This is fascinating because it makes me think OpenClaw is something of a trojan horse aimed at draining Anthropic's resources. For them to go to this length to stop OpenClaw usage raises some interesting questions and a precedent for closed model vendors.
Why do they treat is as a trojan horse? More OpenClaw usage means more Claude usage. Isn't more Claude usage what Anthropic wants?
Not when their customers are paying a flat rate subscription.
Calling current AI subscription services (especially Claude) "flat rate" (implying infinite access for a flat fee) is misleading. There are pretty strict hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly limits. So there is a pretty easy-to-reach limit for all these subscriptions. They're hardly unlimited, and given how easy it is to run into limits, it's likely not super complicated/low-stddev for an accounting department to figure out avg cost per customer.
Is flat rate the best way to describe it when there's actually a few different tiers and each one has hard coded rate limits?
Within each tier, each marginal token is an expense with no marginal revenue to offset. So yes. The platonic ideal for any subscription business model is zero usage.
I run an AI subscription business and we have our pricing set in a way that we make an acceptable profit even if all users were to max out their given usage
Of course. My point is that your profit still decreases as you approach max usage, ceteris parabis. It may be acceptable but it is less. Your costs are variable and your revenue is fixed (at least on a unit basis).
No, not for us because we have a lot of different tiers and so as their usage increases they buy bigger and bigger plans.