AI: It's Business and Personal in OpenAI/Anthropic pricing battles. RTZ #1048

Most of the time it’s both personal and business. Especially as one goes through the details in detail. Between sibling rivals, Anthropic and OpenAI I mean.

I’ve discussed in detail how AI Tokens are the ‘Oil’ of the AI Era both here and in China. The core driver behind the AI Data Center and Power investment gambles and crunch, away in earnest this century.

Now, the pricing battle over bundling AI tiers and tokens, are accelerating, with Anthropic curbing heavier users of OpenAI’s open source OpenClaw AI Agents on its ‘all you can eat’ pricing buffet. It’s an AI Tech Wave trend that’s worth understanding tactically and strategic thus far this year.

Implicator lays out the basics in “Anthropic Cuts OpenClaw From Claude Subscriptions, Citing Unsustainable Compute Costs”:

• “Anthropic ends subscription-based OpenClaw access April 4, forcing users to pay-as-you-go API rates or buy extra usage bundles”

• “Heavy OpenClaw users ran up $1,000 to $5,000 in daily API-equivalent costs on $200/month Claude Max plans”

• “OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger, now at OpenAI, accuses Anthropic of copying features before locking out open-source competitors”

• “Subscribers receive a one-time credit equal to their monthly plan cost, redeemable by April 17”

“Anthropic announced Friday evening that Claude subscriptions will no longer cover usage through third-party tools including OpenClaw, effective April 4 at 12 pm PT. Users who want to keep running OpenClaw with Claude must now purchase separate “extra usage” bundles or switch to API-key billing, according to Boris Cherny, head of Claude Code. The change breaks apart one of the most popular combinations in autonomous AI tooling and exposes a widening gap between flat-rate subscription pricing and the compute demands of agent-driven workloads.”

Again, the battle between the two companies harkens behind the ‘all you can eat’ business conflict in ‘variable cost’ usage and pricing driven businesses rom times immemorial. From Chinese lunch buffets to mainstream users using up huge amounts of internet dial-up capacity on AOL in the nineties on flat monthly pricing.

And the battles are getting a bit personal, for the principals here, and customers. As Venturebeat explains further:

“The response from the developer community has been a mixture of analytical acceptance and sharp frustration.”

“Growth marketer Aakash Gupta observed on X that the “all-you-can-eat buffet just closed,” noting that a single OpenClaw agent running for one day could burn $1,000 to $5,000 in API costs. “Anthropic was eating that difference on every user who routed through a third-party harness,” Gupta wrote. “That’s the pace of a company watching its margin evaporate in real time.”

“However, Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw who was recently hired by OpenAI, took a more skeptical view of the “capacity” argument.“Funny how timings match up,” Steinberger posted on X. “First they copy some popular features into their closed harness, then they lock out open source.”

The fierce competition between the two continues:

“Indeed, Anthropic recently added some of the same capabilities that helped OpenClaw catch-on — such as the ability to message agents through external services like Discord and Telegram — to Claude Code.”

“Steinberger claimed that he and fellow investor Dave Morin attempted to “talk sense” into Anthropic, but were only able to delay the enforcement by a single week.”

“User @ashen_one, founder of Telaga Charity, voiced a concern likely shared by other small-scale builders: “If I switch both [OpenClaw instances] to an API key or the extra usage you’re recommending here, it’s going to be far too expensive to make it worth using. I’ll probably have to switch over to a different model at this point.”

.“I know it sucks,” Cherny replied. “Fundamentally engineering is about tradeoffs, and one of the things we do to serve a lot of customers is optimize the way subscriptions work to serve as many people as possible with the best mode.”

It’s a high-class problem for both Anthropic and OpenAI, and the industry as a whole. Demand for AI Tokens is rising sharply. As they all struggle to provide sufficient supply.

And get their companies ready for mega-IPOs this year. All that means a frenzy of sharp actions all around this AI Tech Wave this year. Stay tuned.

(NOTE: The discussions here are for information purposes only, and not meant as investment advice at any time. Thanks for joining us here)