Shudh

TBH I don't agree with your take. I don't think Athropic's desire to control the harness is about keeping resource usage under control. They could accomplish that by just enforcing limits on the actual resource usage (which they already do) -- if some third-party harness is inefficient, users of than harness hit their limits faster. I think instead that they want to control the harness because if switching LLM providers is too easy, it makes business difficult for the providers. Say GPT 5.5 comes out and it's clearly smarter, faster, and cheaper than Opus 4.7. If everyone can switch providers with two clicks in their harness, many of them will. This would lead to wild revenue and usage swings, which makes capacity planning hard. And perfect competition drives down prices -- in this scenario Opus has to cut its prices to get some users back. Obviously no business wants to be in that situation! By controlling the harness, they add some stickiness. If switching LLM providers means switching harnesses, that's a barrier high enough that most people won't bother to do it on a whim. So now Opus 4.7 can weather the storm until 4.8 or whatever comes out and is back on top. So it makes perfect sense to me as a business decision. It may be user-unfriendly, but tech companies do stuff like this all the time. It's nothing new. Though I would say, it seems weird to me to do this *on top of* subscriptions. Subscriptions already create a lot of stickiness. If you're subscribed only to Claude, that's a pretty big barrier to trying out GPT quickly -- a bigger barrier than the harness barrier I think. So I question whether controlling the harness is really worth all the effort they are putting into it, but idk, they probably have insights that I don't on this. Another factor here might actually be safety concerns. As we know, Anthropic leadership is deeply (excessively, IMO) worried about AI safety, and they feel that Anthropic will do a better job of addressing safety than any other company. They may feel that control of the harness is an important tool for that. I could definitely imagine Dario being terrified of OpenClaw from a safety perspective (I sort of am too). These explanations make much more sense to me than the efficiency issue, which again seems like it could easily be managed in other ways. But of course, these explanations are much harder to just come out and say, without stirring a lot more outrage...

Singapore’s obsession with AI is hitting a new peak. 🇸🇬 🤖 Today, 4 of the top 5 most downloaded apps in SG are AI chatbots. Both the tech migrants and the aunties in hawkers are doing it. And what’s with this vpn at number 4.

cloudflare is underrated. it’s like those reels where a zoo worker throws a meat to an alligator and it lands next to the alligator’s face but it takes the alligator a minute to realize it

Anouncing Spending Caps: Define your maximum monthly spend, if your bill reaches this limit, your Cloud Run resources will be automatically paused.

Announcing Cloud Run sandboxes: Secure on-the-fly code execution: Spin up ephemeral, isolated sandboxes from within Cloud Run resources. Safely execute agent-generated code, scripts, or Chromium.

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