MultiAgency

The new Claude Tag feature seems extremely useful, but at the same time, a dangerous bargain for enterprises because of the pricing model and the risk of lock-in. The four big changes together mean that you interact with Claude as a coworker instead of a tool (the same Claude instance for everyone instead of each worker; soaks up tacit knowledge without your telling it; acts on its own; and does so asynchronously). All clearly very useful, but completely flips the interaction paradigm. anthropic.com/news/introduci… Let’s talk about lock-in. As far as I can tell, Claude maintains its own memories in this new way of working; the human team members can’t see and edit them. (System administrators presumably can, but they have other things to do!) Tacit knowledge thus goes from a weakness of AI agents to a major strength — it seems inevitable that as teams and orgs start to use Claude this way, it will become the main queryable repository of all their tacit knowledge, creating dependence and stickiness. Effectively, Claude is a coworker that you can’t fire without *every* team losing workflows and know-how. By the way, it also seems to introduce a new and pervasive security risk, since Claude can be integrated into private channels as well, and can be given access to repositories and tools even if the users in that channel don’t have access to them. Anthropic has introduced an interesting but complicated access control model to handle all this: claude.com/blog/agent-ide… But I’m not sure I trust people to understand and implement it correctly, nor the LLMs to be sufficiently robust against threats like prompt injection. What about pricing? Claude is not like regular coworkers, because it bills for every token it produces. And it can do an unbounded amount of work, asynchronously and without being asked. In the current model, when AI is a tool, enterprises set per-user budgets, which creates accountability and keeps cost somewhat manageable. When everyone shares a Claude, it will be much harder to track and control spending. Of course you can set a token budget, but turning off Claude for the month for everybody when the budget is hit risks bringing work to a screeching halt. When AI companies talk about the next stage of AI being a “drop-in replacement” for human workers, it should be understood not as a technical innovation but a business model innovation, enabling more value capture and rent extraction. AI companies are no longer competing for a share of enterprises’ IT budgets but rather a share of their entire labor spend, which is orders of magnitude bigger. Claude Tag is a big milestone in this evolution. This shift is very good for AI companies, but it is unclear if it is good for their customers.