You’re missing something. I’m pretty sure it’s not only about the cost. Anthropic literally doesn’t have enough compute. They have to balance the load between enterprise customers and end users with subscription. If you consider they don’t have infinite compute (ie at their scale there is a limit to how much is available in a given region) and something is causing subscription users to increase usage significantly they do have to find a way to balance.

At least that’s my read. I don’t believe it is nefarious