Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive • Hacker News Board

Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive

#501

Post by urbnspacecowboy » Mon, Aug 24, 2026, 10:23 AM UTC

neya wrote: post #492

a1371 wrote: post #113

Where Anthropic f'ed up was treating their monetization the way they treat model training. Turns out that success in experimentation is not transferrable. They have tried to find the highest that the market pays for sota models; however, on the consumer side, this is just too confusing and unsettling: "You can only use Fable for a week as a part of your plan" "Be ready! You have to start paying per token!" "Nevermind…

I'm surprised no one mentions about their recent privacy violation(s). The breaking point for me was the privacy violation. They've been fingerprinting every request and violating users' privacy hoping no one would notice. Too bad, someone found out and that was the day when I cancelled my subscription. https://thereallo.dev/blog/claude-code-prompt-steganography

Like many things that "nobody's talking about", people really are talking about it. Discussion from two months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48734373

Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive

#502

Post by rhdunn » Mon, Aug 24, 2026, 10:27 AM UTC

wahnfrieden wrote: post #276

nullocator wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Philippines is on Anthropics list of allowed countries?

It was flagged for account-sharing, or detecting a compromised account

I had my GMail account locked for 1-2 years because I accessed it from my parents house (in the same country but in a different county) while on holiday. That was because they detected the account being used from a different IP address.

Using VPNs can also trip this.

Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive

#503

Post by rafaelmn » Mon, Aug 24, 2026, 10:30 AM UTC

almog wrote: post #84

rafaelmn wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might as well not be - I routinely get rate limited in a single review session. I've honestly stopped using CC and moved to codex. Sol has it's warts but I've never once hit limits on a 100€ and I get a similar level of performance for what I'm doing. I wouldn't mind bumping Fable to 200$ plan if it was actually better but between the insane caps, reverting to opus/sonnet randomly and having similar perf as OAI - I'm…

What do you mean by "review session"?

Just started reviewing a feature PR and it would hit the 4 hour limit on max effort. On high as soon as I do some clarification turns it would also hit the limit.

Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive

#504

Post by mtrovo » Mon, Aug 24, 2026, 10:33 AM UTC

hirvi74 wrote: post #314

Zigurd wrote: post #102

For many coders including myself, LLM based coding agents work well enough to be useful, and in some cases worth paying for. What I don't see is vast areas of industry finding $10s to $100s of billions of value in LLMs. There's no lint or compiler that can check for correctly constructed contracts. So LLMs, which should be useful to law firms, incur a lot more manual checking of their work than coding agents. Less fo…

I have a family member that is an attorney in housing law. She claimed that LLMs are not particularly useful for her work. If she asked a simple question like, "Find all the for all 50 states," then she still has to go and check every single one of the laws. Since the legislature is modified so often, she cannot look at, say, Maryland's law and know if it the LLM output was the 1990, 2014, 2018, or 2026 version of th…

LLMs are not magic boxes, they hallucinate and deviate quite a lot when asked hard to verify questions.

The only way we got a head start of using it for coding and maths was to have some formal method of validating the output as part of the training and inference time.

Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive

#505

Post by nullbio » Mon, Aug 24, 2026, 10:34 AM UTC

I've found myself using Kimi K3 API for things that ChatGPT is not good at (primarily AI research & development, because I swear they nerf their models for this - along with Anthropic), and I see absolutely zero reason to ever use Anthropic's APIs. The only reason I can tell they still have any form of momentum is because of sunk cost fallacy from the users who still use it.

Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive

#506

Post by nullbio » Mon, Aug 24, 2026, 10:36 AM UTC

nl wrote: post #295

Wow the sentiment here is so negative. I'm on the $200 plan (work pays) and I also have the $20 OpenAI plan (I pay) and keep a balance on OpenRouter. There is nothing as good as Fable, not even close. I recently had it run a 18 hour autonomous rebuild of a project (moving from Spark to Pandas for performance/data size trade off issues). It orchestrated Opus sub-agents flawlessly for 18 hours. It even did a great job…

Either my $200 sub was getting nerfed, or you're dead wrong about nothing being as good as Fable. The only thing I found it was better at was UI design. The rest, Sol was the clear winner. Refusals, failure to follow instructions, doing 1/10th of the work and then claiming it was "finished" was my experience with Fable. For everything else, there's K3.

Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive

#507

Post by nullbio » Mon, Aug 24, 2026, 10:39 AM UTC

kiratp wrote: post #133

The actual issue, is suspect, is that Anthropic won’t provide ZDR for Fable. Makes it a non started for a large percentage of businesses.

Yeah, and it's no secret why they won't. Your data is the only reason they even still provide subscriptions.

Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive

#508

Post by nullbio » Mon, Aug 24, 2026, 10:40 AM UTC

theshrike79 wrote: post #438

madrox wrote: post #370

Anthropic lost all good will with me. Everything from their policies to their rhetoric has an air of "we don't trust you." The way they treated users who wanted to use them for OpenClaw didn't sit well with me, and then the Fable nonsense was the last straw. And they're somehow shocked users aren't loyal to that. It isn't about cost.

Which AI companies still have your good will?

OpenAI is actually great from a users perspective. Responsive on Github issues, engage with the community, listen to feedback, constantly give subscription resets, fair subscription rates, speak out against fearmongering rhetoric, not cutting off your workflow mid task if your subscription runs out, and the list goes on.

Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive

#509

Post by senordevnyc » Mon, Aug 24, 2026, 10:41 AM UTC

bostik wrote: post #390

ray_kay777 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While there's no linter for writing contracts, my experience (as a commercial lawyer) is that frontier LLMs are far better and error checking and far quicker at writing than the average senior lawyer. The main thing holding back further deployment (in my jurisdiction) are concerns around data residency, privilege and how fundamentally it will break an industry that is so heavily reliant on time based billing.

> concerns around data residency Funny you should say that. I read somewhere (not on HN, but I think it was a post linked from here) that a number of law firms who deal with extremely sensitive documents have started buying amped-up Macbooks with 512GB of memory to be able to run local models. These are businesses who literally - and for once this word fits - cannot afford to let some of those documents get anywhere…

Macbook Pros max out at 128GB

Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive

#510

Post by dkersten » Mon, Aug 24, 2026, 10:42 AM UTC

a1371 wrote: post #113

Where Anthropic f'ed up was treating their monetization the way they treat model training. Turns out that success in experimentation is not transferrable. They have tried to find the highest that the market pays for sota models; however, on the consumer side, this is just too confusing and unsettling: "You can only use Fable for a week as a part of your plan" "Be ready! You have to start paying per token!" "Nevermind…

I stopped using Claude because of this BS. If I pay for a service, I want to know what I’m paying for, I want it to be predictable.

Anthropic have been anything but. Flip flopping on model availability, model access behind an opaque filter, their past behaviour of model degradation as they prepared their next model… these are not signs of a reliable service.

I’ve mostly settled on using a mixture of open weights models through Together.ai and Fireworks.ai, a MiniMax subscription for high-token-use tasks that don’t need the best model (for $20 I get what feels like infinite tokens), and codex for the occasional high complexity task, although with Kimi K3 and hopefully soon GLM 5.3, it’s becoming increasingly less important. Deepseek 4 flash is my cheap main with delegation to other models as needed.

I’ve also found LFM2.5 8B surprisingly useful for single-focus tasks like “does this diff touch anything that isn’t related to the task”, and it’s incredibly cheap ($0.03/0.12 per M in/out).