Agreed that $200 USD would be preferable (credits dont pay rent). My comment is directed at the strong words others have left about this being in bad faith on the whole. Even if it is, then their bad faith efforts are better than most.
Opinions here will vary, I wanted to share mine <3
To OPs point, whether you want to call it a gift kinda feels like splitting hairs. As is well established, most software companies have huge dependencies on OSS yet contribute very little so $1200 in free service is a pretty big step up over the fuck-all you'll get from most places.
I think what you’re getting at involves more data that was scraped illegally. Like if Anthropic gave free Claude access to writers since it just lost a lawsuit related to copyrighted books, that would be kind of a slap in the face. But OSS software is not published with an expectation of payment.