Claude Code refuses requests or charges extra if your commits mention "OpenClaw"

I just don't believe for an instant that they're anywhere in the same ballpark of capabilities as running Opus or similar. My time is the most valuable resource. Opus would need to be SIGNIFICANTLY more costly and unstable for me to start entertaining local models for day-to-day development.

Perhaps whatever work you're doing makes this trade-off more sensible, but I struggle to see how that could be true. I'm averse to running Sonnet on a large amount of software engineering problems - let alone Qwen.

Anthropic has been deeply integrated with the US military, having been installed with classified access since June 2024. The podcast highlights that Claude has been actively utilized during the "Venezuela incursion" and the ongoing "war in Iran".

Despite this active involvement, CEO Dario Amodei released a statement attempting to publicly distance the company from the Department of Defense by declaring they would not allow their technology to be used for "mass domestic surveillance" or "fully autonomous weapons". Zitron categorizes this as a highly calculated PR maneuver, pointing out that LLMs are fundamentally incapable of controlling autonomous weapons anyway. The stunt successfully manufactured a wave of positive press—with celebrities and commentators praising Anthropic as an ethical objector—right when the company was trying to secure an IPO or a massive ~$100 billion valuation, all while they quietly remained an active part of the war effort.

Beyond their military contracts, the podcast details several highly questionable business practices Anthropic has used to artificially inflate their numbers:

1. During a lawsuit regarding their military contract, Anthropic's CFO filed a sworn affidavit revealing the company had only made $5 billion in its entire lifetime. This directly contradicted leaked media reports suggesting they made $4.5 billion in 2025 alone. It revealed that the company's publicly perceived run rate was heavily exaggerated through the "shady revenue math" popular in Silicon Valley, a major discrepancy that most financial journalists ignored.

2. When the open-source agent library OpenClaw first launched, Anthropic deliberately allowed users to connect a $200/month "max account" and essentially burn through thousands of dollars of API compute at Anthropic's expense. Zitron points out that Anthropic knowingly let this happen to temporarily boost their usage metrics and hype while they raised a $30 billion funding round. Just weeks after securing the funding, they abruptly cut off access for these users, a move Zitron cites as proof of them being an "unethical company".

Furthermore, the company has faced criticism for gaslighting users, maintaining poor service availability, and silently degrading model performance while rug-pulling users on rate limits. As Zitron summarizes, it is highly unlikely that either Anthropic or OpenAI actually care about these ethical boundaries beyond how they can be weaponized for better PR and higher valuations.

You simply need to price the flat-rate sub at a price that's profitable when averaged out over all of your users, both light and heavy, and prevent fully automated usage by the power users. That's it. This is immensely more user-friendly, and I doubt you'd get any traction at all if you didn't do this. Even if you pay more for the sub, having unlimited (non-automated) usage frees a mental barrier to using the product. If you have to pay for every request you make, it introduces a hesitation to do anything - it makes the user hesitant to experiment, hesitant to prompt for anything of slightly less significance, anxious about the exact token consumption of every prompt, and so on. It's not enjoyable to use when you're being penny pinched for every prompt.

Anthropic's problem, of course, is that they are not bootstrapped. They don't have a business model that can compete with startups running DeepSeek or GLM on their own hardware. Non-frontier startups got to skip the whole "tens of billions of dollars in debt" step of creating a frontier model from scratch, and still get to run a model that is perhaps 80%-85% as good as Anthropic's, which is good enough for millions of customers. So Anthropic is desperate, backed into a corner, and doing anything and everything they can to try to right their sinking ship, no matter how scummy.

Yet.