Some 20 years ago, the telecommunications sector in Germany was liberalized. Many telephone card providers entered what had previously been a barely competitive market. They advertised their products with aggressive claims like: “Buy our €10 top-up card and get 660 minutes to destination X.”
For the first few weeks, they would actually provide those 660 minutes to establish trust in their cards. But after a while, they would quietly start reducing the number of minutes on subsequent top-ups—say, from 660 minutes down to only 300. They wouldn’t do this for every card, so it was difficult to prove. Instead, they relied on averages across their customer base to make the economics work.
Lately, I’ve found myself wondering whether something similar may be happening with frontier AI models. Companies launch with an exceptionally strong model and generous compute limits to build adoption. Once the model is established as a market leader, the incentives change, and users may start perceiving the service as becoming more constrained or less capable over time.
I don’t have evidence that this is what’s happening with Anthropic—or with any other AI company. It’s simply a pattern that the current situation reminds me of.