Tragedy of the commons. You are totally right, they didn't violate any policy. But they violated their moral obligation to not abuse a shared resource.

▲

const_cast 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

It's not a public good - these people weren't shitting in the park. It's a paid-for service and they were paying customers, getting their money's worth.

The price simply did not reflect the cost, and that's a problem. It happens to a lot of business and sometimes consumer's call their bluff. Whoops.

You wanna cheat and undercut competitors by shooting yourself in the foot with costs that exceed price? Fine. It's a tale as old as time. Here, have your loss lead - xoxo, every consumer.

Just charge per unit.

▲

jedberg 4 days ago | parent [-]

I never said it was a public good. I said it was a shared resource.

The tragedy of the commons is the concept that, if many people enjoy unfettered access to a finite, valuable resource, such as a GPU farm, they will tend to overuse it and may end up destroying its value altogether.

That is exactly what happened here. The price was fine if everyone upheld their moral obligation not to abuse it.

	▲	const_cast 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		There is no moral obligation, only the terms and conditions. That's your actual obligation. There's only one person who made a mistake here - Anthropic. They purposefully make their terms and conditions bad, and then when people played by the contract they set forth, they lost money. It's calling a bluff. Anthropic purposefully priced this far too aggressively to undercut their competitors. Companies with stupid amounts of investor capital do that all the time. They flew too close to the sun. You can't create a contract, have all the power in the world to rig the contract in your favor, and then complain about said contract. Everyone was following the rules. The problem was the rules were stupid. To be more specific - abuse requires an exercise of power. End-users have no power at all. They have literally zero leverage over the contract and they have no power to negotiate. They can't abuse anything, they're too weak.

▲

48terry 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Just in case everybody in this comment tree forgot: Claude is not some common, public good. It barely even qualifies as a digital commons, if it does. It is a private tool owned by a private, for-profit company. Nobody has a common obligation to make Anthropic profitable or to reduce its expenses.

▲

jedberg 4 days ago | parent [-]

I never said anything about a public good. See my sibling comment.

	▲	48terry 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		The "finite, valuable resource" in this case being "something a private company is actively trying to produce and pocket wealth with". Again, there is no moral obligation to ensure Anthropic's business goes well and conveniently.