It’s really not hard to understand. Both sides are just competing over who screws up less.
The user surges of recent years were never pull. They were push. GPT 4o got retired and the early 5 series was a smooth talker, which pushed people toward Gemini and Claude. Gemini’s Antigravity slashed quota and the model hallucinated a lot, which pushed people toward Claude Code. Claude’s black-box quota games plus that elitist face pushed people toward Codex. This is just another turn of the same cycle.
A few posts this week acted the whole thing out again.
Tibo may or may not remember that back in April, an A\ engineer got torched precisely for implying the problem was on the user’s end. I’ve already seen plenty of people blowing up in the comments.
His original text reads like it connects usage drain (the term behind that translation here is usage limit, which is just quota) to unauthorized third-party use.
My reaction after reading it was the same as this guy’s below: I never touched any third party, but the problem is real. And more than one person stepped up to say we’re all using it normally.
My sense is they should have said something like “we’re waiting on the investigation” first, or split it into two separate posts, because linking the two together is very…
The next day the credits went out. Now they’ve really become indulgences. Yesterday you say the wrong thing and developers catch fire, today you rush out credits to atone.
The one that came a day after that was much more normal. That’s what a normal response looks like. The earlier one, blaming third parties, was PR straight from hell.
As for Anthropic’s real coping method, it’s probably to open the laptop and post a very long article righteously denouncing the US government.
I’ve written before in Loving and Hating Anthropic and Fable, From Takedown to Return about the same kind of mixed feelings.