Maybe true, but consider the incentives for a moment. Anthropic makes money when it increases token usage. This feature removes a roadblock to burning more tokens. Can you claim with certainty that there is no way that might have influenced their decision?

▲

solenoid0937 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If they don't do this, their competitors will and have a better UX.

Most users that just want their agent to do the damn thing.

Users that want to babysit their agents can always turn the setting off. That is not most users.

	▲	tavavex 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Have all the countless people that just want the agent to run considered not having it run AskUserQuestion if they don't want to be asked questions? If a user sets it up to run AskUserQuestion, the assumption is that they are looking for this behavior. They have literally already opted in. Regardless of how many people you think fall into which camp, the response to this isn't to silently change the behavior of the 'ask the user what to do' functionality that basically renders it useless. And there is no explicit setting to turn off. If you read the issue, you can find that this is a forced behavior that is only circumventable by setting an undocumented environment variable to a high value, but you can't truly turn it off. This was an inexcusable engineering decision at best and a malicious 'gotcha' that tries to coax more tokens out of users at worst. Truly the AI industry at its peak.

▲

fragmede 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

OTOH, their system is currently overloaded beyond what they have capacity to serve, and public plans aren't pay per token like the API is, but a subscription fee with a usage limit. Thus, there is incentive for Anthropic to be conservative with token use because they don't have the capacity to serve all their current users. Artificially driving up usage means more usage, which means their system is more highly loaded, which means users are unhappy with the product, which means they're more likely to churn. That doesn't mean your version of the conspiracy isn't necessarily true, but it does mean it's not the only thing to consider.