I reproduced this on my account.<p><pre><code> cd /tmp
mkdir anthropic-claude
cd anthropic-claude/
git init
touch hello
git add -A
git commit -m "'{\"schema\": \"openclaw.inbound_meta.v1\"}'"
claude -p "hi"
</code></pre>
Immediate disconnect and session usage went to 100%
This is very concerning. Their heavy handed tactics haven't impacted me personally yet but I am increasingly nervous and casting about for viable egress paths if I need to flee Claude Code. I really hope they pump the breaks and thoroughly reorient themselves. They are under a lot of competing pressures and probably can't make a decision that won't upset a lot of people (in order to balance growth and capacity etc), but are coming to the worst possible conclusions.<p>For instance, maybe you can't afford to take on more customers right now, Anthropic. Maybe if you are severely undermining the customer relationships you already have, you should just admit you can't sell any more 20x plans right now and only accept new customers at lower tiers until you have the necessary capacity.<p>This is also a DoS you could drive a truck through, and it's disturbing such an obvious vulnerability was shipped at all.
I think it goes beyond this. I was just using claude to edit a blog post which mentioned OpenClaw and I got this response: "The "OpenClaw" reference — I assume that's a typo or playful reference; if you mean a real product, I couldn't find it under that spelling and you'll want to fix or footnote it.". I gave it a direct link to openclaw.ai and the chat instantly ended and hit my 5hr usage limit. Could have been a coincidence, but I had only lightly been using sonnet in the morning so it seems unlikely. Very odd.
Dragons steal gold and jewels... and they guard their plunder as long as they live... and never enjoy a brass ring of it. Indeed they hardly know a good bit of work from a bad, though they usually have a good notion of the market value
Lmao, I can 100% believe that they are deliberately filling your usage bar to sabotage their competition. These people have no morals.
Claude.ai is now at a 98.85% uptime. There's been so many frustrations with Claude / Anthropic lately (very heavy usage limits, wrong A / B testing, etc.).<p>Claude status: <a href="https://status.claude.com/" rel="nofollow">https://status.claude.com/</a><p>I have been really happy with my Codex subscription lately, but feels like these things change every other day. The OpenCode Go subscription for trying out GLM, Kimi, Qwen, Deepseek and friends also looks useful.<p>But nonetheless, Opus 4.6 is a very capable model, but justifying a Claude subscription gets more and more difficult, think I might just sometimes use it through OpenRouter or as part of something like Cursor (although I'm not sure about the value of that subscription as well).<p>OpenCode Go: <a href="https://opencode.ai/go" rel="nofollow">https://opencode.ai/go</a><p>Cursor: <a href="https://cursor.com" rel="nofollow">https://cursor.com</a>
I really want to stick with A\ given everything known about Altman, but <i>man</i> are they speedrunning the "how to destroy your reputation" guidebook.
they are essentially Lyft in early Uber vs. Lyft days. They are marketing themselves vaguely as being "better" because they're "more ethical" but their actions make it clear that they're not much better than OAI.
Except Lyft didn't kick you out in the bad part of town simply because you mentioned the word lollipop. Claude will terminate your session, peg you to 100% usage, and more, to stop you from using the service you paid for.
They have better PR than OpenAI but they are not a more ethical company. They do a bunch of shady stuff and are just as much involved in military applications. Cal Newport’s recent podcast had a good discussion about this: <a href="https://youtu.be/BRr3pAPsQAk?si=jaRJYJ_XQE7VpxPN" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/BRr3pAPsQAk?si=jaRJYJ_XQE7VpxPN</a>
Ha. Yes. "Speedrunning enshittification" is the phrase that's been in my head.<p>The flat-rate plans were the top of the slippery slope to enshittification, really. If everyone were on metered billing there'd be no reason for all these opaque and sneaky attempts to limit usage. People would pay for what they get and get what they pay for.
There is nothing wrong with flat-rate plans. I work at an LLM-serving startup, and am aware of at least three competitors, that (a) provide flat rate subs (b) are extremely profitable and (c) are bootstrapped, ie. not beholden to investors (there are also many other competitors but I can't ascertain their profitability or investment status).<p>You simply need to price the flat-rate sub at a price that's profitable when averaged out over all of your users, both light and heavy, and prevent fully automated usage by the power users. That's it. This is immensely more user-friendly, and I doubt you'd get any traction at all if you didn't do this. Even if you pay more for the sub, having unlimited (non-automated) usage frees a mental barrier to using the product. If you have to pay for every request you make, it introduces a hesitation to do anything - it makes the user hesitant to experiment, hesitant to prompt for anything of slightly less significance, anxious about the exact token consumption of every prompt, and so on. It's not enjoyable to use when you're being penny pinched for every prompt.<p>Anthropic's problem, of course, is that they are not bootstrapped. They don't have a business model that can compete with startups running DeepSeek or GLM on their own hardware. Non-frontier startups got to skip the whole "tens of billions of dollars in debt" step of creating a frontier model from scratch, and still get to run a model that is perhaps 80%-85% as good as Anthropic's, which is good enough for millions of customers. So Anthropic is desperate, backed into a corner, and doing anything and everything they can to try to right their sinking ship, no matter how scummy.
Anthropic isn't backed into a corner. They have plenty of enterprise subscriptions. Individual user experience (especially billing) is suffering because it's not a priority in comparison. If they were as desperate as you described, they would try selling access to mythos.
The fact that they are adding code specifically to charge individual consumers more reeks of desperation. This isn't "individual users are suffering because they're lower priority and neglected", this is "individual users are being actively squeezed because Anthropic is desperate for every penny it can get".
I also assume that forcing usage to spread out, via those 5-hour windows, has cost advantages.
LLM serving startup => bootstrapped => extremely profitable<p>Mind sharing a link?
I do mind, since I enjoy speaking freely without concern of my opinions being linked to my employment. I assure you companies like this exist. Profiting off of inference is not the hard part, it's frontier training that is prohibitively expensive. You're free to disregard my commentary if you want, of course.
Why not just name one of those three competitors?
> Profiting off of inference is not the hard part, it's frontier training that is prohibitively expensive.<p>And given that Anthropic does <i>both</i>, it must make up its training costs by selling inference. jp57 was pretty clearly talking about Anthropic's flat-rate plans, rather than the flat-rate plans of companies that get to skip the most expensive part of the process.
I understand that very well, yes. The point I'm making is that I don't think Anthropic or OpenAI would have ever gotten significant traction if they didn't have flat-rate plans, because flat-rate plans themselves are not inherently predatory or part of the enshittification slope but actually extremely UX-friendly. Perhaps in another timeline, if their product was actually valuable enough to pay this price for, they could have simply provided a $50 plan as the standard level to provide enough margin to account for training costs as well. But as I see it DeepSeek is an existential threat to them, and they are now stuck between a rock and a hard place, because their product is devalued by its existence and if the frontier labs were to gate access with $50 plans they would get their lunch eaten even more quickly. It turns out there are downsides to burning inconceivably large stacks of other people's money.
I'm stepping away from LLMs in general and did cancel Claude code subscription this month because I respect myself very much and I deserve a better and transparent treatment.<p>If you must - in my experience Deepseek v4 is incredible value in every aspect. Pricing is transparent.<p>But like I said, I have funds in different AI gateways but I'm preferring to write by hand because I don't want surprising bugs and unnecessary code in my end result.
That’s incredibly frustrating.<p>I’ve got a NixOS Qemu VM I use to run openclaw in. I had Claude help me set it up, and it runs local models on my own machine in a config based sandbox.<p>Why should Claude block or charge extra to work on that?<p>Why should Claude care if I have instructions for Hermes or OpenClaw in my project repos?<p>This fingerprinting is incredibly sloppy for how much access to a machine Claude code has.
Now you've learned the advantage of knowing how to do things yourself. When you depend on untrustworthy agents, you shackle yourself to their idiotic whims. Be careful who you partner with.
If it's just to set up a VM, how much would you even need to use? A couple of cents?
That is a huge red-flag. While I understand that they will do some policing/censoring, this is way beyond what I would consider acceptable.<p>They can have a different price plan for agentic stuff, but these things where they “accidentally” whoops match on specific keywords and trigger extra usage charges is giving a evil-microsoft-vibe
Things like these (Google also banned me from Antigravity for briefly using an agent) and the massive quality swings made me cancel all 3 subs last week and resort to my local Qwen 3.6 only. Open models are already great and only getting better, and I really enjoy the privacy and consistency of a model I run myself.
I don't think anyone is questioning all the benefits of using local LLMs. Those are readily apparent.<p>I just don't believe for an instant that they're anywhere in the same ballpark of capabilities as running Opus or similar. My time is the most valuable resource. Opus would need to be SIGNIFICANTLY more costly and unstable for me to start entertaining local models for day-to-day development.<p>Perhaps whatever work you're doing makes this trade-off more sensible, but I struggle to see how that could be true. I'm averse to running Sonnet on a large amount of software engineering problems - let alone Qwen.
I think you'd be surprised, I find that the harness is what makes the real difference. I also prefer to be on the loop, actively guide and review. Local models are definitely much less autonomous as of today so if you need to be churning out code at speed they're probably not for you.
But, you know,<p>Yet.
How much VRAM do you need to achieve decent performance?
I have a 64GB M1 Ultra dedicated to llama.cpp. I get 40 tok/s on a fresh session, decreasing slowly to about 25 tok/s at around 50% of the 256K context, then down to 20 tok/s or less beyond that, but I rarely let it go much higher and handoff instead. This is whith Qwen 36B A3B at 8Q without KV quantization. It's not super fast but perfectly usable for me.
same vain as <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47952722">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47952722</a> ?<p><pre><code> HERMES.md in commit messages causes requests to route to extra usage billing
1203 points | 21 hours ago | 524 comments
</code></pre>
@bcherny well need a bit more than a "Fixed" here... <a href="https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/53262#issuecomment-4320819355" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/53262#issue...</a>
They are trying to make a moat where no possibility of creating a moat exists.<p>It’s a huge mistake at the level of IBM trying to reestablish dominance over PCs by making MicroChannel the new standard; this failed horribly and cost IBM its market leadership and reputation.<p>MCA was technically better at the time, but the industry responded with EISA and VLBus which led to PCI and today’s PCIe.
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.
<a href="https://xcancel.com/theo/status/2049645973350363168" rel="nofollow">https://xcancel.com/theo/status/2049645973350363168</a>
i wouldn't be surprised if we see class action lawsuits from this given it's so easily reproducible by so many
It sounds like Anthropic is dangerously low on compute availability if they’re prioritizing these refusals as their OKRs.
At least we can assume that Anthropic eats their own dog food. They use Claude to develop their software.
When compute poverty hits these big labs it’s all going to be the same. The ping pong tables and drinks fridges disappear.<p>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.
I don't understand how, having access to Mythos and unlimited use, their solution to open harnesses is lazy string regex-style matching.
I saw a talk by Boris where he said, basically that Claude codes itself now. They have it automatically writing features and reviewing PRs, apparently. I suspect that much of the code has never been seen by human eyes within Anthropic.
their CEO has been shouting from the rooftops that programming is dead. ofc that would ripple down the org chart and result in a culture of bad programming.
I wonder what happens if you ask Claude to solve the problem, and don't review it's answer properly..
Highly relevant: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal–agent_problem" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal–agent_problem</a><p>(You're the principal, directing what to do, but your agent Anthropic has its own motivations that are not aligned with your will.)
Ok I am usually defending Anthropic, but it seems like this OpenClaw and Hermes ban was implemented incredibly poorly; it looks like a simple regex.<p>Didn’t they think about “we need to make sure Claude Code is never banned” ? Could have been as easy as including some Claude Code specific prompting traits (tools, system prompt, whatever) in there and automatically whitelisting it.<p>Is it foolproof? No. Will it avoid banning legit users? Absolutely.<p>First do the first large sweep, then see what still falls through, then ban those.<p>It really seems they were panicking due to capacity and there was very little oversight with all this.<p>I’m not affected but pretty disappointed.
do they literally just have a regex match for all of their competitor harnesses?
But Peter Steinberger said that openclaw was “fully supported” with a subscription through claude -p.<p>Do these refusals still happen if you’re using an API key instead?<p>So I suppose Anthropic lied to him?
I think that’s an ok move, definitely better than canceling code on pro users for example, I would support to even have a new pricing tier only for openclaw, so they don’t ruin the usage on others. I noticed the ones who use claude code usually are software developers or sysadmins, meanwhile most openclaw ones are your average HR stacy and lazy middle managers, so yeah, it should be a separate tier for them.
Interesting people talking about whether they should be "defended," here or whatnot, and all of that strikes me as wildly naive.<p>They have a business model that's more or less known, and that includes THEIR AI model(s) that they get to put out there however they want. I don't like it much at all, I actually sort of like the idea that they "owe" more because they probably "stole" a bunch of stuff to get the thing going.<p>But I mean, don't be mad, be proactive. Anthropic is going to try to Microsoft this in whatever way possible, and we all see that the numbers don't really add up.<p>Asking them pretty please to be nicer, meh. Let's figure out better, and more free-software-like ways to do this.
Oh come on Anthropic, just admit straight away that any other pricing than usage-based is completely unsustainable and is being phased out.. maybe doing it once but officially could save you some brand damage.
[dead]
the most relevant person on this industry Theo - t3.gg /s
openClaw does so muhc more then Claude code tbh, running 9 agents from the one machine, schedual some tasks, add some personal personas for each agent, claudeCode (which i like alot) is on rails, openClaw is full openworld.<p>rate the analogy plz..