They have two products:

* Subscription plans, which are (probably) subsidized and definitely oversubscribed (ie, 100% of subscribers could not use 100% of their tokens 100% of the time).

* Wholesale tokens, which are (probably) profitable.

If you try to use one product as the other product, it breaks their assumptions and business model.

I don't really see how this is weaponized malaise; capacity planning and some form of over-subscription is a widely accepted thing in every industry and product in the universe?

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tomashubelbauer 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I am curious to see how this will pan out long-term. Is the quality gap of Opus-4.5 over GPT-5.2 large enough to overcome the fact that OpenAI has merged these two bullet points into one? I think Anthropic might have bet on no other frontier lab daring to disconnect their subscription from their in-house coding agent and OpenAI called their bluff to get some free marketing following Anthropic's crackdown on OpenCode.

	▲	bri3d 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It will also be interesting to see which model is more sustainable once the money fire subsidy musical chairs start to shake out; it all depends on how many whales there are in both directions I think (subscription customers using more than expected vs large buys of profitable API tokens).

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Propelloni 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

So, if I rent out my bike to you for an hour a day for really cheap money and I do so a 50 more times to 50 others, so that my bike is oversubscribed and you and others don't get your hours, that's OK because it is just capacity planning on my side and widely accepted? Good to know.

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bri3d 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Let me introduce you to Citibike?

Also, this is more like "I sell a service called take a bike to the grocery store" with a clause in the contract saying "only ride the bike to the grocery store." I do this because I am assuming that most users will ride the bike to the grocery store 1 mile away a few times a week, so they will remain available, even though there is an off chance that some customers will ride laps to the store 24/7. However, I also sell a separate, more expensive service called Bikes By the Hour.

My customers suddenly start using the grocery store plan to ride to a pub 15 miles away, so I kick them off of the grocery store plan and make them buy Bikes By the Hour.

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elzbardico 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

As others pointed out, every business that sells capacity does this, including your ISP provider.

They could, of course, price your 10GB plan under the assumption that you would max out your connection 24 hours a day.

I fail to see how this would be advantageous to the vast majority of the customers.

	▲	pluralmonad 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Well, if the service price were in any way tied to the cost of transmitting bytes, then even the 24hr scenarios would likely see a reduction in cost to customers. Instead we have overage fees and data caps to help with "network congestion", which tells us all how little they think of their customers.

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dehugger 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yes, correct. Essentially every single industry and tool which rents out capacity of any system or service does this. Your ISP does this. The airline does this. Cruise lines. Cloud computing environments. Restaurants. Rental cars. The list is endless.

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pyvpx 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I have some bad news for you about your home internet connection.