I’m not so sure. We only need to look at Uber’s example of companies realizing they’re spending way too much and trying to rein it in. Claude has excellent revenue but it is highly dependent on very rich technology companies continuing to spend lavishly without seeing returns. The music will stop at some point and Anthropic will be hit the hardest. OpenAI may have less revenue but it is distributed across many, many more customers and use cases, it’s resilient. And even if Anthropic do, somehow, manage to keep their customers spending huge amounts on Claude, they’re very vulnerable to being undercut by OpenAI given codex is pretty much at parity. Anthropic seems more vulnerable to me.
I think it's somewhat guaranteed that the music will at least die down a little bit. We saw this with cloud companies being bitten by cloud cost optimization initiatives. I can't imagine we won't see the same with AI, especially as the workforce stops trying to tokenmaxx to save their role.
Every week there's at least one post on the HN front page bitching about API errors from Claude because Anthropic doesn't have enough serving capacity. I really don't see any signs they're "spending too much", the actual evidence on the ground seems to be exactly the opposite: constant exasperation that they're not spending enough.
I just finished talking to a dev manager friend of mine at a household name company.
He told me they are massively pulling back on the AI stuff.
Right now the lashback is about cost, because that's the most easily measured pain point.
Soon, we'll start seeing a deeper understanding of the quality issues. At that point, it's likely this whole experiment gets firmly put in a bin of the toolbox where it belongs.
I know people at medium size companies where they are tracking AI costs very carefully. They are pulling back to levels under $100/week in AI spend per engineer, encouraging use of lower quality, lower cost models, etc.
$100/week will get you both a higher tier of Claude and significantly more tokens with GLM5.1 or Kimi, both of which are competitive in a decent harness (for Kimi that means their own CLI - it works well in that, but has a lot of quirks that requires special treatment). Just slightly more will get you all three.
I don't doubt you, but $100 is approximately the cost to company of one hour of dev time. If companies end up being willing to spend only 2% of their dev budget on AI, this bubble is not going to last long.
I mean Anthropic’s customers are spending too much on Claude. Anthropic’s customers are encouraging tokenmaxxing amongst their employees; measuring employees by token usage. That’s great for Anthropic’s short term revenue numbers but terrible long term because at some point companies will realize tokenmaxxing is not good. OpenAI is much less exposed to tokenmaxxing, which is a good thing.
Tokenmaxxing is the practice of measuring employees by how many tokens they use, encouraging employees to burn tokens needlessly, it is unrelated to what agents can do.
If a task can be completed with 100k tokens but employees are considered better performers if they complete it with 500k tokens instead… that’s unsustainable and cannot possibly benefit Anthropic in the long term.
At some point, Amazon and Uber and so on and so forth are going to realize that actually, employees using 100k tokens or even 50k tokens is better than 500k and Anthropic’s revenue will fall off a cliff.
I think removing limits is fine. There’ll be overspend and at some point adjustments in expectations as we learn more about the value that can be delivered which will likely result in a reduction in spend, but even now, during this period of relative immaturity about measuring the value of output, so long as more tokens = more output, I don’t think the introduction of limits represents much of a risk to Anthropic and OpenAI. Tokenmaxxing is uniquely bad because it is not tied to any additional value (more tokens for the same output).
And I could be wrong about tokenmaxxing being a Claude specific problem but as far as I can tell, all of the major companies encouraging employees to maximize their token usage are Claude Code users. And the music has to stop on that at some point, whether because the companies run out of money or because they learn better ways of measuring productivity in the AI age. And if tokenmaxxing is what is driving Anthropic’s lead in revenue, it could be catastrophic to lose that, because Anthropic are spending billions of dollars per month on the infrastructure to support it.
If tokenmaxxing is evenly distributed between Anthropic and OpenAI then they’ll both hurt but equal hurt shouldn’t disadvantage either much.
