You lose little by assuming malicious intent when it comes to billion-dollar tech companies and your money. They can prove otherwise by remedying the situation.

ok, how is this adequately explained by stupidity?

If it is adequately explained by stupidity then you should be able to get it to display the same behavior without mentioning OpenClaw? Do you have any theory as to what stupid thing they have done to make this happen, non-maliciously? Because, Hanlon's razor doesn't just work by saying Hanlon's razor - you have to actually explain how the stupidity happened.

Not to corporations, no. You do not need to be charitable to a corporation.

What you do shows what you value. This clearly wasn't a mistake on the part of Anthropic. Time has shown that. They made the call based on what they believe in

Gross negligence is malicious.

It does not. I would be fairly magical the most favorable interpretation that makes sense is that its supposed to disconnect but also taking your money is a defect.

There's been a sustained pattern of incidents. If Anthropic were truly serious about not wanting to take people's money, then they would have put in place whatever review processes were necessary to stop this from happening. So regardless of whether or not they specifically intend to cause harm, they're willingly letting it happen, which is just about as bad.

Yes, it's reasonable to turn down the heat. But it's also reasonable for people to be upset when their money is taken from them, and when the company that does so is effectively beyond persecution for doing so.

Even with the best of faiths, this is at the very least a shoddily vibe coded “detect and low-key block attempts to use Claude for Openclaw” - it decided to look for specific strings wrapped in json without realizing this doesn’t always imply it’s an actual payload for Openclaw itself. And the human driving it was too dumb to review/catch this bad inplementation.

So maybe not malice, but certainly a level of ineptitude I don’t expect from a crucial vendor from a tool that’s become essential for many developers.

(I don’t care, I do just fine when Claude is down or refuses to help me (it has happened) though)

> consider how many bugs you've been responsible for over the course of your career that you didn't intend.

Through some amount of carelessness that ended up costing people money? 0.

Maybe 1 if you want to count the automated monthly charging system that did over charge (extra erroneous charges for the same month) a handful of clients too many times. I noticed before anyone else did, and all of those 1am charges were reversed before 4am. So I don't think that one counts because it was a boring bug that would have been very bad if I wasn't paying attention.

Incompetence to the point of negligence can reasonably be considered malicious. If you're an engineer by trade, you have an ethical and professional responsibility to make sure things like this can't happen. And then, when bugs introduce said complications, fixing them, and remediating the damage.

I am engineer by trade. If I pushed an update which wrongly busted my customer's usage limits at a trillion dollar company, I would expect to get fired. Alongside my EM.

> How about we turn down the heat, everyone?

How about Anthropic turn down the heat and refunds money to everyone for every bug it created with its LLM?

> How about we turn down the heat, everyone?

The heat is coming, in part, from the lack of a proper support channel.

Yeah they probably just typed in "Hey Claude, figure out a way to get our inference spend under control - no mistakes!" and shipped it

And the stealing of $200 here? More non malice?

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/53262#issue...

This would have been easy to say if it was the first time it or something similar happened.

But there is a clear pattern emerging. There's no reason to turn down the heat when a company of this size and influence is allowed this level of absurdity time and time again.

Nah, however this was implemented this was a clear and obvious probable side effect. If they want to block the access at the mention of openclaw, that’s silly but mostly harmless, but why charge extra for an ambiguous case? At best that’s incredibly lazy, which for a company with as much money, influence, and power as Anthropic, is equivalent to malice.

This is not the first, nor likely last, of behavior like this.

My personal story is that I bought $50 of credit into their system, didn't use it all that much, and then after a year had gone by they kept the leftovers. I consider that a kind of theft.

Nuance? Ignorance vs malice? You think too highly of folks.

Well this regex nonsense was likely vibe coded. If it escaped quality checks then this is a testament to how dangerous things coming out of Anthropic are, but not in the scifi sense that their CEO tries to make everybody believe.

How about no?

Why should we coddle a corporations when they screw over customers?

It matters very little if they did this out of incompetence or malice.

If openai / anthropic / google were the only game in town then yea, we’d already be paying 5x as much as we do. But local models are so close to sota that it just isn’t going to happen. If I’m a lawyer getting billed $500k/yr on $600k profit I’d rather buy a chonky server and run a model that’s 90% as good and get my money back in 2 years, then pay $5k electricity on $600k profit.

Nobody will successfully lobby for banning local models either, it just isn’t going to happen when the rest of the world will happily avoid paying 80% of their profits to some US bigco for the privilege of existing.

> "It's still cheaper than a human" they'll say.

The question is how much friction there will be for people to switch over to Gemini, GPT or maybe even DeepSeek or Mistral or whatever. Even if price hikes are inevitable across the board, the moat any single org has is somewhat limited, so prices definitely will be a factor they'll compete on with one another at least a bit.

Kimi and GLM 5.1 are already capable of handling a good chunk of my tasks. They about to lose the leverage to allow them to drastically increase prices - enough models are 6-12 months away from being good enough large proportions of their customers uses.

This is assuming there will be no competition. But why wouldn't there be? Especially since you can use open source models, which are not too far from frontier models (from now).

Its not20 years. Its now. Nvidia has already said that tokens cost more than humans.

https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/cost-c...

what is illegal about it?! their product, they can do whatever they want and you can choose to be a customer or not, no?

No chance unless open weight models out of China discontinue. The gap right now is practically nonexistent.

Deepseek has demonstrated that there is no reason for it to actually lose money. The awful business practices and monopoly tactics of the frontier model labs in the US are the problem.

I mean obviously. Why would the companies that control this technology NOT charge the absolute maximum amount their customers are willing to pay?

This doesn't even have anything to do with if it loses money or not. Obviously they are going to charge as much as possible.

What action did the user take that was against the TOS?

So, in America, just because it's written in a contract does not mean it's enforceable in anyway.

I can make you sign a infinitely generating contract, that doesn't mean it's enforceable/

If I have a terms of service for my SaaS where I've snuck in a vague term that I can "charge additional usage fees at my discretion", it doesn't mean I get to actually charge you $100,000 because I found out your favorite color is blue.

There's absolutely an expectation of reasonability and good faith.

Nobody signing up for Claude would be reasonably assuming that they are allowed to arbitrarily decide what magic words suddenly bypass the subscription cost model that was actually purchased into an overcharge model that is significantly more expensive, whose verbiage clearly indicates the intent of the feature being enabled is to allow additional use after the quota has been consumed, not randomly at the behest of Anthropic.

The user did not do anything against the TOS. This isnt about running OpenClaw, its about having the words OpenClaw present in a file.

TOS is not an impenetrable immunity shield.

Isn't this precisely the pattern of behavior that gets you sued for anti-competitive practices?