Well, off the top of my head:

- Banning OpenClaw users (within their rights, of course, but bad optics)

- Banning 3rd party harnesses in general (ditto)

(claude -p still works on the sub but I get the feeling like if I actually use it, I'll get my Anthropic acct. nuked. Would be great to get some clarity on this. If I invoke it from my Telegram bot, is that an unauthorized 3rd party harness?)

- Lowering reasoning effort (and then showing up here saying "we'll try to make sure the most valuable customers get the non-gimped experience" (paraphrasing slightly xD))

- Massively reduced usage (apparently a bug?) The other day I got 21x more usage spend on the same task for Claude vs Codex.

- Noticed a very sharp drop in response length in the Claude app. Asked Claude about it and it mentioned several things in the system prompt related to reduced reasoning effort, keeping responses as brief as possible, etc.

It's all circumstantial but everything points towards "desperately trying to cut costs".

I love Claude and I won't be switching any time soon (though with the usage limits I'm increasingly using Codex for coding), but it's getting hard to recommend it to friends lately. I told a friend "it was the best option, until about two weeks ago..." Now it's up in the air.

Anthropic has become shady as hell in less than a few weeks. The DoD Story and the overall popularity among developers got them a huge leap over OAI but i certainly won't renew my subscription with them. The Claude SDK feels like a constant fight against its own limitations compared to Codex and other Harnesses.

Huh I've noticed that! Opus hallucinates answers and provides contradictory reasoning to me much more regularly during the past couple of weeks than it did in February.

For example, after a question about a script that used taskset and CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES to handle NUMA domains on a parallel GLUE evaluation run:

>Round 2 tasks reuse GPU slots that Round 1 may still be occupying. Cola, SST-2, and QQP are small datasets and will likely finish before MNLI, but QNLI is sizable. If QNLI (GPU 3, slot 3) is still running when Round 2 launches, that's fine — they're on different slots. But more importantly, Round 2 uses slots 5/6/7 (GPUs 7/0/1), while Round 1 uses slots 0/1/2/3/4 (GPUs 4/5/2/3/6). So there's no GPU collision — you're good here actually. Disregard, this is clean.

> It's all circumstantial but everything points towards "desperately trying to cut costs".

I have been wondering if it's more geared at reducing resource usage, given that at the moment there's a known constraint on AI datacenter expansion capability. Perhaps they are struggling to meet demand?

> (claude -p still works on the sub but I get the feeling like if I actually use it, I'll get my Anthropic acct. nuked. Would be great to get some clarity on this. If I invoke it from my Telegram bot, is that an unauthorized 3rd party harness?)

How often? Realistically, if you invoke it occasionally, for what's clearly an amount that's "reasonable personal use", then no you don't get nuked.

Claude -p is allowed. They're not going to give you a feature then ban you for using it.

What they changed is that it now uses extra usage, which is charged at api rates

They also screwed up the API token detection and also blocked a bunch of 1st party tool users for ~24h.

Support consisted of AI bots saying you did something stupid, you did something wrong, you were abusing the system, followed by (only when I asked for it explicitly) claiming to file a ticket with a human who will contact you later (and it either didn't happen or their ticket system is /dev/null).

(By the way this is the 2nd time I've been "please hold" gaslit by support LLMs this exact same way, the other being with Square)

claude -p not working would be instant unsubscribe downgrade from Max to Pro and further drive my use of codex. I use both but overall have noticed I reach for Claude less than codex lately because claude keeps getting slower and slower (I have not noticed a drop off in quality, but I use it less and less so maybe I'm not in a good position to notice).

Generally I find codex and claude make a good team. I'm not a heavy user, but I am currently Claude Max 5x and ChatGPT Plus. Now that OpenAI has a $100 offering and I am finding myself using Claude less, I am considering switching to Claude Pro and ChatGPT Pro x5. The work hours restriction on Claude Max x5 really pisses me off.

I am not a heavy user. Historically I only break over 50% weekly one week a month and average about 30-40% of Max x5 over the entire month. I went Max because of the weekly limits and to access the better models and because I felt I was getting value. I need an occasional burst of usage, not 24/7 slow compute. But even for pay-as-you-go burst usage Anthropic's API prices are insane vs Max.

I have yet to ever hit a limit on codex so it's not on my mind. And lately it seems like Claude is likely to be having a service interruption anyway. A big part of subscribing to Claude Max was to get away from how the usage limits on Pro were causing me to architect my life around 5hr windows. And now Anthropic has brought that all back with this don't use it before 2pm bullshit. I want things ready to go when the muses strike. I'm honestly questioning whether Anthropic wants anyone who isn't employed as a software engineer to use their kit.

Anyway for the last month or so codex "just works" and Claude has been an invitation for annoyances. There was a time when codex was quite a bit behind claude-code. They have been roughly equal (different strength and weaknesses) since at least February (for me).

Perhaps Anthropic should put a freeze on new signups until they can increase capacity. This is the best kind of problem for a business, I'm cheering for them.

> (claude -p still works on the sub but I get the feeling like if I actually use it, I'll get my Anthropic acct. nuked. Would be great to get some clarity on this. If I invoke it from my Telegram bot, is that an unauthorized 3rd party harness?)

100% this, I’ve posted the same sentiment here on HN. I hate the chilling effect of the bans and the lack of clarity on what is and is not allowed.

Why were third party harnesses banned? Surely they'd want sticking power over the ecosystem.

i dont know why ppl are surprised. you just need to see what they say on china, open source and fake safety blogs to understand they re not a company that devs should give their code for free to

> claude -p still works on the sub but I get the feeling like if I actually use it, I'll get my Anthropic acct. nuked

I've used it with a sub a lot. Concurrency of 40 writing descriptions of thousands of images, running for hours on sonnet.

I have a lot of complaints. I've cancelled my $200 subscription and when it runs out in a few days I'll have to find something else.

But claude -p is fine.

... Or it was 2 week ago. Who knows if they've silently throttled it by now?

I think we are about a month away from a class action lawsuit, at their revenue they are a juicy target. And god knows they got the entirely self inflicted unholy combination going on, marketing & sales that borders on fraud (X times the usage of plan Y which has Z times of free tier which has unknowable "magic tokens") and then of course the actual fraud, reducing usage in fifteen different non obvious non public ways.

>> apparently a bug?

it's a bug only if they get a harsh public response, otherwise it becomes a feature

Most of those are issues are coming from a very small minority. A lot of times its good for businesses to focus on the customers that are driving them the highest margin, most likely not users like yourself.

1) Nobody should expect to use OpenClaw without API usage.

2) We have known for a long time that the plans are subsidized. It was not as big of a deal but now that demand has continued to explode at a multiple and tools like OpenClaw were creating a lot of usage from a small minority of customers, prices change.

Everything for me points more towards, we have made a service people really want to use and we are trying to balance a supply shortage (compute) with pricing. Nothing is stopping folks like yourself from simply paying the API rates. It is the simple no hassle way to get around any issue you are having, pay the API cost and you will have no limitations!