HACKER Q&A
📣 ud0

I don't get why Anthropic is limiting usage


I’m trying to understand the rationale behind Anthropic limiting certain types of third-party usage, e.g., OpenClaw

From a naive perspective, more usage should mean more revenue since customers pay per token. So why restrict it? If a third party is generating heavy usage, isn’t that ultimately beneficial for revenue and growth?

What other factors are they considering that are not immediately obvious? If I sold shoes, I'd be happy to sell more regardless of how many resellers are down the chain.

  👤 mikewarot Accepted Answer ✓
I believe all the AI providers are reaching capacity limits, and they want to preserve their margin for customers paying by the token, instead of monthly plans(which are effectively subsidize advertising).

It won't just be Anthropic.

👤 watwut
They operate at loss.
👤 vova_hn2
> From a naive perspective, more usage should mean more revenue since customers pay per token.

They are not limiting usage through the API with per token payment.

They are limiting usage through a subscription that gives you a lot (but they won't tell you how much exactly) of tokens for a fixed monthly payment.

Using models through a subscription tends to be much cheaper than using the API and paying per token.

Anthropic provides cheap subscriptions with less profit or even at a loss (we don't know) to promote its own tools. Using subscription for third-party tools obviously defeats this purpose.

👤 stray
Yeah but what if you sold shoe subscriptions because mostly people only wear one pair of shoes at a time -- but some people were using a service called OpenToe that was grabbing 50-100 shoes at a time?
👤 robin_reala
If you’re selling shoes to potentially 10,000 people, but ten customers consistently buy your entire stock, then you’re making the same money. But you’re limiting your future expansion, because whenever the other 9,990 potential customers try to buy your shoes they find none on the shelves and either choose to not use you in the future, or worse tell people how bad you are at supplying shoes.

Given finite server availability, my guess is that OpenClaw users were degrading the service (or start hitting service limits soon) for “normal” users, causing Anthropic to get worried that their cashcow in Claude would start to get negative press.