Anthropic’s growth story is a sham built on selling subscriptions that let users burn anywhere from $8 to $13.50 for every dollar of subscription revenue and providing a brittle, inconsistent service, made possible only through a near-infinite stream of venture capital money and infrastructure providers footing the bill for data center construction.

Put another way, Anthropic doesn’t have to play by the rules. Venture capital funding allows it to massively subsidize its services. The endless, breathless support from the media runs cover for the deterioration of its services. A lack of any true regulation of tech, let alone AI, means that it can rugpull its customers with varying rate limits whenever it feels like.

If Anthropic were forced to charge its actual costs — and no, I don’t believe its API is profitable no matter how many people misread Dario Amodei’s interview — its growth would quickly fall apart as customers faced the real costs of AI (which I’ll get to in a bit). If Anthropic was forced to provide a stable service, it would have to stop accepting new customers or massively increase its inference costs.

Anthropic is a con, and said con is only made possible through endless, specious hype. Everybody who blindly applauded everything this company did is a mark.

You missed one of the main points about addictiveness of AI coding. Which isn't exclusive to Claude Code, but very relevant: It has the main factors of gambling addiction. Rare big rewards (when it does something really well), frequent small rewards (you managed to get a step closer), many near misses (not quite the correct result). That's basically identical to slot machines. And a mechanism that many predatory business models use (some games, some online shops etc). Without this, people wouldn't say they're addicted, they would just say they're using it.