Matt just NUKED anthropic. 🙈

**TL;DR:** Anthropic quietly removed Claude Code from lower-tier plans, then rolled it back amid backlash; the real culprit is a chronic GPU shortage born of Dario’s 2022 bet that OpenAI would go bust, leaving the company throttling users, rewriting TOS on the fly, and watching its once-perfect code-to-data flywheel grind to a halt. ## Claude Code “stealth nerf” Yesterday users woke up to find **Claude Code** gone from the Pro plan. No e-mail, no blog post—just a pricing-page edit that pushed the feature to the new 100 $/mo Max tier overnight. Hours of outrage later the line-item re-appeared on Pro, but free users are still locked out. The episode is being called an “un-nerf”, yet the message is clear: Anthropic is rationing compute by any lever it can find. ## Anthropic’s cult-like flywheel Employees joke that Anthropic is a “cult with one commandment: AGI or bust”. They ignore image/video models, consumer gimmicks, even mainstream marketing—all chips go on coding capability. The loop they brag about in recruiting decks looks like this: 1. Ship the world’s best code model 2. Sell it to enterprises for AI-assisted development → giant revenue 3. Collect mountains of private source in the process 4. Feed that data into the next training run 5. Stronger code model → stronger base model → return to step 1 This is arguably the tightest data-revenue feedback cycle since Google AdSense. But the whiteboard is missing one box: **buy enough GPUs to serve and train at scale**. That blank space is now the entire story. ## Dario’s 2022 miscalculation On a November 2022 *Darknet Diaries* episode CEO Dario Amodei said OpenAI had a “quite high” chance of bankruptcy. His math: if usage kept 10×-ing yearly, by 2027 someone would need a trillion dollars of inference hardware booked in advance; miss the forecast by even a year and the balance sheet implodes. Anthropic therefore chose the “prudent” path—avoid the capex cliff, keep burn low, stay alive. Demand did grow 10×; OpenAI swallowed the risk, locked in H100s, and is still standing. Anthropic, meanwhile, is chronically allocation-short, forced to throttle the very product that was supposed to feed the flywheel. ## Dominoes of the GPU famine - Daily rate limits ratchet tighter almost weekly - Third-party agent projects (OpenClaw, Hermes, etc.) first encouraged, then API-blocked - Policy updates appear only via tweets, Slack DMs, or quiet ToS edits—never in one authoritative place ## The OpenClaw communications fiasco Developer Peter Steinberger tweets that Opus is “by far the best model to orchestrate agents”, open-sources OpenClaw, sees explosive GitHub stars. Two weeks later he and the repo are acquired by—of course—OpenAI. Anthropic’s reaction: 1. Radio silence 2. Sudden API key revocation for “violating usage guidelines” 3. Partial reinstatement after complaints 4. New SDK rate window nobody asked for All of this relayed piecemeal in random Twitter replies, never a single official doc. Users still don’t know what is or isn’t allowed. ## Reliability numbers that won’t pass a finance audit Anthropic’s own status page shows **98.8 %** uptime for Claude API over the last 90 days—nowhere near the 99.9 % enterprise buyers expect. Compare OpenAI’s public page: API 99.9 %, ChatGPT 99.8 %, Codex 99.98 %. When your core differentiation is “we code better”, constant 500 s and 429 s erode the argument fast. ## Carrot, then stick **14 Mar** – Product lead Tarik posts a “spring break gift”: off-peak and weekend Claude Code sessions consume half quota. Developers reschedule entire CI pipelines to 3 a.m.; savings are real. **26 Mar** – Same account: “To ensure consistent availability we are lowering the 5-hour session cap for free, Pro and Max tiers…” The carrot lasted twelve days. ## A paying customer’s vent “I send Anthropic 200 $ every month and they brainstorm new ways to stop me from using what I paid for. Between the throttling, the outages and the policy whiplash I finally understand why Theo calls himself their ‘number-one hater’.” ## End-game Dario’s risk-averse capex strategy kept the company solvent but also starved the feedback loop that made it special. Every GPU they don’t buy is an OpenAI win: overflow traffic, glowing PR, and now the acquisition of showcase projects that originally ran on Claude. Unless Anthropic raids the balance sheet for a massive hardware order—and writes a single, sane usage policy—it risks discovering that user trust, like quota, throttles down to zero. Source: [https://youtu.be/aO5k3haUz9Q](https://youtu.be/aO5k3haUz9Q)