(Although I'm not completely sure this maps onto Anthropic, which was never primarily targeting consumers.)

This pisses off businesses though. I guarantee you that multiple businesses will set up workflows with different AIs for orchestration as sold to them by OpenAI and Anthropic. Cue agents.md not working, "What do you mean the thing I'm paying this much per seat for doesn't play well with the other AIs?"

The consumers here are developers -- who are--> potential founders OR future purchase decision makers.

It's a TERRIBLE idea to piss them off just because they're small.

They're "small" right now. But quite a few of them will have long careers and they will remember.

It's why so many trad corp companies give stuff away to students for free / treat the people on the come up as first tier customers. Because those are future decision makers. And the turn table turntables.

A cautionary case study is Google. How many times does a founder who is considering which cloud service to use gets cautioned to never use Google Cloud?

Google Cloud was a has been before it ever got out of the gate because of just how much goodwill Google blew up over the years. There's nothing, literally nothing, they can spend money on to make that go away in the short-term. And they're not willing to commit to the long-term.

Precisely. Anthropic was never good to its consumer users.

it's always been this way with Claude/Ant though, not something that changed

This is more SV modus operandi