The model providers are quite aligned with concerns like customer retention. These arguments only work if there is no competition. We exist in a marketplace of black boxes. There's not just "the one" you must suffer. You have options. You can build your own too.
They’re growing over 10x a year. They want users and revenue. In order to get users and revenue, they want to provide the smartest models at affordable prices. If they unnecessarily burn tokens, users will get less value and switch.
This thread is filled with competing comments about their monopolistic power and how when one model provider was no longer doing a good job people switched to a different one.
The competition in this market is ferocious!
I see posts all the time on HN about which models from which providers offer the most bang-for-the-buck, and how to minimize token usage and still get optimal results, so it appears that competition is working.
1. Self hosting
2. Chinese models
3. Running it locally. Requires upfront cost and compromises on TPS.
Hell, I use 3 different providers, and I currently don't give a dime to Anthropic or OpenAI.
Theoretically.
In reality, one sessions output tokens become the next sessions input tokens (at least if you continue the topic) so, its not as aligned as all that.
But the parent is right, when incentives are not aligned, friction will happen. Its inevitable.
I agree that incentives are misaligned but there’s several competing model providers. If one gets funny with their costs people will jump ship, especially if the gap between the top 2 labs and everyone else keeps shrinking.
These safeguards already exist when they get a whiff that you might be using Claude to fix security issues. Doesn’t seem farfetched given the incentives I outlined that they would apply to this kind of abuse.
How loose those controls are becomes a market force.
https://code.claude.com/docs/en/admin-setup#set-up-usage-vis...
Goas back to factory towns, gift cards, game money or MtG.
When you’re doing this 100K times per day you get an extremely good idea of what it costs. You also have all the tools to see when something starts changing quickly.
This change is for Claude Code the harness. If you’re using the API at scale and paying full price then you get exactly what you put into the request.