alt Hacker NewsOk. Someone explain to me why they would f themselves this hard with software engineers when they are absolutely winning. This just seems like a bad move.
Is it infrastructure? Are they unable to control costs?
Everyone else is spending like money is water to try to get adoption. Claude has it and is dialing back utility so that its most passionate users will probably leave.
I don’t understand this move.
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"Adoption" like 2000's internet companies losing money on every sale to get market share?
For SaaS, use the SaaS API. For product, use the product.
They subsidize the product with "don't care how much" pricing so they have users to build out features without users worrying about cost. If it's not actual users using the product, then features will be built in OpenClaw instead of Claude.
The earlier they draw this line, the better.
However, announcing it the day before it is effective is a huge unforced error, even if it were just a consequence of the TOS. They gain nothing by making people scramble.
Also better to announce at the same new ways to support plugging in to Claude Code - something to encourage integration/cooperation. No fences unless the field inside is flowering.
They have so much mindshare right now that they can’t lose, and the number of users that use opencode and would be affected is miniscule—-on the level of complaining about your online bank not supporting Konqueror.
Honestly I suspect they're just getting ready to release a new feature for autonomous usage. I mean it was one of the leaked feature toggles. If I'm right it'll likely mean we'll get an announcement within the next 2 weeks for "long running prompts/agents"
I mean, it is easy to understand once you realise that there is no spoon.
Despite their power, frontier models are threatened by open-source equivalents. If AGI is not on the horizon and model performance is likely not going to be enough of a differentiator to keep the momentum going, the only other way is to go horizontal - enterprise solutions, proprietary coding agent harnesses, market capture, etc.
If AGI is in sight, none of these short-term games really matter. You just need to race ahead.
They have plenty of high paying users that will soak up what the claws are consuming in capacity. They are thinking about those customers and delivering them a better experience
Openclaw users are a small percentage of their user base but take up a lot of their compute. Given the cost is subsidized it’s not surprising they would target it. Getting these users to leave is probably the point. These aren’t profitable users.