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anonym29yesterday at 8:07 PM5 repliesview on HN

I've said it before and I'll say it again.

The people mad about this feel they are entitled to the heavily subsidized usage in any context they want, not in the context explicitly allowed by the subsidizer.

It's kind of like a new restaurant started handing out coupons for "90% off", wanting to attract diners to the restaurant, customers started coming in and ordering bulk meals then immediately packaging them in tupperware containers and taking it home (violating the spirit of the arrangement, even if not the letter of the arrangement), so the restaurant changed the terms on the discount to say "limited to in-store consumption only, not eligible for take-home meals", and instead of still being grateful that they're getting food for 90% off, the cheapskate customers are getting angry that they're no longer allowed to exploit the massive subsidy however they want.

Anthropic has every right to place rules around their generous subsidization of the Claude subscription plans, which give limits of ~8-12x as many tokens as you'd get for the same expenditure in the PAYG API.

That said, demanding an open source repo remove information that Anthropic openly publishes and distributes for free (the prompt) is a bit odd...


Replies

cedwsyesterday at 8:12 PM

This argument has been decapitated countless times already on HN. Anthropic already enforce usage limits for everyone. If those limits are higher than what they want users to actually consume, that's Anthropic's problem.

This move is anti-competitive and Anthropic knows it. They're hurriedly trying to lock the gates and lay landmines behind everyone after a massive surge of new subscribers so that they're stuck using Claude Code. They see it as vital to their survival to not just to be the gas pump for tokens, they need to control the platform.

show 4 replies
noemityesterday at 8:21 PM

I must be alone in this but I don't think its heavily subsidized. I see their models as really overpriced. No way they cost that much. Could they really?

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benayesterday at 8:21 PM

Which I'm sure people would have more sympathy for if the restaurant wasn't robbing Sysco to make their food in the first place.

sifexyesterday at 8:30 PM

Except to me, the argument is like a customer bringing their own plate to eat off of, and the restaurant then sues the customer and demands that no restaurant can ever be allowed to use that customers plate.

Opencode to a lot of people is a nicer and more feature rich harness than CC, it doesn’t consume any more tokens than CC, and if it did, the bounds of how many tokens each account is allowed to use is tied to the users payment and rate limits.