A lot of the comments here are reacting to the censorship aspect, which is obviously an important point. But the more interesting subtext to me is that I feel like this gives insight into the situation within the company. I'm assuming they wouldn't do something like this unless the recent load issues (mostly driven by OpenClaw usage) were seen as an existential threat. So I'm guessing that's how the leadership views their current situation. Between OpenClaw and their (probably inaccurate) capacity planning, they simply can't onboard any more consumer users. In other words, things are going to get worse before they get better. Anthropic has taken drastic measures because their service is about to implode.
The irony of course is that the way they've gone about reacting to this has damaged their brand so badly at the trust level that the public view of their company has completely flipped. They also seem strangely oblivious to this side of things.
Their approach has also been bizarrely chaotic. Banning then restoring OpenClaw usage. Removing Claude Code from the Pro plan, then re-enabling it and claiming it was an A/B test. Honestly my read is that Dario has a weak leadership style within the company where he either doesn't give enough specific guidance to his reports or overreaches with reactionary instructions.
> I'm assuming they wouldn't do something like this unless the recent load issues (mostly driven by OpenClaw usage) were seen as an existential threat.
I think another possibility is that they are trying to shift the burden of OpenClaw to their competitors.
Openclaw is an always on AI assistant that's plugged into a bunch of MCPs. You don't understand what kinds of problems that can help solve and cant envision any use cases for that?
From a conceptual perspective it sounds great. The problem is that OpenClaw isn't actually a solution to that problem for 2 reasons, user expectation and underlying security. The majority of people I've talked to who want an 'AI assistant' effectively are expecting a proper executive assistant, just in AI form. A proper executive assistant will remember every important bit you tell them, they won't need to be reminded of it later, and more importantly they come to me of their own volition when something comes up. All things OpenClaw does not solve. Further, using MCP as the underlying protocol means you have to implicitly trust every piece of data you connect to that AI, because otherwise it's way too easy for me to send you an email with hidden instructions just for your AI to read. I mean even the defaults for the OpenClaw install had basically opened everyone who installed it and didn't configure it in any way to any attacker. So while I agree with you that there are problems in this space that an AI agent 'could' solve, OpenClaw does not currently solve any of them, and in fact does the opposite, exposing you and all your information easily.
I think the important point in the parent comment is "Burning a shit ton of tokens". Openclaw was built fast and loose, making it use far too many tokens for trivial things. I'm confident the next Claw can and will be engineered to be at least 10x as token efficient and more reliable.
Drafting email responses for work, organizing talking points for upcoming meetings based on email and doc context. Creating tickets for work tracking. Anything you can do with claude code and mcps pretty much.
None of those things require an always on token burner. I'm not trying to be rude, but do you think that's the only way to present relevant information to an LLM or something? It's literally the least efficient way to do it.
> The irony of course is that the way they've gone about reacting to this has damaged their brand so badly at the trust level that the public view of their company has completely flipped.
No one at my company gives a single shit about Openclaw, so this whole situation has been a noop for a lot more of the public than you seem to think.
Also, "censorship"? How is disallowing a specific tool that abuses a subscription "censorship"?
No one at my company cares about OpenClaw either. We do care that we can be billed unexpectedly (either usage quota immediately being consumed, or being charged additional costs), generally with zero recourse, because a particular set of characters that Anthropic doesn't like appears somewhere in a repo.
This week the characters are "OpenClaw". I won't even try to guess what might lead to erroneous billing next week.
I think the disallowing usage part was a great idea. I'd rather that Claude works well without getting DDOS'd. But merely mentioning OpenClaw causing session termination and extra charges? That's censorship. Also pretending not to know what OpenClaw is.
'censorship' may be too strong a word, but there is something unprecedented about this. AI tools are supposed to be general-purpose and able to assist with all sorts of tasks. It's expected that they are restricted when it comes to "unsafe" content like illegal or nsfw information and activities. However, this is the first time, to my knowledge, that an AI tool has been restricted from assisting with something that's perceived as a threat to the AI company.
> this is the first time, to my knowledge, that an AI tool has been restricted from assisting with something that's perceived as a threat to the AI company
You think so? I was under the impression that all the model providers have been trying to prevent use of their models to train competitor models for a while now.
> recent load issues (...) were seen as an existential threat
I wouldn't be so sure. Don't overestimate people competence.
For me it all looked like picking the highest ROI item in attempt to fix their reliability without putting too much thought how to do it gracefully. So they just hacked it and we see the results
Everything I’ve heard about the company tells me they are obsessed about exponential growth. It might seem bad to make a change that loses you 10% of your users, but if those are your least profitable users and the rest of your userbase is growing 200% per month, why does it matter?
> The irony of course is that the way they've gone about reacting to this has damaged their brand so badly at the trust level that the public view of their company has completely flipped.
I you are overstating how much of their user base cares about OpenClaw. Not nearly as bad as the DoD was for OpenAI (particularly because that cut into a pattern of how Sam Altman acts in general)
But it is a reminder they are just another company
I don't the OpenClaw furor has been a problem for the majority; but stuff like the harness bugs with dropped thinking traces (capacity optimization?) and some fairly bizarre billing bugs with weird/opaque comms around both have been more concerning and affect a larger group than that loud minority. You do kind of want a reliable service with reliable billing and reasonable comms for most things at the corporate level.
All SOTA model providers are losing money. When users run Opus, they are essentially renting a GPU cluster worth half a million dollars for a $100/$200 subscription. If they want to IPO, they need to show a projection toward profit.
For that reason, they want to discourage power users and attract normies.
The irony of course is that the way they've gone about reacting to this has damaged their brand so badly at the trust level that the public view of their company has completely flipped. They also seem strangely oblivious to this side of things.
Their approach has also been bizarrely chaotic. Banning then restoring OpenClaw usage. Removing Claude Code from the Pro plan, then re-enabling it and claiming it was an A/B test. Honestly my read is that Dario has a weak leadership style within the company where he either doesn't give enough specific guidance to his reports or overreaches with reactionary instructions.