the next model, and if it is significantly better, people would start flocking back again.

PunchyHamster 9 hours ago||||
you could have more successful company if you took VC money and paid the users directly. Revenue doesn't matter if company is in the red
AstroBen 14 hours ago||||
Not really. A person will eventually drink dirty water if it was the only thing available in a desert.

There's very little competition for SOTA models. The models themselves also weren't built by Claude. The current revenue has almost nothing to do with what Claude built.

Hell if it was so far ahead then they wouldn't be desperately trying to block OpenCode.

NitpickLawyer 14 hours ago||
> The models themselves also weren't built by Claude. The current revenue has almost nothing to do with what Claude built.

Ummm, no. Anthropic is #1 in coding because they developed it first. Then they used data + signals to train models specifically to work best with cc. They work together. Why do you think every provider (including chinese ones) have their own harnesses? Having real-world data and usage metrics helps training the models in immense ways.

Having features fast in this case >>> having perfect features. Some of them they dropped along the way, but having them in the pair cc + models is what matters. People switched from Cursor to cc in droves because it worked better there. That's not a fluke. That's how you improve your models, by collecting real world data after you launch them.

> Hell if it was so far ahead then they wouldn't be desperately trying to block OpenCode.

That's a lack of compute problem.

MagicMoonlight 15 hours ago|||
Everything works until it doesn’t.

The problem with slop is, nobody understands it. Nobody ever designed it, nobody really knows how it works. You’re just putting blind faith in the slop you’ve shipped.

It lets you be very quick, but if you’ve accidentally compromised all your data or bank accounts through the slop then you won’t know until you’re destroyed.

pdyc 15 hours ago|
why do people want to continue to use anthropic despite their shitty service? its not like they have some kind of lock-in as it is still new company and it has shown its color before we are stuck with it unlike google/meta etc.
0xpiguy 15 hours ago||
Totally agree. This is why open source models and toolings are so important for the ecosystem. I would not want these companies decide what we can or cannot do.
AtNightWeCode 14 hours ago||
That's a great question. Maybe other services have flaws too.
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