Anthropic want you to use claude code cli badly and are prepared to be very gene...

redbluered · 2026-01-09T10:31:49 1767954709

I think they are.

The key question is about why they want to you to use the CLI. If you're not the customer, you're the product.

There's also a monopolistic aspect to this. Having the best model isn't something over can legally exploit to gain advantage in adjacent markets.

It reeks of "Windows isn't done until Lotus won't run," Windows showing spurious error messages for DR-DOS, and Borland C++ losing to the then-inferior Visual C++ due to late support of new Windows features. And Internet Explorer bundling versus Netscape.

Yes, Microsoft badly wanted you to use Office, Visual C++, MS-DOS, and IE, but using Windows to get that was illegal.

Microsoft lost in court, paid a nominal fine, and executives were crying all the way to the bank.

senordevnyc · 2026-01-09T15:18:15 1767971895

If you're not the customer, you're the product.

You are the customer, you're paying them directly.

ilvez · 2026-01-10T03:08:43 1768014523

We are both in this case..

dheatov · 2026-01-09T11:38:39 1767958719

Assuming the actual price for many user is closer to 1k USD/mth than to 200 USD/mth, and the actual price is closer to their target margin to be a viable business, they're practically subsidising usage after 200 USD/mth. Together with other AI-TECH doing the same, they fabricate a false sense of "AI is capable AND affordable", which imo is evil.

vovavili · 2026-01-09T12:07:47 1767960467

There is nothing evil about prioritizing customer acquisition over immediate profit.

fc417fc802 · 2026-01-09T14:04:01 1767967441

And yet in many cases there are regulations against it. Almost as though behavior that warps the market is generally undesirable.

vovavili · 2026-01-09T14:08:31 1767967711

Give me an example of one such regulation.

fc417fc802 · 2026-01-09T14:15:38 1767968138

Are you sure you're participating in good faith? I'll go ahead and indulge you for the benefit of the audience though.

The generic term is predatory pricing and it's regulated to some extent in pretty much every country. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing#Legal_aspect...

When carried out at the international level it's known as dumping. The WTO has provisions against it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)#Legal...

keeda · 2026-01-09T21:10:23 1767993023

As the Wikipedia page calls out, predatory pricing is generally in the context of a dominant firm throwing their weight around to dominate the market. You could make this case against large incumbents like Microsoft and Google, but Anthropic is actually the upstart here.

In any case, all this depends on how you define the "market", and the entire market for AI-assisted coding is very nascent and fast-moving to make any reliable calls about dominance at this point.

fc417fc802 · 2026-01-09T22:43:47 1767998627

That's the context where it tends to get regulated. Indeed it doesn't apply to Anthropic. Neither is Anthropic a party to the WTO.

I was asked for examples of behavior that distorts the market being regulated and provided two of them. There are other examples out there as well.

vovavili · 2026-01-10T16:01:00 1768060860

I fail to see how standard business practices Anthropic is engaging are predatory. If anything, the customer is clearly at an advantage here.

realharo · 2026-01-09T15:39:19 1767973159

Well they are doing the same to website owners who rely on human visitors for their revenue streams.

Both scraping and on-demand agent-driven interactions erode that. So you could look at people doing the same to them as a sort of poetic justice, from a purely moral standpoint at least.