you can write automated MCP tools that run within claude code, and could theoretically generate as high a load as any other automated/3rd party agent. You can also do loops that burn tokens incredibly fast. This is allowed with no caveats (I use MCP's basically to test what I'd like to try with the API...) So this explanation just seems a lil hollow.
When you can’t enforce everything at once, you go where the most acute problems are. I imagine when your MCP avenue of abuse catches on—like this other category of harnesses did—to such a scale as to become a problem impacting us folk trying to go about our business… when that’s where the problems shift, I imagine (and hope) Anthropic will crack down on that vector too. To keep the service usable for us ordinary meatbags.
I’m glad they give us the leeway to experiment, and I’m also glad they weed the garden from time to time. To switch metaphors, I’m deeply frustrated when my very modest, commuter-grade use gets run off the figurative highway by figurative hot-rodders. It’s been extra-529y this week, and it’s about time they reined it in a little.
You’re always welcome to pay-as-you-go for as many tokens as you’d like to burn on their infrastructure… or to compute against any of the wide array of ever-improving open models on commodity compute providers…
While you can write an automated tool to consume all their tokens, I strongly suspect most users, like myself, are not doing that. So even if Anthropic loses money on a power user, they profit overall and keep public sentiment high by not alienating users with restrictions. It's an optimization problem of making a profit off the average used while staying low enough to attract customers, even if that means some users cost more than they pay.
More users spinning up OpenClaw means that balance starts to shift towards more users maxing their tokens, thus the average increases, so I think their explanation makes sense still.
Anthropic is much more concerned about what people are ACTUALLY doing than what they could, in theory, be doing.
Yes, but very few people are actually doing that compared to OpenClaw. If everyone else was doing that, they'd be cracking down on it too.