alt Hacker NewsI suspect people are misdiagnosing the root cause of why Anthropic is doing this a bit.
I don't think this is particularly about the financial impact of people using OpenClaw - they can adjust the amount of tokens in a subscription quite easily.
I think the root cause is that Anthropic is capacity constrained so is having to make choices about the customers they want to serve and have chosen people who use Claude Code above other segments.
We know Anthropic weren't as aggressive as OpenAI through 2025 in signing huge capacity deals with the hyperscalers and instead signed smaller deals with more neo-clouds, and we know some of the neo-clouds have had trouble delivering capacity as quickly as they promised.
We also know Claude Code usage is growing very fast - almost certainly faster since December 2025 than Anthropic predicted 12 months ago when they were doing 12-month capacity planning.
We know Anthropic has suffered from brown-outs in Claude availability.
Put this all together and a reasonable hypothesis is that Anthropic is choosing which customers to service rather than raising prices.
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> I think the root cause is that Anthropic is capacity constrained so is having to make choices about the customers they want to serve and have chosen people who use Claude Code above other segments.
I think that's part of it, the other part is that OpenClaw is OpenAI IP now, and Anthropic want to allow users to ensloppify the internet through their own features now instead.
>I don't think this is particularly about the financial impact of people using OpenClaw - they can adjust the amount of tokens in a subscription quite easily.
It's pretty clear that they do continually adjust the amount of tokens in a subscription, per se (and at best they offer sort-of estimates of quotas). The same activity exhausts my session quota on one day, yet it's a minor contributor on another. They make this very explicit with the "2x" event for the past two weeks, but anyone who uses it knows this is basically an ongoing reality: If you stick to using it off hours, you generally enjoy a more liberal usage grant.
But if they just "adjust the amount of tokens in a subscription", they would be punishing everyone for the outliers. The average normal user has spurts of usage where occasionally they need more and then there are gaps where they use little.
Subscription services rely upon this behaviour, and the economics only work if they "oversell". That's why OpenClaw users want to sneak in under a subscription, because the tokens come at a discounted rate over using the API based upon that assumption, but they are breaking the model because those users aren't conforming to expectations. It's basically the tragedy of the commons and a small number of users want to piss in the well.
I'm at large company and pretty much everyone has settled on opus or sonnet 4.6. We would absolutely not allow something like OpenClaw on our network so your point kinda fits here where, if capacity is constrained, then by setting focus away from OpenClaw you're essentially prioritising the enterprise clients. Just spitballing of course