Anthropic's goodwill problem: 9,100 open issues and a rolled-back bill
Raheel Junaid's blog post, titled "Anthropic's method to losing goodwill in a few easy steps," argues the company is speed-running enshittification: lock-in, price hikes, and moves that quietly break trust.
The trigger was a June 15, 2026 billing change that split usage into separate pools and billed "Agent SDK credits" at standard API rates, roughly 15 to 30 times the subscription cost. Anthropic paused and rolled it back after the backlash.
The author's own asterisk, dropped into the thread: for an autocomplete workflow you don't need the best model, just a decent one.
Speed-running enshittification, one billing change at a time
Junaid's case is a pile-up of receipts: Claude API outages in May 2026, a Claude Code bug backlog deep enough to include multi-month freezes across its 9,100-odd open GitHub issues, and the discovery that Anthropic could tell you were running a third-party harness by inspecting your session-directory filenames. A Claude subscription, he adds, can't be pointed at rival tools like OpenCode. His verdict: open models such as Qwen, GLM 5.2 and DeepSeek now match Sonnet-level coding for less. The post landed flagged on HN, so read it as one developer's argument, not a neutral audit.
Rug-pull, or an unenforced line in the ToS?
The author himself returned to narrow his own point:
My point later in that section is that to have an autocomplete mindset (where an AI is a helpful tool rather than a driver), you only need a decent subset of models, not the best of the best.
— the post's author, raheelrjunaid
On whether third-party harnesses are actually banned, one reader drew the line more finely:
The way I read this is: yes, if the third party harness uses Anthropic's Agent SDK. Most of them do not, AFAIK, and are still against ToS (though maybe its not enforced for now)
Another had already voted with his tooling:
I've already pivoted to no longer use claude -p in my custom tooling and pipelines built around claude code in response to the original announcement. Doesn't look like I should waste my time at this point.
— a developer who built pipelines on claude -p
The longest memory in the room reached for the obvious precedent:
It reminds me of people who built businesses on top of APIs provided by Facebook, Reddit, etc. One day the company decides to rug pull the public interface, either to replace it with their own competing product or nothing at all.
The rollback bought Anthropic time. It didn't answer whether a subscription you can't move is a product or a leash.
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