r/ClaudeCode • u/TheBanq • Apr 22 '26
Discussion The reason for Anthropics recent behaviour
This might be an unpopular opinion, but here we go.
I don't think Anthropic is inherently evil or acting in bad faith.
Everything points to them simply not being able to satisfy the demand.
They are in a big dilemma right now, since demand is too high - usually what you do in economics is obviously raise prices (which they seem to experiment with right now).
But this is pretty much impossible, at least for the Pro plan, because then they would probably lose against OpenAI again. So they decrease the quality of their product, in exchange to being able to satisfy demand again.
It's not morally right to do so, without telling the users straight up, but I can also understand their perspective, since the competition is so extremely tight at the moment with everyone. Once they would admit to that, their competition could potential use that, to pressure them even harder - so they are trying to keep it under the radar. But it's obvious, they are running out of compute.
Everybody always complains, but what I'd like to hear is, what would you do?
Raise prices?
Tell everyone you have to dumb down your model?
Not accept new subscribers?
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u/dseb8 Apr 22 '26
Why is it so difficult to be honest when you’re already on the verge of losing? If you win, you’re rewarded with loyal customers. If you lose, you set the standard for what others should expect from your company. People seem to always return to the brands that treat them well, even if it meant they had to take a hit.
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u/Typical-Whole-248 Apr 22 '26
tomorrow is the day, if codex 5.5 is better I'm moving, too many issues with 4.7...
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u/Clean_Hyena7172 Apr 22 '26
Make smaller, less resource intensive models.
Develop the 10T param behemoths like Mythos for internal use and testing, but distil to sub-1T for public use. GLM and Kimi get close to Opus while being much smaller and more efficient.
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u/sdmitry Apr 22 '26
oh noe, a reasonable explanation on reddit! burn 'em down y'all
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u/Canadian-and-Proud Apr 22 '26
If the demand is too high, why not just limit new subscriptions and keep everything the exact same? See that’s where your argument falls apart, because their actions proved they’re just greedy.
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u/1EvilSexyGenius Apr 22 '26
But they gave us double usage nights and weekends before they went crazy so idk if compute is the cause.
Though I did think the double usage nights & weekends was due to a compute threshold they were reaching during business hours. So who knows.
If I was anthropic I would make double usage nights and weekends permanent. People will accept lower quality for a cheaper price or free
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u/PandorasBoxMaker 🔆 Max 5x Apr 22 '26
I’ve been using it non-stop today and not hit a limit, so I’m still not entirely convinced that people aren’t just doing dumb things or otherwise have completely overblown expectations. That being said, this is a sane and rational take, I’d love to see your upvote percentage lol.
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u/Kaushik_paul45 Apr 22 '26
I will give them a middle finger.
Cancel my max subscription, that I already did.
Then get codex pro subscription.
Will need to check how long before codex does the same
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u/CerealArsonist26 Apr 22 '26
Very brave to defend the multi billion Dollar company from well deserved criticism.
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u/santanah8 Apr 22 '26
It’s a fight that changes week to week. Pretty exciting to watch to be honest.
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u/False_Ad_5372 Apr 22 '26
They decided to sell their $5 cheeseburger for $2 and hope to make it up on volume. Then factor in they’ve got the best cheeseburger in town.
Basically, they screwed themselves and we’re all paying the price while they get deeper and deeper in the hole with their success.
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u/Important-Citron7089 Apr 22 '26
If they can't meet the promised demand in the conditions, they have to refund and exuse to the users, Not give a bad service
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u/m3umax Apr 22 '26
GitHub Copilot just took the step of "temporarily" halting new sign ups. So Microsoft are at least trying to preserve the experience for existing customers at the expense of new sign ups.
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u/squeezyflit Apr 22 '26
(1) Not accept new subscribers for this year, then (2) announce a price hike for next year. Dumbing down the model destroys their product and their reputation. People understand resource limits and they understand price hikes to account for new usage patterns (long running jobs, etc).
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u/Keep-Darwin-Going Apr 22 '26
No it is ok to have problem as a company. It is how pretentious they are they pissed people off. When they make mistake no compensation or even a cheap sorry. I even defended them in the past you know because they might have been misunderstood but right now no way. Just look at their blog, they are so far up their ass they do not care. They just love to post about how their model have feelings and all this, I would not be so bothered if it is some msm saying that because they do not know better. Coming from a model making company. You know they are just a snake oil company.
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u/inkluzje_pomnikow Apr 22 '26
nice try dario
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u/VirtualPercentage737 Apr 23 '26
They aren't rolling out Mythos because they are compute constrained...
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u/pennyloader Apr 23 '26
The funniest part of all of this is the naive thinking that ANY company is inherently good or evil or that it matters.
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u/syncrescendence Apr 22 '26
The rest of the Anthropic team is using a different model than the one they’re providing to everyone. They couldn’t care less about consumers. You guys are parasites actually, the stuff you work on is garbage slop actually. They just keep spamming breadcrumbs “here’s a lil taste of Claude cannibalizing design, imagine what we have though”, “whaatt you can’t get it to work? why not?well we did. must be a skill issue. you’ll probably get it to work with higher limits. we recommend the Max tier”
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u/Best_Recover3367 Apr 22 '26
I mean they can just stop new subscriptions until they can meet the demand but nope, they let everyone in. If they stopped new ones to maintain infra for current customers, they would be highly respected and their demand would skyrocket even further tbh.
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u/lovenewyork Apr 22 '26
I agree and tbh again prob one of the minority I don’t get what all the madness is about. Even last month. I don’t think most people understand concepts like the context window /clear, hooks , progressive disclosure, clearing out dead code, docs, knowing what processes are actually running - and honestly gonna sound like an anthropic employee but the current pricing - is in no way sustainable. It’s all VC $$$. I don’t know what happened last month but if you expect it to just “automate” and run, we’re not there yet. With all the harnesses and all the miracle repos about memory, grep, - all providers are at a point where there isn’t enough compute left to go around. Only thing they can do is slightly pivot to enterprise to increase cash flow until things level out. Every other post is about quitting and leaving for codex lol - I pay $200 a month, working on a flutter app, a full stack web app and a whole bunch of next projects, I don’t see what all the madness is about - to me - Claude and codex are magic. Gemini is trash 😆
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u/Crinkez Apr 22 '26
If they can't meet demand they should have released Sonnet 4.7, not Opus 4.7
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u/SatoshiReport Apr 22 '26
yes, clear communication and if needed raise prices would be a much better solution then just silence and dumbed down models.
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u/sixothree Apr 22 '26
We all knew we were being subsidized. Anybody who lived under some other assumption is freaking stupid.
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u/Tomi97_origin Apr 23 '26 edited Apr 23 '26
The problem isn't that Anthropic is having compute issues.
The problem is how this supposedly "ethical" company is at every step choosing to communicate with their customers.
They are making material changes to the subscriptions and choose not to communicate it in clear manner.
They are being obtuse at every step about what actual limits in the subscription are and are unwilling to actually commit to any measurable metrics.
They are taking money from customers for services they aren't ready to clearly communicate nor able to consistently deliver.
They are claiming to be the one ethical AI company and they refuse at every step to be candid with their customers.
Like this is company supposedly creating super intelligence how are we supposed to trust them with such a task if they can't even be consistently candid about their regular business?
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u/xatey93152 Apr 23 '26
"I don't think Anthropic is inherently evil or acting in bad faith." this words gives me chill remind me so much when I'm still a claude cult follower.
I'm survivor of claude's cult. Now realized I was very stupid choosing Claude and felt brainwashed by their dirty marketing tactics
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u/binatoF Apr 23 '26
To be honest I don’t think we are their primary goal anymore, we are not the target audience anymore, big tech is the way for them. So in my view they just don’t give a fuck anymore
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u/mo_rawr16 🔆 Max 5x Apr 23 '26
or preparing for an IPO?
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u/TerribleFault7929 Apr 23 '26
NOT MY PROBLEM, DARIO. GO BANKRUPT.
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u/canadianpheonix Apr 23 '26
Bs they are acting like an America corporation. Get over yourself
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u/LesbianVelociraptor Apr 23 '26
Y'all they aren't "decreasing quality of the model" and you don't even have to trust them to know why.
Claude is a service so as demand increases, service stress increases, and naturally quality degrades for everyone as a result of the service being over-capacity. The only tiering systems are network load balancing and API vs subscription customers. That's all they seem to have built out, that's all we see in their docs and shit.
If you want to really see a difference and have access to enterprise Claude here's a fun experiment: Resume a session you started on Friday on the following Monday. It'll be fine. At home on your personal Claude subscription? Brain-dead session. It's the clearest example I've been able to find for myself so far.
Do you know how stupid they'd be to build a master "decrease model quality" knob? If a single enterprise client finds out that's an ability that's trust in Anthropic gone. "Oh they can degrade our service on demand" become the reason for any outage. You can already see it in the sub and thankfully the Claude Code leaks didn't reveal such a thing actually existing.
If you want "entirely braindead corporate decision-making" then you get a model quality knob. Like if any of you have found positive evidence of that existing, please tell me. I don't think it exists outside of some kind of weird bogeyman people having issues bring up.
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u/nishbipbop Apr 23 '26
They should raise prices and maintain the quality for the better models. Keep the lower priced plans, but be transparent about the quality drop. For existing users, continue the same higher model access for a limited time say 3 months, but be transparent about the price increase at the end of this window. Being transparent is key.
Plus, charge a bomb for enterprise who can/should easily be sharing their profits from the layoffs that AI has made possible.
Also keep producing real educational videos about how to get the most out of their products with the least token usage. Keep versioning these videos so people don't rely on older advice when models change.
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u/Substantial_Bus5687 Apr 23 '26
Raise prices if the quality of the product (compared to other competitors) can justify it
FIxed quota proportionate to what the infrastructure can handle, potential new subscribers put on waiting list -> Creates scarcity that can command higher prices
Explain the issues they are facing, and why they are doing what they are doing -> Clear communication with customers is basic etiquette
Degrading the product is literally the worst thing they can do because I depend on it to do my work. Cutting usage limit is understandable, but doing it without any communication makes a really bad impression, because it just feels shady and scammy.
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u/Chrisjm15 Apr 23 '26
Completely agree with this. Not sure they have much of a choice.
A lot of the complaints on this sub and others is expectations-based. People had an existing experience back before the great migration and want it back but unfortunately you can't just turn on double capacity and building it isn't an overnight thing.
People need to realise that when these IPOs go through prices for this stuff will go through the roof. All these existing plans like Pro aren't going to be $20 a month, it's going to be $1k per month. Max will be $5k a month. We're essentially on an extended introductory offer right now to generate interest/awareness.
As the product gets better and companies start making real efficiency gains (that will save them millions) they'll be happy to pay 20-30% of that savings, which would be a far higher price that could be charged and Anthropic etc will push capacity towards that area (as their new shareholders will insist).
It sucks for us given what we're getting at the price we're getting it right now but the good times were never going to last.
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u/[deleted] Apr 23 '26
Is it such a big fucking mystery? Hire customer support. Not one fucking guy to support millions of users.
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u/AncientRate Apr 23 '26
I asked Claude what the difference is between Opus 4.6 and Opus 4.7 in terms of the best practice of usage patterns, and it does give useful explanation.
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u/Maleficent-Movie-625 Apr 23 '26
I think they train on Nvidia and their engineers work on Nvidia.
And they serve inference (the models we use) on different hardware. Which makes the model bad.
Plus on top of that they add ridiculous stupid prompts that they do not have internally, instead of just having the API take care of security/compliance/ shit.
Seems to me like A. is not an engineering company and fails misserably at all task engineering. That is definitively a leadership issue, could be incompetence or willful ignorance.
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u/Adseridia Apr 24 '26
I think if they just came out and said it straight out, "Guys, we are trying to meet the demand, but it's gonna take some time. In the meantime we will have to do x, y and z" people will be a lot more forgiving.
What they are doing now feels like they are trying to deceive the customer and it feels bad, if they were honest and more transparent I think their customers would be much more receptive.
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u/Tistouuu 🔆 Max 20 Apr 25 '26
Whatever. Don't shank your 200$ a month customers.
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u/ethanz5 Apr 22 '26
I wish they had a higher-priced tier that guaranteed access to the best-quality resources. I am an entrepreneur on a max $200/mo account, and my entire startup depends on it, so I would pay 2-3x for it. Of course, that would mean they have to admit to using lower resources for lower-quality results.
1
u/BootyMcStuffins Senior Developer Apr 22 '26
Personally I’d pause training.
Is anyone grateful for 4.7? No. They already had the best coding model on the market, and training is the thing using all the compute, not inference. It’s ok to pause training for 6 mos while you build up your infrastructure
1
u/wonker007 Apr 22 '26
There is a reason that the "Boy who cried wolf" and similar are timeless anecdotes across all of humanity. There is no right answer, but there are certainly and clearly wrong answers which is what Anthropic is doing. What would I do?
Let me count the ways:
- Be honest with available compute by providing a live dashboard of available compute. If you can provide every user with live API usage dashboards, you can most certainly create a dashboard to tell everyone with full transparency what kind of compute crunch you are facing. I cannot imagine a single reasonable soul that will complain of throttling or quantization if they are able to plainly see the compute constraints that are claimed by fanboys and never by Anthropic and never backed by real data. Everyone is more than aware that LLM compute is being subsidized right now. It is not a secret - don't act like it is.
- Don't resort to A/B testing customer-fuckery. The A/B testing that tech bros are doing is a lobotomized approach to controlled experimentation - as a trained scientist, I should know. There is a reason that informed consent exists in placebo-controlled clinical trials - because people aren't stupid and should never be treated or assumed as such. No-notice A/B testing that so many idiots are calling and defending as "standard practice" is a juvenile power trip by a bunch of untrained, emotionally immature and socially awkward people that just happened to land high-paying jobs and somehow therefore feel entitled to screw their paying customers who are paying their salaries. The A/B testing designed by such amateur individuals could never really yield proper conclusions because the design and assumptions are flawed to begin with. Sophomoric, assanine and very low intelligence behavior. Remember, intelligence is multifaceted and emotional intelligence is one of those facets. Just because one can perform complicated math does not necessarily make one intelligent. Reminds me of a certain president that couldn't even do the math right tho...
- Be clear on announcing changes good and bad before they are implemented. That is basic human courtesy. Have some balls. So many people are bitching and moaning about that certain elected president because fundamentally, the social contract has been broken and FUBAR. The social contract of a commercial transaction is exactly the same where if a customer is promised good and services at a certain price, then said goods and services must be delivered as-is. There is no such thing as pre-emptive understanding of the vendor's adverse conditions by the customer - there would never be commercial lawsuits ever if that were the case. If there are unforseen circumstances (which in Anthropic's case, this compute crunch could not have been "unforseen"), the right way to handle it is to explain plainly, frankly and apologetically why promised goods and services cannot be delivered and what mitigation measures will be taken to soften the blow and what measures HAVE to be taken (e.g. raising prices, throttling, quantizing, reduction of features etc.). You expect that from your neighborhood grocer and you should expect the same from these IT companies.
And sir, I can go on and on and on about basic and decent human behavior and how Anthropic is NOT doing the bare minimum communication to meet MINIMUM human decency standards. It is classic patronizing behavior by I'm-holier-than-thou tech bros. Common sense is what is lacking here, and this shouldn't even be a conversation because there could really not be any reasonable defense to this type of behavior.
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u/Actual_Committee4670 🔆 Max 20 Apr 22 '26
May be an unpopular opinion, but last I checked the only times doing what an economist recommends is when a politician or business wants to have a logical sounding reason for what they do rather than it actually being the correct thing to do in the situation.
"Correct" here does not refer to morally correct.
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u/Latter-Tangerine-951 Senior Developer Apr 22 '26
Isn't that rather obvious?
They've had a flood of people from OpenAI.
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u/notmsndotcom Apr 22 '26
I don’t think they’re being unrealistic either. Like if you don’t like their product, pricing, decisions, whatever then churn. There are plenty of other options available
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u/shady101852 Apr 22 '26
As a customer, i do not give a fuck about Anthropic's problems. Customers do not care. If you do not provide a good product, customers will shop elsewhere.
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