There are multiple reasons why this makes sense for Anthropic

- The intention of subscriptions, as anywhere, is a combination of trying to promote brand loyalty, and the gym membership model of getting people to pay for oversubscribed resources that many will never use. As the parent noted, people maxxing out their allowed usage, for whatever reason, are not the most profitable customers, and in this case probably not profitable at all

- OpenClaw is now owned by a competitor, OpenAI, and Anthropic are trying to compete in this space

https://www.semafor.com/article/04/03/2026/anthropic-eyes-it...

- Anthropic are capacity constrained, having sensibly chosen to err on the side of safety (not going bankrupt), and are now trying to do the best they can to manage that.

Presumably they might be acting differently if they had capacity to spare, but even then helping a competitor to build market share in a potentially lucrative segment doesn't make strategic sense.

I do wonder about the wisdom of Anthropic promoting usage-maxxing development patterns such as running a dozen agents in parallel ... maybe not the wisest thing to do when capacity constrained! It would make more sense to promote usage at night with low priority "batch jobs" rather than encourage people to increase usage during periods of maximum demand.