How is compute shortage to satisfy demand manifested? Obviously they never close sign-ups, so only option is to extended queues? But if demand grows like crazy, then queues should get longer, yet my pro claude plan seems snappy with only occasional retries due to 429.
They have several levers for demand destruction. From Anthropic's POV, I suspect this is least to worst bad
- reducing the surface area of "acceptable use" (e.g., blocking third-party tools OpenClaw)
- tighter usage limits and more subscription tiers
- increasing existing subscription prices
- moving to usage based model completely
- taking away compute from training next gen models (future demand destruction)
Reduce quality? Like quantizing models or context cache