It's possible they don't know the actual costs. The one-time costs like hardware and training foundation models is huge. There's the ongoing costs like the PhD dudes they hire. There's the data they buy and decide not to use. There's the various offers under one payment plan - limited artifact hosting, cowork, image upload, Claude Code, Code tab on Claude. What about feature parity between the site and app? Who's working on all these?

tldr it seems really complex and by the time they've counted it they probably hired 40 new people for an unannounced feature.

I mean, if you look at the Claude subreddits, the general consensus is that Anthropic and OpenAI are money hungry corporate devils that are here to enslave all of us, and everyone should get unlimited everything on Max x20.

I think you may be overestimating the willingness of people to understand Anthropic’s concerns.

While I feel the same way, this is nothing new at all. Basically every company does this and it's a totally normal way to test new profit models. Has been done for decades. People acting surprised here really need to get on with reality.

Stage 2 of enshittification. A necessary prerequisite to full enshittification is lock-in, so be on the lookout for it!

But they have red ethical redlines bs

Usually A/B testing is just on the surface, and when you actually subscribe you get the "better" terms of the possible options.

Like, they're just advertising different terms to test how many people would still click on it and very likely start the subscription process, but after they click they go back to the usual terms. Changing the whole payment flow, account models and permissions in their backend just for a quick test is usually too much work.

But yes, basically, if you're B and not A, and B has objectively worse terms than A, then you're just unlucky. But this is the essence of A/B tests. They are done by basically every company everytime, because it's the most straightforward and simple way to test new terms or designs.