Monologue: What's Going On At Anthropic?

In this week’s Better Offline, Ed Zitron discusses Anthropic’s aggressive new rate limits, the leak of Claude Code’s source code, and the dread consequences of having software written 100% by LLMs. Free newsletter: The Subprime AI Crisis Is Here https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-subprime-ai-crisis-is-here/ Save $10 off a year of my premium newsletter: https://edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo-subscription/gzqwkv54e1 - I’d be so grateful! Peak hours announcement: https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/26/anthropic_tweaks_usage_limits/?ref=wheresyoured.at https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/31/anthropic_claude_code_source_code/ Boris on 100% of his code: http://x.com/bcherny/status/2004897269674639461 Lenny interview with Boris: https://x.com/lennysan/status/2024896611818897438 YOU CAN NOW BUY BETTER OFFLINE MERCH! go to https://cottonbureau.com/people/better-offline use free99 for free shipping on orders of $99 or more. Buy our new “FUCK DATA CENTERS” shirts today! Newsletter: wheresyoured.at Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/betteroffline Ed's Socials - http://www.twitter.com/edzitron instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com https://www.threads.net/@edzitron email me [email protected] See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:08Ed Zitron?

  Hello and welcome to this week's Better Offline. I'm your host, Ed Zitron.

• 1:23Ed Zitron?

  So yes, you're getting two monologues this week because we had a guest pull out last minute, leaving me with just my keyboard, my microphone, and a Diet Coke in one of those weird vacuum-sealed tubes that really only real Diet Coke freaks own. And today I'm going to start with a few questions. What's going on in Anthropic? What is Dario Amade up to? Why do things keep breaking? Used to be the coders could just launch Claude and run a bunch of subagents to look productive. Think you can rely on Claude code? Guess again. Dario Amade doesn't care about you. And he certainly doesn't care about your family. Anyway, to set the scene, I need to give you a few details about Claude Code in general, which you don't pay for Claude Code itself, there's not like a Claude Code subscription.

• 2:07Ed Zitron?

  When you subscribe to Anthropic's service, you pay for a Claude subscription. And you either pay 20 bucks, 100 bucks, or 200 bucks a month. With each tier having more access than the last, and access meaning rate limits, so you can use it more. Though if you're wondering what that actually means, that's really by design. As all Anthropic tells you is that you've got a five-hour limit and a weekly limit on their models, with a separate one for Claude Opus, which is their more expensive, more complex one. An important detail is that these subscriptions are also heavily subsidised. When you pay Anthropic 200 dollars a month, you're not paying on a per-token rate, which is what AI startups have to do, they pay per-million input and output tokens. No, no, no. You just do stuff and stuff comes out.

• 2:50Ed Zitron?

  And you're able to do the same things you would if you're using the API, but you're burning tokens, and you can burn over 2,500 dollars in model tokens on a 200 buck a month subscription. Or at least you could. And some users have been able to spend upwards of 5,000 dollars on the same subscription. Rate limits are generally used to restrict people from burning as much, but the problem has become that for Anthropic to approach anything close to profitability would have to rate-limit people into the, well, into the depths of hell at this point. Moving on, in the middle of March, Anthropic started a two-week-long promotional campaign where they doubled rate limits for off-peak hours using Claude, set to end on March 27, 2026. A day before it was set to end, on March 26, 2026, Anthropic would announce it was starting

• 3:34Ed Zitron?

  peak hours, with Claude Code users maxing out their sessions faster than, between the hours of 5:00 AM and 11:00 PM Pacific, Monday to Friday, with a spokesperson limply adding that efficiency wins, unnamed of course, would offset this and only 7% of users would hit the limits. All of this was sold as a result of managing the growing demand for Claude. Yeah, spoiler alert, more than 7% of users appear to have hit the limits and nobody seems to be feeling particularly efficient, don't know where those gains are. One user on a hundred dollar a month max plan complained about hitting sixty-one percent of his session limit, the five hour one, after four prompts, which he found out based using a tool called CC usage, cost ten dollars and twenty-six cents in tokens. He still spent

• 4:17Ed Zitron?

  ten percent of his subscription in four prompts. Another said that they hit sixty-three percent of the limit on their two hundred a month plan in the space of a day, and another hit ninety-five percent after twenty minutes of using their max plan. Gonna guess a hundred dollars a month on that one. Another person hit their max limit after two or three things, don't know what they were, and another vowed to cancel their two hundred dollar a month subscription after hitting their weekly limit in the space of a day, saying that they, and I'm going off of a translation from fucking Grok, so forgive me, expected a premium experience for two hundred dollars and what they got was constant limit stress. I've linked a lot of these in yesterday's free newsletter, the subprime AI crisis is here. Really advise you read it, but also you can see how many people are mad. Or just

• 4:58Ed Zitron?

  go on Twitter and search Claude limits. It's not great. Now, while Anthropic technical staff member Lydia Halli posted that Anthropic was aware of people hitting usage limits in Claude code way faster than expected, and that some investigation of some sort was taking place, it's hard to imagine that Anthropic had no idea that these limits were so severe, although any of this was a surprise. Now, as I wrote this sentence that I'm reading on Tuesday, March thirty-first, it doesn't appear that any changes have been made. People are still complaining about hitting their limits in a few prompts, and Anthropic has yet to update anyone, in my opinion, because these are the rate limits they decided were necessary to keep the business going and roll their nasty ass into IPO.

• 5:39Ed Zitron?

  A few days previously, though, Anthropic had also accidentally, and I put that in quotation marks, leaked the existence of their Capybara and Mithos models to Fortune magazine. By which I mean they had a data cache, to quote Fortune, with over three thousand assets that was left open on the internet, and Fortune somehow found it. You know, it kind of reminds me of like a skeezy bloke dropping a Magnum condom out of his wallet in front of a woman and being like, "Hey, hey, you see that? Whoa, whoops, whoops." In any case, this massive leak also included absolutely fucking nothing about the models themselves, other than that they're a step change better, and that their cybersecurity features were so very scary that they would have to roll them out slowly.

• 6:20Ed Zitron?

  I'm, I, I don't know, man, I, no insult to the people at Fortune, I just don't think they're on fucking showdown looking up AWS buckets. I wonder how this got there. Now, I will say, at first I was completely sure that this was a deliberate leak, because 3,000 assets left open on the internet and none of them have any info on the model, but just scary things like, "Ooh, it's so much better." But now I'm not so sure, because yesterday Anthropic accidentally leaked the entire source code of its Claude Code coding interface. The leak was a result of a reference in Claude Code's MPM package, the thing that you query to download Claude Code onto your computer via the terminal, that led right back to a zip archive on Anthropic's servers, per the register, that contained the source code.

• 7:03Ed Zitron?

  I will add that there's an ongoing discussion about what actually caused this problem, with someone hackenous, hackenews? Hackenews? I'm just gonna keep it, saying it might be a problem with Bun, the packaging tool used to allow people to download Claude Code, that Anthropic acquired in December of last year. To be clear, this isn't a leak of Anthropic's models, but it's still an unbelievably large leak, one that exposed Claude Code's innards to the entire internet and all of their competitors. And while I imagine using the source code is illegal on some level, I can't imagine there's any reason their competitors can't take a look, or that they're, you think that they're all sitting around being like, "Oh, I absolutely can't, I mustn't, it's not okay." Especially when this is a company that fucked over just about anyone building anything

• 7:46Ed Zitron?

  that you build on top of a Claude Code subscription. Thinking about how they treated open code, by the way. Anyway, now is a great time to remind you that Claude Code creator Boris Cherny said at the end of December that 100% of his contributions to Claude Code were written in Claude Code, and told Lenny Rochitsky in February 2026, "The coding is now solved for most use cases." I assume that the use cases that haven't been solved include making sure that there isn't a direct link from the Claude code installer to a Cloudflare storage bucket with its source code ready to download. That one just doesn't seem like they got that one pinned down. I'll also add that the same interview added that Churney hadn't written a single line of code since November 2025.

• 8:28Ed Zitron?

  Which is, I mean, those of you playing at home, I know many of you really enjoy my game show, is that good? And I just have to ask you, is that good? Anyway, I feel like I very recently warned everybody about the very obvious dangers of allowing LLMs to write all of your code. These models do not have thoughts or knowledge or really anything other than probabilistic generations of outputs based on training data, and a lot of it, and they're quite complex. Nevertheless, this means that any time you choose to just accept the code they generate without reading it thoroughly, you're choosing to trust something inherently untrustworthy, doesn't think or have knowledge. This is just the beginning of us finding out the ugly cost of software engineers trusting

• 9:11Ed Zitron?

  large language models to write their code at scale. LLMs are good at writing lots of code, which in turn means that the code requires far more time to review, which assumes you do review it, which becomes far more difficult when you're constantly pressured to ship more and more and more software every fucking week. Or if you're Boris Churney and you believe that shipping software fast is the same thing as shipping good software. I'm now thinking about the launch of Anthropic's Claude Co-Work, a product that can allegedly manage files on your computer or draft documents or some such bullshit, nobody seems to be able to explain it. At the time, Boris Churney proudly boasted that Claude Co-Work was built in around a week and a half, which makes perfect sense, as almost immediately a story came out of

• 9:53Ed Zitron?

  a guy who tried to reorganize his wife's desktop files using Co-Work, which is one of the literal things on the Co-Work website it tells you to do, only to watch it delete every single one of his photos permanently. He was only able to recover them thanks to an iCloud backup. This is the future that these so-called large language model companies want for you. Bad software, shipped quickly, hyped by a captured media that doesn't give a damn about whether the services are the things you pay for are functional or useful, and doesn't even bother using the tools or understanding them. And nobody else appears to be discussing how inherently deceptive these companies have become. A subscriber to Claude who paid for an annual subscription in December 2025 now has a product that has significantly less value thanks to egregious rate limits.

• 10:37Ed Zitron?

  And that's also like if you can even do your job anymore, I imagine people in the 20 buck a month subscription are really fucking suffering. And in general, Anthropic's models seem to, go and look at the Reddit if you want to understand more, they seem to oscillate in utility and efficacy based on the time of day you use them and their proximity to a new model launch. This is a really weird story that I've never been able to get to the bottom of, but there have been reports for like over a year of different models from Anthropic, from OpenAI, from whomever, getting dumber at random times. No one's able to get to the bottom of it. I've heard people saying they quantize the models, make them smaller during the day. I don't know. If you have any information about this, shoot me a piss on Plurk or email me at [email protected].

• 11:22Ed Zitron?

  That's [email protected]. What we do know is that Claude Code, one of the few popular AI products, is built with the same disregard for safety and customer happiness as the rest of Anthropic's astonishingly shitty business that burns billions of dollars with no end in sight. Chief Claude Code's sloppagandist Boris Cherny doesn't give enough of a fuck about his customers to actually read his code, and I imagine the same goes for a lot of other engineers within the company and big tech at large. The consequences are already obvious. In the last few months, AI coding tools brought down AWS twice and lost Amazon hundreds of thousands of orders and led to a security breach inside Meta mere weeks ago. And now these tools have leaked Claude Code's source code.

• 12:07Ed Zitron?

  How much is enough to make people wake up to the inherent dangers of using these models to write software at scale? I guess we're gonna find out. I'll see you on Friday for another monologue.

• 12:26Speaker 02

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