You're making the opposite argument. Anthropic is incentivized to use less tokens in Claude Code because people are paying a fixed monthly fee for subscriptions.
That strategy only makes sense if there's an abundance of tokens, but that's not the case. AI companies are spending a ton of resources on improving token efficiency because they are all severely GPU constrained. Anthropic instead nudges you to move to a higher tier by setting rate limits.
Also not true, they want you to pay for a higher subscription bracket and then use only marginally more than you would have, which I think they’re doing quite effectively for most people based on my interactions.
Flip side is customer psychology. Choosing a more expensive tier leaves better emotion.
Also i doubt there was jira ticket with “make llm more verbose”, rather ticket with “bug makes llms too verbose” gets prioritised taking revenue impact into account.
Higher subscription brackets are likely worse for them. I recall seeing someone calculate that a fully maxed out highest subscription bracket is something like $15K in tokens?
And people paying $100 or $200 are much more likely to max it out for purely psychological reasons - it crosses that threshold where I want to see my money's worth in full. Whereas people on $20 subs are more likely to be there just to get access to better models and features, and are not necessarily even doing any substantial work.
It's always more complicated than that because the prestige and Early Adopter users are what drag other people to also be customers to avoid FOMO.
Your gym members who got a subscription aspirationally and don't show up are absolutely subsidizing the power lifter who is introducing wear on (tens of?) thousands of dollars of equipment three times a week, but if the regulars weren't there you wouldn't have sold those subscriptions at all. Without a poster child there's no poster.
Generally, companies with >150 people can’t use subs. So yeah, it’s mostly a funnel for devs/small companies to eventually vet for the product and convince their enterprise to use it as well.
Not really. The incentive is to make you hooked on the process, so you bring the same process to the workplace, and start paying corporate prices, not individual subscription prices. For that to work Claude Code, prompt, and the rest of the mechanics has to be more or less uniform.