Their expectation must have been a human using the service at a human capacity.
This is different from an automated agent orchestrating a ton of different agents at the same time doing a lot of things.
There is a difference.
They already have the regular subscription plans (Pro, Max) and a separate billing process for direct API usage. They could absolutely introduce another type of plan optimized toward this kind of usage or just accept that it's a dumb pipe that is being paid for and having these random arbitrary limitations is just making things more confusing and a bad plan for the future.
Clawdbot was clearly against the Consumer Terms of Use the whole time, they’ve just started actively detecting and blocking it.
> Except when you are accessing our Services via an Anthropic API Key or where we otherwise explicitly permit it, [it is forbidden] to access the Services through automated or non-human means, whether through a bot, script, or otherwise.
If the actual concern is use pattern, enforce that directly. What we have instead is metered usage + behavioral restrictions + product fragmentation across three separate offerings.
That's not a clean billing philosophy, it's layers of control stacked on top of each other with no coherent logic tying them together.
If subscriptions are for humans and API is for automation, fine. But then don't meter the human product arbitrarily and don't sell a subscription tier for automation while also restricting automation. Pick a lane.
Except it's not. It's a desktop, web, mobile, and CLI subscription product built on top of a usage-based API with a generous token allowance bundled with it. That generous allowance comes with the restriction that those tokens can only be spent through Claude product surfaces. Why would Anthropic offer their API at a loss and subsidize the profits and growth of other businesses?
Sure there is a difference. It's like when most mobile companies wouldn't allow tethering because then people would actually use the service.
You can try to stop that, but people will price in those inconveniences. They will simply learn that the fee pays for much less than the token limit and that the company is enforcing some unwritten limits by adding extra limitations to usage.
We will see it play out.
Isn't that exactly what they just did?
being honest would be to just adjust the limits rather than adding piecewise limitations
but of course with honesty comes that people can actually gauge your product accurately and they may not want that
nobody wants them to add fineprint every time users find effective ways to actually use the service to its advertised limits, it only benefits those who want to be milked for recurring revenue for sporadic usage while paying handsomely for the privilege
If you had to pay for APIs yourself for any provider then you'd know that SOTA tokens are not cheap, and Claude Code for $100 is almost a too good to be true bargain for what you can get out of it.
I don't think that's accurate for professional users. Personal users, especially those for whom $200/m is a significant cost, will definitely try to get the most out of it.
I know several $200/m user (I'm on the $100 personally), and they've all had the same experience I had when first upgrading to the max package: initially you try to use it as much as you can and feel like you need to keep it busy. But that goes away after a few days and you use it when you have need. The primary point of the max tiers for my peers is to not hit limits during their work if they occasionally use it intensively because it's disrupting to have to wait for X hours to continue.
If you get a benefit from using it, and you bill at $200 an hour, and you work 160+ hours a month, the $200 monthly cost doesn't register as a significant cost and you won't make it determine your usage patterns. I'm sure that'd be different if VC money goes away and it turns out the true price would need to be closer to $5k, but at this point it's similar to your ISP for fiber costing $80 a month. You enjoy the speed for a few days, but then it becomes the new normal.