I love Claude and have got a lot out of it in terms of Claude Code especially. The problems are stacking up for Anthropic however, and the same for OpenAI too. What both companies have in common is they burn enormous amounts of cash whilst keeping a very loose relationship with the truth, especially when it comes to how they deal with customers. OpenAI for example even did one on Disney who were paying $1bn so it’s not too surprising when they choose to ignore support tickets sent by someone on a $20 per month contract. Misrepresentation of capabilities It feels like the advertised capabilities are completely different to what subscribers actually get. This is against the law in Europe and the UK when it’s a paid subscription. The terms must be transparent. In the US it’s probably fine because you folks let corporations stomp all over you, but it’s not like that here. Anthropic change the formula almost every month for actual usage and actual performance (confirmed 67% drop by AMD). This is equivalent to consumer fraud where a company that sells olive oil replaces 67% of the product with water and doesn’t label the change. These legal issues and hefty fines from regulators especially in Europe are not far away now. The wolves are at the door. This creates an even bigger problem for Anthropic: Trust erosion in the brand. For professional users, Claude Code lives and dies off its dependability as a work tool, if enterprise and even organisations like AMD or Disney get the rug pulled under them, it damages trust in the brand really badly. LLMs are a commodity - once trust is lost, customers can easily move away over night to a different one. So why is China going to pounce and when? Deepseek 4 is rumoured for this May/June. In the US, data centre capacity just isn’t there to support further expansion in enterprise. However with Huawei, the Chinese are making their own AI server chips. As we saw with the OpenAI Sora - Disney shambles, the big money for Anthropic is not with consumers and individuals but as we saw with Sora there simply isn’t enough server capacity to keep adding more big customers. All they can do is downgrade the service levels for everyone in order to have silent tiers where some are downgraded, it’s a black box. They are trying to fit all these big demanding corporate customers into the very finite amount of compute and RAM available to them. (That’s why you’ve been deprioritised in peak times by Anthropic as a Max customer, it’s nothing to do with ‘bugs’ or ‘skill issues’) Finally, there is a crisis in hardware and fuel costs, entirely of the US’s own making, in which they have zero control over. That’s because TSMC and Nvidia, as well as the memory chip suppliers are unable to expand quickly enough to keep up with the demand so the hardware prices simply keep escalating. TSMC are reluctant to spend billions expanding factories for something that resembles a bubble. The result is driving up costs for Anthropic. There’s a big risk also in that TSMC are on Taiwanese territory contested by China and the lithography machine supply is a monopoly (ASML, based in The Netherlands). The glass in these machines is German… Zeiss. This is a fragile ecosystem and one the Americans have no control over. For years I’ve watched US company after company grow and expand without a single thought about whether it will be profitable in the short and medium term. They are exposed the moment the investors pull the rug. Amazon were able to get by on tiny profit margins or even huge losses for many years because investors saw the potential to scale. Now the potential to scale data centre compute in the US is diminishing day by day, Anthropic and OpenAI will be less attractive to investors. The cost of the hardware is just insane and going up and up, and it doesn’t even have a decent shelf life… 1-2 years for most of the GPUs to either smoke out or go obsolete, all the while using too much energy, running too hot, and fuel costs are rising. The Chinese open weight, open source models don’t have the same ceiling. They’re getting more efficient, due to the NVidia export controls and more vertically integrated with the custom homegrown hardware. I consider Opus 4.6 to be the minimum level for serious coding work. GLM 5.1 already isn’t far in the rear view mirrors. I dare say Z ai and Deepseek aren’t spending as much manpower on marketing and safety either. There could even be a completely left-field development from the UK or Germany in the AI field that disrupts everything. The UK after all invented ARM and RISC architecture, and without the German optics industry, 3nm chip lithography wouldn’t exist and we’d all still be using roasting hot Intel CPUs in Macbooks. I’ll be up-front with you all… I don’t want America to win this race. The way these companies treat us… they don’t deserve to, and I’m convinced now that Anthropic are in serious trouble. submitted by /u/freedomfromfreedom
Originally posted by u/freedomfromfreedom on r/ClaudeCode
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