Could this be legally construed as anti-competitive behavior?
Edit: I asked Claude. It replied:
> Consumer protection / deceptive practices. In the EU this would be a clear UCPD (Unfair Commercial Practices Directive) issue and potentially a DSA violation. In the US, FTC Act §5 prohibits "unfair or deceptive acts." Selling a product that secretly performs worse than advertised for a commercially self-serving reason, without disclosure, is textbook deception. The Samsung/Apple battery throttling cases are instructive here: Apple faced regulatory action across multiple jurisdictions specifically because users weren't told.
> Competition law. This is where "anti-competitive" gets complicated. Refusing to help competitors build competing products via your ToS is generally legal — you can decide who you license to. But covertly sabotaging output quality for a class of users while charging them full price crosses into different territory. Under EU competition law (Article 102 TFEU), if a company with dominant market position uses covert technical means to disadvantage competitors, that's closer to abusive conduct than a legitimate ToS restriction.
I think either you've prompted Claude misleadingly, or it's interpreting the law unnecessarily prissily (which is a failure mode I've noticed LLMs falling into).
This clearly is disclosed, otherwise how did we get to know about it?
Anthropic’s behavior reeks of insecurity. Imagine Google taking elaborate measures to prevent you from searching about search engine development!