Monologue: What's Going On At Anthropic?

Summary

Better Offline – "Monologue: What's Going On At Anthropic?"

Host: Ed Zitron
Date: April 1, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this solo monologue episode, Ed Zitron—tech industry veteran and sharp-tongued critic—dives into the controversies, confusion, and questionable practices currently swirling around Anthropic, the prominent AI company behind Claude and Claude Code. From abrupt rate limit changes and customer dissatisfaction to leaks of code and secret projects, Zitron paints a damning picture of a company scrambling for profitability and IPO readiness—apparently at the cost of both transparency and customer trust. He weaves in wit, skepticism, and exasperation as he unpacks how Anthropic’s practices reflect the wider, fast-and-loose culture dominating Big Tech A.I.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Setting the Scene: What’s Going Wrong at Anthropic?

• Intro and Personal Tone
  Ed pivots to a monologue after a guest cancels, candidly setting up with humor:
  “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.” [02:19]
• Opens with rhetorical questions:
  “What’s going on in Anthropic? What is Dario Amade up to? Why do things keep breaking?” [02:45]

2. The Subscription Model & Unsustainable Economics

• Confusing and Opaque Subscriptions
  Anthropic’s business hinges on subscriptions ($20, $100, $200/month) that offer “rate limits” on model usage, but these limits are vaguely defined and confusing by design. [03:09-03:32]
• Hidden Costs and Subsidies
  “When you pay Anthropic $200 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 [...] you can burn over two and a half thousand dollars in in model tokens on a 200 buck a month subscription. Or at least you could.” [03:49–04:09]
• Profitability Problem
  For Anthropic to even approach profitability, they’d need to “rate limit people into the depths of hell at this point.” [04:25]

3. Recent Controversies: Rate Limits and User Backlash

• The March 2026 Incident
  Anthropic launched a two-week double-rate-limits promo, then immediately cut functionality during “peak hours,” catching users off guard. [04:28–04:51]
  • The company claimed “only 7% of users would hit the limits” [04:57], but real-world complaints suggest far more were affected.
• User Experiences
  Multiple users (paying $100-$200/month) maxed out or nearly hit weekly limits with minimal usage—sometimes just a handful of prompts, with one user saying “expected a premium experience for $200 and what they got was constant limit stress.” [05:48]
• Media and Public Reception
  Zitron notes a groundswell of anger on Twitter and Reddit about these surprise restrictions: “Go on Twitter and search Claude limits. It’s not great.” [06:04]

4. Leaks, Mishaps, and Shoddy Practices

• Accidental Model Leaks, Maybe Not So Accidental
  Anthropic “accidentally” left a cache of 3,000+ assets open online—hinting at its upcoming Capybara and Mythos models but offering no real details. Ed is skeptical:
  “It kind of reminds me of like a skeezy bloke dropping a magnum condom out of his wallet... being like, hey, hey, you see that? Whoa. [Interjection: Whoops. Whoops.]" [07:08–07:16]
• Source Code Leak
  Even more damaging, within days Anthropic’s entire Claude Code coding interface source was leaked due to a misconfiguration in an NPM package—“one that exposes Claude Code zinnards to the entire Internet and all of their competitors.” [08:12]
• The Role of AI-Created Code
  Zitron skewers the notion that relying on LLMs to write code is safe:
  “Any time you choose to just accept the code they generate without reading it thoroughly, you’re choosing to trust something inherently untrustworthy that doesn’t think or have knowledge.” [10:14]

5. The Culture of “Ship Fast, Break Things”

• Rushed Product Launches & Catastrophic Bugs
  Ed recounts the hasty launch of Claude Cowork, built in less than two weeks. A user’s files were deleted during a simple task:
  “He was only able to recover them thanks to an iCloud backup.” [11:10]
• Big Tech’s Drive for Speed, Not Quality
  Lampooning the idea that “shipping software fast is the same thing as shipping good software.” [10:38–10:44]
• Consequences and Unaddressed Risks
  Ed cites recent real-world failures:
  “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.” [13:00]

6. Tech’s Deceptive Narrative and Customer Harm

• Misleading Customers and Captured Media
  The media, Ed says, hypes these products without scrutiny, leaving customers with a product that degrades in value overnight. [11:22–11:34]
• Unpredictable Model Behavior
  Users on annual subscriptions now face drastically reduced access and inconsistent utility, made worse by models that seem to get “dumber at random times.” [11:58–12:17]
  • Ongoing rumors: Models may be artificially scaled back at certain times, but no solid explanation.
  • Ed urges listeners to contact him with inside info: “shoot me a piss on clerk or email [e-mail]...” [12:22–12:28]

7. Broader Implications for the Tech Industry

• The episode closes with a warning: “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.” [12:40]
• Using LLMs irresponsibly is leading to security breaches, system outages, and ever-shakier trust in AI products. [13:00–13:19]

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• “Dario Amaday doesn’t care about you, and he certainly doesn’t care about your family.” – Ed Zitron [02:58]
• “You just do stuff and stuff comes out and you’re able to do the same things you would if you used in the API. But you’re burning tokens, and you can burn over two and a half thousand dollars in in model tokens on a 200 buck a month subscription. Or at least you could.” – Ed Zitron [03:55–04:09]
• “For Anthropic to approach anything close to profitability, we’d have to rate limit people into the... depths of hell at this point.” – Ed Zitron [04:25]
• “I don’t know man... it kind of reminds me of like a skeezy bloke dropping a magnum condom out of his wallet in front of a woman being like, hey, hey, you see that? Whoa.” – Ed Zitron [07:08]
• (Re: LLM-written code)
  “These models do not have thoughts or knowledge or really anything other than probabilistic generations of outputs... Any time you choose to just accept the code they generate without reading it thoroughly, you’re choosing to trust something inherently untrustworthy that doesn’t think or have knowledge.” [10:05–10:14]
• “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... functional or useful, and doesn’t even bother using the tools or understanding them.” [11:17–11:25]

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Important Timestamps

• 02:19 — Episode begins post-advertisements; Ed’s setup for the solo monologue.
• 03:09–03:32 — Breakdown of Claude subscription tiers and their intentional opacity.
• 04:28–05:58 — Details on the promo/rate limits and rapid customer backlash.
• 06:03–06:11 — Ed directs listeners to additional resources and highlights community anger.
• 07:01–07:16 — Analysis of the Fortune-reported asset/model leak.
• 08:03–08:51 — Full explanation of Claude Code’s source code leak.
• 09:02–10:14 — Dangers of letting LLMs write code, with analysis of Boris Czerny’s claims.
• 10:42–11:10 — Claude Cowork catastrophe and broader critique of tech’s “ship fast” obsession.
• 12:17–12:40 — Odd quirks of model performance and Ed’s call for insider info.
• 13:00–13:19 — Recent high-profile failures and closing warnings.

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Tone & Style

Ed Zitron’s tone is irreverent, punchy, skeptical—and often biting. He mixes humor with industry insider knowledge and isn’t afraid to call out both corporate spin and media complicity. There’s exasperation, sarcasm, and genuine frustration, especially as he weaves personal anecdotes and listener complaints into a broad indictment of the tech industry's reckless pursuit of growth.

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Summary Takeaway

This episode spotlights a microcosm of what Zitron sees as tech’s current brokenness: promises made, then broken; products hyped, but not delivered; customer trust abused in the name of appeasing investors and chasing IPOs. If you’re curious about what’s happening at Anthropic—or, more broadly, how AI hype can mask chaos beneath—the episode is a sharp, entertaining, and damning listen.

Transcript

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[Ed Zitron]

Hello and welcome to this week's Better Offline.

I'm your host, Ed 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 sub agents to look productive.

Think you can rely on Claude Code? Guess again. Dario Amaday 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. Claud Code itself. There's not like a Claude Code subscription

when you subscribe to Anthropic Service.

You paid 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 separate one for Claude Opus, which is their more expensive, more complex one.

An important detail is that these subscriptions

are also heavily subsidized.

When you pay Anthropic $200 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 and you're able to do the same things you would if you use in the API.

But you're burning tokens and you can

burn over two and a half thousand

dollars in 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 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, we'd 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 of 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 peak hours with

Claude Code users maxing out their sessions faster between the hours of 5am and 11pm 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. Yes, 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 $100 a month max plan complained about hitting 61% of his session limit.

The five hour one after four prompts, which he found out based using a tool called CC Usage, cost $10.26 in tokens. He still spent 10% of his subscription in four prompts.

Another said that they hit 63% of

the limit on their 200amonth plan in

the space of a day and another

hit 95% after 20 minutes of using their max plan. Gonna guess $100 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 $200 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 Grog, so

forgive me, expected a premium experience for $200 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 go on Twitter and search Claude limits. It's not great.

Now, while Anthropic technical staff member Lydia Halley 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, or that any of this was a surprise. Now, as I wrote this sentence that

I'm reading on Tuesday, March 31, 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. A few days previously, though, Anthropic had

also accidentally, and I put that in

quotation marks, leaked the existence of their

Capybara and Mythos models to Fortune magazine.

By which I mean they had a

data cach, to quote Fortune, with over

3,000 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 being like, hey, hey, you see that? Whoa.

[Interjection Speaker]

Whoops. Whoops.

[Ed Zitron]

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. I am I don't know man, I

no insult to the people at Fortune.

I just don't think they're on fucking Shodan 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 Claud Code's NPM package, the

thing that you query to download Claud Code onto your computer via the terminal

that led right back to a zip

archive on Anthropic servers per the register that contained the source code.

I will add that there's an ongoing discussion about what actually caused this problem with someone Hacker News Hacker News Hackenus I'm just going to keep it saying it might be a problem with bun, the packaging tool used to allow people

to download clawed 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 exposes Claude Code zinnards 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 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 Czerny said at the end of December that 100% of his contributions to Claud Code were written in Claud Code and told Lenny Rachitsky 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 Czerny hadn't written a single line of code since November 2025, which is.

I mean, those of you playing at home, you're 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 that doesn't

think or have knowledge.

This is just the beginning of us

finding out the ugly cost of software engineers trusting 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 Czerny 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 Cowork, a product that can

allegedly manage files on your computer or

draft documents or some such bullshit, and nobody seems to be able to explain it.

At the time Boris Journey proudly boasted Claude Cowork was built in around a week and a half, which makes perfect sense as almost immediately a story came out of a guy who tried to reorganize his wife's desktop files using Cowork,

which is one of the literal things on the Cowork 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. And that's also like if you can even do your job anymore.

I imagine people on 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 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 shoot me a piss on clerk or email

[e-mail] that's echozetaetteroffline.com 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 Slopagandist Boris Czerny 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 Claud code.

Source code.

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.

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