alt Hacker NewsAdditional information from Google employee https://x.com/_mohansolo/status/2025766889205739899 :
"We’ve been seeing a massive increase in malicious usage of the Anitgravity backend that has tremendously degraded the quality of service for our users. We needed to find a path to quickly shut off access to these users that are not using the product as intended. We understand that a subset of these users were not aware that this was against our ToS and will get a path for them to come back on but we have limited capacity and want to be fair to our actual users."
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My fascination with local LLMs has waxed and waned over the past year or so. And then something like this comes along and it waxes again mightily. ;-)
It's a bit leftfield for sure, but "malicious"?
While I see the point of limited capacity, it also shows that Google did not plan for rate limiting / throttling of high usage customers. This is ALWAYS the problem with flatrate pricing models. 2% of your customers burn 80+% of your capacity. Did see that in former times with DSL, not too long ago with mobile and now with AI subscriptions. If you want to provide a "good" service for all customers better implement (and not only write in your T&Cs) a fair usage model which (fairly) penalises heavy users.
Good on them that they want to provide a way to bring back customers on board that were burned / surprised by their move.
BUT: The industry is missing a significant long term revenue opportunity here. There obviously is latent demand and Claws have a great product market fit. Why on earth would you deactivate customers that show high usage? Inform them that you have another product (API keys) for them and maybe threaten with throttling. But don't throw them overboard! Find a solution that makes commercial sense for both sides (security from API bill shock for the customer / predictable token usage for the provider).
What we're seeing right now is the complete opposite. Ban customers that might even rely on their account. Feels like the accountants have won this round - but did not expect the PR backlash and possible Streisand effect...
> will get a path for them to come back on
That's not what support has been telling their $250 a month customers.
we are unable to reverse the suspension [1]
I get the need to move fast to stabilise the service but similar to an outage it doesn't take much to put a banner on the support page to let customers know bans are temporary until they can come up with a better way of educating customers. Further more it doesn't much to instruct ban appeal teams to tell customers all bans are under review no matter what the reason is to buy them time to separate Claw bans from legitimate abuse bans that need to be upheld.
The fact that users are paying $250 for a service they can't use for at least the last 11 days kills any sympathy I had that Google needed "quickly shut off access", it's like they just sat on their hands until the social media storm hit flash-point.
After 11 days there still isn't even an official statement, just a panicked tweet from a dev likely also getting hammered on socials, goodness knows how long before accounts are restored and credits issued.
Even the original Google employee in the forum thread just ghosted everyone there after the initial "we're looking into it".
> We understand that a subset of these users were not aware that this was against our ToS and will get a path for them to come back on but we have limited capacity and want to be fair to our actual users.
It feels like a good default for this would be something similar to video game bans: where you get a "vacation" from the service with a clear reason for why that is, but can return to using it later. Given how much people depend on cloud services, permanent bans for what could be honest mistakes or not knowing stuff would be insane.