I think you are right. I'll edit my comment to point to this.

Yes, at the very least, it's a no-brainer for OS maintainers who are already paying for Max 20x.

This potentially can be a supply chain attack at a massive scale.

Ugly may be a strong word, but upon reading the title, the first thought that came to me was that they'd done some self-examination and decided to finally do the ethical thing about all the open source training data without which their proprietary product would plain and simply not exist.

In comparison, a program that grants time-limited credits to a few high-visibility projects reads like a self-serving marketing move no matter how you slice it.

What baffles to me is the people who think that "gifts" should never be criticized.

I mean, suppose Adobe decides to gift "$1200" value in Adobe products/subscriptions to all subscribers of the gimp-users mailing list. Can I criticize that?

Agreed, that's a lot of value for a person to pay for themselves!

My calendar is littered with the occasional "Cancel Wired subscription", "Cancel Amazon Unlimited", "Cancel Fitbit premium". This is a standard promotional offer, and it's trivial to not get bitten by it. We have the technology to set reminders for future dates.

> and automatically kicking a user off would also probably be bad.

Would it? The only way to access Claude is via a CLI or a GUI.

> $ claude --resume

> No subscription active (expired on 6/1/2026). Reactivate at claude.ai/settings.

> automatically kicking a user off would also probably be bad.

No. "Sorry, subscription has expired, please re-up your account" is an extremely reasonable UX.

The whole "free period but we'll auto bill you after" is a shitty dark pattern that mostly exists to extract value from life admin errors. The people who got enough value to justify the cost would've paid anyway.

A $200 bill from some cloud entity that doesn't have my credit card info would cause nothing but enormous laughter.

What is ugly here is the combination of the free trial (not ugly in an of itself), and they way they are trying to recruit qualified users for it from open source.

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That never works for me. I try to only sign up for things that I can cancel immediately and continue to use for the rest of whatever time period I signed up for.

Instead of potentially getting billed for some trial I forgot about, I would rather pay for a month, immediately cancel, and then repeat every month when I realize it's not working.

Besides helping me keep my expenses under control, it doubles as an evaluation of the company. If they make it difficult to cancel, or do not let me use the rest of my paid time, I know they are not a company I want to do business with.

  OSS maintainer: I'd like to cancel my subscription!

  Claude: Thank you for prolonging your subscription for another year. I'll take the required steps.

  OSS maintainer: No, I said CANCEL!

  Claude: You are absolutely right! Thank you for your two year subscription.

You're absolutely right that some individuals will be able to sign up for this program, and remember to cancel at the end of the six months. However, when companies choose to implement a policy like this they're acting on well-established statistics. They know that a meaningful percentage of people will forget to cancel, and the company will end up with increased revenue. There might be a bit of good will here, but in the end a program like this with these clearly-spelled-out terms is not much more than marketing.

This feels especially ugly to me because maintainers of large open source projects will feel pressure to keep using tools that let them work in an AI-assisted world. This really feels like it will make life harder for open source maintainers in the end, rather than easier. That's the opposite of what a meaningful open source campaign should look like.

At the very least, it puts maintainers right back in the position of having to beg giant companies for handouts.

Dont accept this subscription dark pattern

Someone in my hoa association recently failed to pay their dues. Why? Because they were in the hospital for several weeks.

It should be a reason to criticize them, though. They're tricking people in order to make more money. They know it, you know it, we all know it. They could easily not do this, or if they want to make the argument that it's helpful not to have your subscription suddenly lapse at the end of the period, they could make it an option to have your subscription auto-renew as paid.