alt Hacker NewsAt this point everyone doing these kind of flows (using claws or any other flows that run agents in a loop 24/7) using any kind of subscription-based billing for inference must be aware they're on borrowed time.
Enough people have gone over the economics - you're costing OpenAI/Anthropic money, potentially a lot of money, so it's inevitable that sooner or later that particular party will come to an end.
Having said that, doing it by running a regex on your prompts to look for keywords is a bit loose
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I don't get it though. Why not just revise the billing so that if users are hitting the servers above some defined frequency, they get charged more?
I'm tired of this startup-adjacent mindset that promotes endless adversarial scamming. I absolutely think people should be able to run OpenClaw or whatever harnesses they want, but I also think they should pay in some proportion to usage rather than trying to exploit an all-you-can-eat buffet offer to stock their own catering business.
The demo above uses the prompt "hi". The openclaw string is in the git history, which Claude goes looking for.
The only reasonable thing to do if you care about the longevity of your workflow is to build it around open-weight models.
If you choose to not be able to get work done without Claude you're at the mercy of whatever they want.
Oh it's way worse than people realize. The monthly vs api keys is a huge issue for them. They will have to end monthly subscription plans. You can pay $20 a month and use $10k in api tokens. They are in all out panic trying to fix this. But yes, the house of cards is ending.
The company ending part is when they have to cut the $20 a month plan and take things away. They are creating a massive group of coders that can't code - soon to have no way to code. This cohort will rampage through all social forums.
They can just do token caps. But they don't want to do that because "infinite" sells better.
We all get the "realpolitik" of it. That doesn't mean anthropic just gets to ignore the contract they signed. Well it does as long as you're fighting the fight for them before it even gets to anthropic.