If it's that big of a problem to you, you're free to just... not use the freebie?
It's not a freebie, it still requires a subscription and burns tokens twice as fast as Opus.
Then you better not complain how expensive it is to use (Just like the other companies are doing) or the next time Claude goes down then.
Anthropic does not care about us and isn't going to talk to you either and will extract from you as much as possible.
The true answer is local models.
It’s an interesting thing to bring up because it’s this classic thing we’ve seen for decades now.
The ramifications go beyond the individual which is why I assume they mentioned it. They don’t need to use it/not use it for it to have interesting implications.