alt Hacker NewsA lot of the comments here are reacting to the censorship aspect, which is obviously an important point. But the more interesting subtext to me is that I feel like this gives insight into the situation within the company. I'm assuming they wouldn't do something like this unless the recent load issues (mostly driven by OpenClaw usage) were seen as an existential threat. So I'm guessing that's how the leadership views their current situation. Between OpenClaw and their (probably inaccurate) capacity planning, they simply can't onboard any more consumer users. In other words, things are going to get worse before they get better. Anthropic has taken drastic measures because their service is about to implode.
The irony of course is that the way they've gone about reacting to this has damaged their brand so badly at the trust level that the public view of their company has completely flipped. They also seem strangely oblivious to this side of things.
Their approach has also been bizarrely chaotic. Banning then restoring OpenClaw usage. Removing Claude Code from the Pro plan, then re-enabling it and claiming it was an A/B test. Honestly my read is that Dario has a weak leadership style within the company where he either doesn't give enough specific guidance to his reports or overreaches with reactionary instructions.
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> recent load issues (...) were seen as an existential threat
I wouldn't be so sure. Don't overestimate people competence.
For me it all looked like picking the highest ROI item in attempt to fix their reliability without putting too much thought how to do it gracefully. So they just hacked it and we see the results
> The irony of course is that the way they've gone about reacting to this has damaged their brand so badly at the trust level that the public view of their company has completely flipped.
No one at my company gives a single shit about Openclaw, so this whole situation has been a noop for a lot more of the public than you seem to think.
Also, "censorship"? How is disallowing a specific tool that abuses a subscription "censorship"?
Everything I’ve heard about the company tells me they are obsessed about exponential growth. It might seem bad to make a change that loses you 10% of your users, but if those are your least profitable users and the rest of your userbase is growing 200% per month, why does it matter?
> I'm assuming they wouldn't do something like this unless the recent load issues (mostly driven by OpenClaw usage) were seen as an existential threat.
I think another possibility is that they are trying to shift the burden of OpenClaw to their competitors.