Companies compete by optimizing margins. Lower margins, more sales, and more customers for more forward looking sale. Higher margins, more profit per sale.

That's a "fixed" constraint, because maximizing future adjusted value is what companies do.

So they don't play little games with mass products. If they did they would be harming their own bottom line/market cap.

(For small products, careful optimization often doesn't happen, because they are not a priority.)

Note this thesis explains what is going on here. What was previously one kind of customer (wide distribution of use), is now identifiably two. The non-automated token maxers (original distribution) and automated token maxers (all maxed, and growing in number). To maintain margins Anthropic has to move the latter to a new bin.

But the customer centric view also holds. By optimizing margins, that counter intuitively incentivizes reduced pricing on lower utilized products. (Because margin optimization is a balance to optimize total value, i.e. margins are not the variable being maximized.)

The alternatives would be bad for someone. Either they under optimize their margins, or change regular customers more which is unfair. Neither of those would be a rational choice.

(Fine tuning: Well run companies don't play those games. But companies with sketchy leaders do all kinds of strange things. Primarily because they are attempting manage contradictory stories in order to optimize their personal income/wealth over the companies. But I don't see Anthropic in that category.)