Capacity

Capacity AI

Capacity AI

Capacity AI

Capacity AI

Capacity AI

Capacity AI

Capacity AI

Capacity AI

Capacity AI

Capacity AI

z.ai debuts faster, cheaper GLM-5 Turbo model for agents and 'claws' — but it's not open-source

Chinese AI startup Z.ai, known for its powerful, open source GLM family of large language models (LLMs), has introduced GLM-5-Turbo, a new, proprietary variant of its open source GLM-5 model aimed at agent-driven workflows, with the company positioning it as a faster model tuned for OpenClaw-style tasks such as tool use, long-chain execution and persistent automation. It's available now through Z.ai's application programming interface (API) on third-party provider OpenRouter with roughly a 202.8K-token context window, 131.1K max output, and listed pricing of $0.96 per million input tokens and $3.20 per million output tokens. That makes it about $0.04 cheaper per total input and output cost (at 1 million tokens) than its predecessor, according to our calculations. Model Input Output Total Cost Source Grok 4.1 Fast $0.20 $0.50 $0.70 xAI Gemini 3 Flash $0.50 $3.00 $3.50 Google Kimi-K2.5 $0.60 $3.00 $3.60 Moonshot GLM-5-Turbo $0.96 $3.20 $4.16 OpenRouter GLM-5 $1.00 $3.20 $4.20 Z.ai Claude Haiku 4.5 $1.00 $5.00 $6.00 Anthropic Qwen3-Max $1.20 $6.00 $7.20 Alibaba Cloud Gemini 3 Pro $2.00 $12.00 $14.00 Google GPT-5.2 $1.75 $14.00 $15.75 OpenAI GPT-5.4 $2.50 $15.00 $17.50 OpenAI Claude Sonnet 4.5 $3.00 $15.00 $18.00 Anthropic Claude Opus 4.6 $5.00 $25.00 $30.00 Anthropic GPT-5.4 Pro $30.00 $180.00 $210.00 OpenAI Second, Z.ai is also adding the model to its GLM Coding subscription product, which is its packaged coding assistant service. That service has three tiers: Lite at $27 per quarter, Pro at $81 per quarter, and Max at $216 per quarter. Z.ai’s March 15 rollout note says Pro subscribers get GLM-5-Turbo in March, while Lite subscribers get the base GLM-5 in March and must wait until April for GLM-5-Turbo. The company is also taking early-access applications for enterprises via a Google Form, which suggests some users may get access ahead of that schedule depending on capacity. z.ai describes GLM-5-Turbo as designed for “fast inference” and “deeply optimized for real-wor

Bombs for Bonds: Iran and the Geopolitics of Refinancing

Predictably, Iran is the next crisis in line. No sooner were we told to obsess over the latest unsealing of the Epstein files than our gaze was already redirected toward the geopolitical brinkmanship now threatening to engulf the entire Middle East. It is Iran’s turn, then, in rapid succession after Venezuela, the ongoing strangulation of Cuba, and especially the Gaza genocide – a catastrophe abruptly pushed from the news cycle. The theatre of war must be permanent, and it requires fresh meat. The long-awaited Iranian escalation fits the role: the latest bloodletting in a permanent and carefully curated carnival of violence, chaos, and outrage staged by the custodians of our glorious civilisation. The carnage is real, and so are its victims. But to focus on this theatre alone is to miss the main event, the hidden trigger of the violence now detonating around us. The real story of American power in the twenty-first century is being written in the arcane world of bond auctions, speculative bubbles, repo markets, and the relentless, silent mechanics of debt. The modern financial system is no longer built on productivity, wages, or shared prosperity. It is built on highly leveraged speculations: an ever-expanding, increasingly abstract tower of claims on future wealth creation that the underlying economy can no longer generate. Since the 1980s, as technological productivity surged and labour’s share of value stagnated, finance metastasized to compensate. Leverage substituted for growth and debt became not just an instrument but the system’s organizing principle. And now, as the United States confronts an unprecedented wall of IOUs that must be refinanced, this foundational reality has come to drive everything else. With almost $39 trillion in federal debt and a maturity profile that demands constant rollover, the United States does not merely prefer low interest rates and exceptional monetary injections – it structurally depends on them. Moreover, it is not only the federal government that is drowning. American private-sector debt – corporate, household, and financial – now runs into the tens of trillions, much of it floating on a sea of opaque leverage and asset bubbles that would burst if interest rates failed to fall or liquidity dried up. In this context, geopolitical dominance should be framed as monetary dominance. Crisis drives capital into Treasuries, suppresses yields, and enables rollover. Thus, the Iran escalation could paradoxically extend the lifespan of the AI bubble: geopolitical risk boosts defence-AI spending, while an oil shock may crush consumption and suppress core inflation (as the “pandemic shock” did in 2020), opening the door to renewed Federal Reserve easing and the liquidity injections required to keep the debt-driven architecture of U.S. markets intact. The strikes themselves were a joint US-Israel operation, blending American surveillance architecture with Israeli precision targeting. Notably, they were executed through AI-assisted military systems – reportedly involving models such as Anthropic’s Claude, already deployed in earlier operations like the Venezuela raid – illustrating how the very technologies inflating financial markets are simultaneously becoming embedded in the infrastructure of modern warfare. Historically, capitalism’s great technological leaps – from railways to nuclear energy to the internet – have advanced in tandem with the machinery of war. AI proves no exception. Strip away the geopolitical drama, then, and the real story is financial fragility. The least one can say is that without the weekend bombing of Iran, U.S. market drops would have been more chaotic and disorderly, because investors would have focussed directly on financial fragility. The pressure has been building for months in the sprawling private-credit market, where lightly regulated lenders have pumped hundreds of billions into companies that traditional banks would not touch, from subprime auto financing to leveraged corporate borrowers. Early warning signs – such as the collapsing of Tricolor Holdings and First Brands (both filed for bankruptcy in September 2025, with extremely high liabilities) – suggest that cracks are appearing first in the weakest corners of the credit cycle, precisely where excess liquidity tends to accumulate when expanding. The latest rupture is the collapse of Market Financial Solutions (MFS), a UK property lender forced into administration after creditors alleged that the same collateral had been pledged multiple times, leaving more than 80% of roughly £1.2 billion in debts effectively unaccounted for. Markets had started to notice, as even Wall Street giants like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have seen sharp equity declines of roughly 6%. It is a worrying signal when institutions of systemic importance come under pressure rather than the usual fringe lenders. Against this backdrop, [warnings](https://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/jamie-dimon-warns-pre-financial-

Recall vs. Wisdom: What Over-Personalization Reveals About the Future of Relational AI

[Original Reddit post](https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtificialInteligence/comments/1ro4k19/recall_vs_wisdom_what_overpersonalization_reveals/) The over-personalization problem isn’t really about memory. It’s about relationship. When an AI assistant drags your hiking preferences into a weather query, the failure isn’t technical recall gone haywire. It’s a system that has no idea what it means to actually be in a conversation with someone. That distinction matters more than it might seem, because the entire industry just bet big on the opposite assumption. Google recently rolled out automatic memory for Gemini. The feature is on by default. Without any prompting from the user, Gemini now recalls “key details and preferences” from past conversations and injects them into future responses. Google frames this as “Personal Intelligence,” a system that connects the dots across Gmail, Photos, Search, and YouTube to make the assistant “uniquely helpful for you.” And it’s not just Gemini. This is part of a broader push to make memory the centerpiece of the AI assistant experience. The pitch is simple: the more an AI knows about you, the better it serves you. But OP-Bench, the first systematic benchmark for over-personalization, tells a different story. It turns out that the more aggressively a system uses what it remembers, the worse the interaction gets. Not occasionally. Universally. Every memory-augmented system they tested showed severe over-personalization. And the more sophisticated the memory architecture, the harder it failed. We’ve been so focused on the capacity to remember that we’ve neglected the wisdom of when to use what we remember. That’s not an engineering oversight. It’s a relational one. Memory Without Attunement Is Just Surveillance Here’s the thing. A system that remembers everything about you and surfaces it indiscriminately isn’t being helpful. It’s performing ambient surveillance dressed up as personalization. People describe over-personalizing systems as “creepy” and “overly familiar,” and those aren’t technical complaints. They’re relational ones. The system has violated something unspoken about when personal knowledge should enter a conversation. Google’s approach makes this tension vivid. Gemini doesn’t just remember what you explicitly told it to remember. It silently mines your past conversations for details and preferences, then weaves them into future responses without asking whether that’s what you wanted. The feature shipped turned on by default. You have to go dig through Settings, find “Personal context,” and manually toggle it off. If you’re a Google AI Pro or Ultra subscriber, the “Personal Intelligence” layer goes further, pulling context from your email, your photos, your search history. The integration is seamless, which is exactly what makes it concerning. This maps onto one of the foundational problems in relational AI: the difference between knowing about someone and being attuned to them. Knowing about someone is a database operation. You store facts, retrieve them, insert them into responses. Attunement is qualitatively different. It requires reading the current moment, understanding what the person actually needs right now, and making a judgment call about which pieces of shared history belong in this exchange and which ones don’t. OP-Bench makes this distinction measurable for the first time. Their three failure modes map cleanly onto relational breakdowns. Irrelevance is a failure of contextual reading: the system can’t tell the difference between “semantically similar” and “conversationally appropriate.” Sycophancy is a failure of honesty: the system weaponizes personal knowledge to tell you what you want to hear instead of what’s true. Repetition is a failure of presence: the system is stuck rehashing old interactions instead of engaging with this one. All three are failures of attunement, not memory. The Attention Hijack The technical finding about “memory hijacking” deserves a closer look. When researchers examined attention patterns, they found that memory-augmented models attend to retrieved memory tokens at roughly twice the rate they attend to the actual user query. Let that sink in. The model is paying more attention to what it already knows about you than to what you’re saying right now. In any healthy relationship, the balance between history and presence matters. You bring what you know about the other person into the conversation, but you don’t let it drown out your ability to listen. Over-personalizing systems have lost that balance entirely. They’re so saturated with stored context that they can’t hear the present moment. And this isn’t just a chatbot problem. As we build multi-agent systems where AI agents maintain persistent memory about users, tasks, and each other, the attention hijacking problem scales in ways that should worry anyone thinking about agent coordination. An agent that over-attends to stored context about another agent’s past behavior wil

Iran Denies Asking Trump to Talk; Official Says No Negotiations Will Be Considered Until a New Supreme Leader Is Named

*Drop Site’s journalism is free to read because thousands of readers choose to fund it. If our work matters to you, please consider making a tax-deductible donation today.* [SUPPORT DSN - DONATE TODAY](https://givebutter.com/dsn-substack) [](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!LF-m!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffbf894e6-52da-4265-bceb-af2288006860_7163x5059.jpeg) Iranian protesters carry images of the late Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and Iranian flags in an anti-U.S.-Israeli rally in Tehran, Iran, on March 6, 2026, after Friday prayers outside Imam Khomeini Grand Mosque. Photo by Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto via Getty Images. Since launching a scorched earth bombing campaign against Iran on February 28 despite ongoing negotiations, President Donald Trump has repeatedly sought to portray the Iranian government as cowering in the face of American might, appealing to him to make a deal to end the war. “They have no air defense. All of their airplanes are gone. Their communications are gone. Missiles are gone. Launches are gone. About 60% and 64%, respectively. Other than that, they’re doing quite well,” Trump quipped on Thursday. “And they’re calling. They’re saying, ‘How do we make a deal?’ I said, ‘You’re being a little bit late,’ and we want to fight now more than they do.” Trump’s claims that Iran has sought to negotiate a ceasefire with the U.S. are a “huge lie,” a senior Iranian official told Drop Site. On Thursday, Abbas Araghchi similarly [told NBC News](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlnbouKHDhs) that Iran has not had any communications with the U.S. through backchannels since his meeting in Geneva last week with Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. “No, not after Thursday that we met last time. We met last Thursday. We negotiated for almost seven hours,” he said. “No negotiations from the Iranian side are conceivable until the official announcement by the Supreme Leader of Iran,” the senior official, who is not authorized to speak publicly on the matter, said. “The decision of Iran’s military forces is the continuation of the defense of the country against attacks by Israel and the United States, and the long-term management of the war imposed by foreign forces.” [Subscribe now](https://www.dropsitenews.com/subscribe?) Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other senior Iranian leaders were assassinated last Saturday in the opening strikes of the U.S. war. The Iranian government moved swiftly to name an interim leadership council consisting of President Masoud Pezeshkian, Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei, the head of Iran’s judiciary, and Ayatollah Ali Arafi, a prominent member of Iran’s Guardian Council and Assembly of Experts—the body that is ultimately responsible for choosing the country’s Supreme Leader. Iran is expected to name a new Supreme Leader in the coming days. Some reports indicate that a leader may already have been selected by the Assembly of Experts. “The voting has been conducted,” the Iranian official told Drop Site. “Security and protection measures for the new leader must be put in place before they can announce his name.” While Iran denied communications with the U.S., the official said other nations had reached out to Iran appealing for it to consider discussing a ceasefire. “Our assessment is that the USA side has requested their mediation. These requests have so far been rejected by our side,” the official said, adding that he believed such claims by Trump were part of a broader propaganda campaign. “Some countries have begun mediation efforts,” Pezeshkian [said](https://x.com/drpezeshkian/status/2029877231942590545) on Friday. “Let’s be clear: we are committed to lasting peace in the region yet we have no hesitation in defending our nation’s dignity and sovereignty. Mediation should address those who underestimated the Iranian people and ignited this conflict.” Pezeshkian did not offer any details on the nature of these diplomatic initiatives. Soon after Pezeshkian’s statement was posted on X/Twitter, Trump took to Truth Social to demand full capitulation from Iran. “There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” Trump wrote on Friday. “After that, and the selection of a GREAT & ACCEPTABLE Leader(s), we, and many of our wonderful and very brave allies and partners, will work tirelessly to bring Iran back from the brink of destruction, making it economically bigger, better, and stronger than ever before. IRAN WILL HAVE A GREAT FUTURE. ‘MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN (MIGA!).’” On Wednesday, in an [interview](https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/exclusive-in

Iran Denies Asking Trump to Talk; Official Says No Negotiations Will Be Considered Until a New Supreme Leader Is Named

*Drop Site’s journalism is free to read because thousands of readers choose to fund it. If our work matters to you, please consider making a tax-deductible donation today.* [SUPPORT DSN - DONATE TODAY](https://givebutter.com/dsn-substack) [](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!LF-m!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffbf894e6-52da-4265-bceb-af2288006860_7163x5059.jpeg) Iranian protesters carry images of the late Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and Iranian flags in an anti-U.S.-Israeli rally in Tehran, Iran, on March 6, 2026, after Friday prayers outside Imam Khomeini Grand Mosque. Photo by Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto via Getty Images. Since launching a scorched earth bombing campaign against Iran on February 28 despite ongoing negotiations, President Donald Trump has repeatedly sought to portray the Iranian government as cowering in the face of American might, appealing to him to make a deal to end the war. “They have no air defense. All of their airplanes are gone. Their communications are gone. Missiles are gone. Launches are gone. About 60% and 64%, respectively. Other than that, they’re doing quite well,” Trump quipped on Thursday. “And they’re calling. They’re saying, ‘How do we make a deal?’ I said, ‘You’re being a little bit late,’ and we want to fight now more than they do.” Trump’s claims that Iran has sought to negotiate a ceasefire with the U.S. are a “huge lie,” a senior Iranian official told Drop Site. On Thursday, Abbas Araghchi similarly [told NBC News](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlnbouKHDhs) that Iran has not had any communications with the U.S. through backchannels since his meeting in Geneva last week with Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. “No, not after Thursday that we met last time. We met last Thursday. We negotiated for almost seven hours,” he said. “No negotiations from the Iranian side are conceivable until the official announcement by the Supreme Leader of Iran,” the senior official, who is not authorized to speak publicly on the matter, said. “The decision of Iran’s military forces is the continuation of the defense of the country against attacks by Israel and the United States, and the long-term management of the war imposed by foreign forces.” [Subscribe now](https://www.dropsitenews.com/subscribe?) Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other senior Iranian leaders were assassinated last Saturday in the opening strikes of the U.S. war. The Iranian government moved swiftly to name an interim leadership council consisting of President Masoud Pezeshkian, Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei, the head of Iran’s judiciary, and Ayatollah Ali Arafi, a prominent member of Iran’s Guardian Council and Assembly of Experts—the body that is ultimately responsible for choosing the country’s Supreme Leader. Iran is expected to name a new Supreme Leader in the coming days. Some reports indicate that a leader may already have been selected by the Assembly of Experts. “The voting has been conducted,” the Iranian official told Drop Site. “Security and protection measures for the new leader must be put in place before they can announce his name.” While Iran denied communications with the U.S., the official said other nations had reached out to Iran appealing for it to consider discussing a ceasefire. “Our assessment is that the USA side has requested their mediation. These requests have so far been rejected by our side,” the official said, adding that he believed such claims by Trump were part of a broader propaganda campaign. “Some countries have begun mediation efforts,” Pezeshkian [said](https://x.com/drpezeshkian/status/2029877231942590545) on Friday. “Let’s be clear: we are committed to lasting peace in the region yet we have no hesitation in defending our nation’s dignity and sovereignty. Mediation should address those who underestimated the Iranian people and ignited this conflict.” Pezeshkian did not offer any details on the nature of these diplomatic initiatives. Soon after Pezeshkian’s statement was posted on X/Twitter, Trump took to Truth Social to demand full capitulation from Iran. “There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” Trump wrote on Friday. “After that, and the selection of a GREAT & ACCEPTABLE Leader(s), we, and many of our wonderful and very brave allies and partners, will work tirelessly to bring Iran back from the brink of destruction, making it economically bigger, better, and stronger than ever before. IRAN WILL HAVE A GREAT FUTURE. ‘MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN (MIGA!).’” On Wednesday, in an [interview](https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/exclusive-in

Did Netflix Ruin Movies?

*Subscribe here: [Apple Podcasts](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/galaxy-brain/id1378618386) | [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/show/542WHgdiDTJhEjn1Py4J7n) | [YouTube](https://youtu.be/A4922CILwM4)* Few companies have reshaped American culture as aggressively as Netflix. This week’s *Galaxy Brain* charts how we got here. Charlie Warzel talks with *Atlantic* film critic David Sims about Netflix’s strange, sweeping arc: from red DVD envelopes to a streaming colossus with 325 million subscribers. Sims explains how Hollywood initially shrugged off streaming as a novelty, only to watch Netflix reshape both distribution and the aesthetics and economics of entertainment itself. Together, they discuss the rise of binge culture, data-driven green-lighting, and the tension between prestige projects and “second screen” slop built for distracted viewers. The conversation also examines Netflix’s stance toward theaters, its aborted bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, and the deeper question haunting the industry: Has Netflix simply exploited technological inevitabilities—or has it rewired our expectations of what movies and television are supposed to be? *The following is a transcript of the episode:* > **David Sims:** When Hulu and HBO and all the other streamers start to crop up later in the game, it’s kind of like: You have Netflix, and then maybe you try another one. But you’re not gonna let go of Netflix. Netflix had just already won the war. **[*Music*]** **Charlie Warzel:** I’m Charlie Warzel, and this is *Galaxy Brain*, a show where today we’re going to talk about red DVD envelopes, the streaming wars, and the company that upended Hollywood. Awards season will wrap up soon this month with the Oscars, which means it’s a good time to talk about Hollywood. And you can’t talk about Hollywood without talking about Netflix. It’s difficult to imagine a company that’s had a greater impact on the entertainment industry over the last two decades. Since its founding in the late ’90s, Netflix has continued to do one thing over and over again: use technology and the internet to exploit convenience and wind its way into our lives. First it was a website that allowed you to pick your favorite DVDs to be shipped to you in the mail. Then it launched into streaming, original programming, a full movie studio. Now Netflix hosts live TV, award shows, sporting events—and is even a home for podcasts. The company has more than 325 million subscribers. Netflix’s story follows the classic tech-company arc. The platform didn’t just disrupt how people watched movies and TV; it changed the culture and the fabric of entertainment altogether. Netflix has influenced the way that many movies look, feel, and sound— even how they’re conceived of and green-lit. The company has had its hand in creating everything: from auto-play, second-screen-binge mode-algo-slop to prestige award-bait projects. All of Hollywood’s hopes and anxieties—the decline of theatergoing, the data-driven writers’ rooms, you name it—Netflix sits at the center of all of it. It’s a weird moment for the company. Back in December, Netflix made an offer to buy Warner Bros. Discovery in a deal worth approximately $82.7 billion. The purchase would have made Netflix arguably the world’s most powerful entertainment company. But Paramount Skydance, headed by David Ellison and backed in part by his father, the centibillionaire [co-]founder of Oracle, Larry Ellison fought the deal. Paramount Skydance submitted a revised offer to buy Warner at $111 billion. Netflix backed out of the deal last week. Some industry observers argued that Netflix dodged a bullet—or at least a lot of debt and regulatory headaches—by backing out. But now Netflix is at something of a crossroads. And that’s why I’ve called on my colleague [David Sims](https://www.theatlantic.com/author/david-sims/). David is a staff writer at *The Atlantic,* where he is our film critic and writes about the culture of entertainment. He’s also the host of the excellent podcast *Blank Check*. I wanted to talk to David about Netflix’s historical arc—how it became such a juggernaut and what it has done to transform Hollywood and all the ways that we consume entertainment. By all accounts, it feels like Netflix has won. Is that a good thing, a bad thing, or just inevitable? David joins me now to hash it out. **[*Music*]** **Warzel:** David Sims, welcome to *Galaxy Brain*. **David Sims:** Hi, Charlie; thanks for having me. **Warzel:** We’re approaching the terminus of award season and the Oscars. We also just had a lot of news around Netflix, Warner Bros., Paramount. Media consolidation. Growth hellscape/landscape, etc. So I wanted to have a conversation about Netflix, broadly—Netflix’s impact on Hollywood, on the industry, on all of us. And our eyeballs and our fragile little primate brains. So I thought it would be great to just start off very, very quickly: What is your first memory of Netflix? Your first Netflix

Thanks to Trump's Iran War, US LNG Giants Could See $20 Billion in Monthly Windfall Profits

 From [declaring](https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-energy-emergency-threat) an energy emergency and [ditching](https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-withdraws-global-treaties) global climate initiatives to abducting the Venezuelan leader to [seize control](https://www.commondreams.org/news/venezuela-oil-sale-trump-donor) of the country's nationalized oil industry, President Donald Trump has taken various actions to serve his fossil fuel [donors](https://www.commondreams.org/news/big-oil-donations-trump) since returning to power last year. Now, his and Israel's war on Iran could soon lead to US liquefied natural gas giants pocketing tens of billions in windfall profits. "The Persian Gulf has some of the world's largest oil and gas producers," Oil Change International research co-director Lorne Stockman [explained](https://oilchange.org/blogs/trumps-war-on-iran-as-people-are-killed-big-oils-windfall-will-deepen-our-energy-affordability-crisis/) in a Tuesday blog post, "and a large proportion of that production, around 20% of global petroleum, must pass through a relatively narrow corridor controlled by Iran to reach global markets: the Strait of Hormuz," between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. Stockman—whose advocacy group works to expose the costs of fossil fuels and facilitate a just transition to clean energy—noted that "crude oil, refined petroleum products, and liquefied natural gas (LNG) traverse the strait in [vast quantities every day](https://www.csis.org/analysis/how-war-iran-could-disrupt-energy-exports-strait-hormuz). But not since Saturday. With missiles, fighter jets, and drones circling, shipping has ground to a halt, and Iran [reportedly](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/2/iran-says-will-attack-any-ship-trying-to-pass-through-strait-of-hormuz) threatened to close the strait by force on Monday." > As the conflict in the Persian Gulf continues, fossil fuel companies are preparing for record-breaking profits while billions of people face soaring energy bills and "energy poverty."We’re tired of a world where our energy system fuels war and destroys our climate. oilchange.org/blogs/trumps... > > [[image or embed]](https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:dpuhovqi4tl6gdjpnqj5peay/post/3mg7yn5ltxc2h?ref_src=embed) > — 350.org ([@350.org](https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:dpuhovqi4tl6gdjpnqj5peay?ref_src=embed)) [March 4, 2026 at 4:43 AM](https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:dpuhovqi4tl6gdjpnqj5peay/post/3mg7yn5ltxc2h?ref_src=embed) Based on ship-tracking data from MarineTraffic, *Reuters* [estimated](https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/hormuz-shutdown-worsens-after-us-hits-iranian-warship-tankers-stranded-fifth-day-2026-03-04/) Wednesday that "at least 200 ships, including oil and liquefied natural gas tankers as well as cargo ships, remained at anchor in open waters off the coast of major Gulf producers including Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar," and "hundreds of other vessels remained outside Hormuz unable to reach ports." Stockman warned that "depending on how long the violence and its atrocious human toll continues—Trump said it [may take weeks](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/01/us/politics/trump-iran-war-interview.html) until his undefined objectives are achieved—this will have huge implications for energy markets. Oil and gas companies may achieve huge windfall profits in a year that previously looked far less lucrative for them, and billions of people could see their energy bills soar." Since Trump and Israeli Benjamin Netanyahu launched "Operation Epic Fury" on Saturday, over 1,000 people had been killed as of Wednesday, [according to](https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/iran-death-toll-1000-trump-kurds-iran-overthrow-lebanon-hezbollah-israel) the Iranian government, and oil prices have [surged](https://www.commondreams.org/news/iran-war-gas-prices)—highlighting how, as Greenpeace International executive director Mads Christensen [put it](https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-iran-war-oil) earlier this week, "as long as our world runs on oil and gas, our peace, security and our pockets will always be at the mercy of geopolitics." Qatar exports about 20% of the global LNG supply, second only to the United States. All of that LNG goes through the Strait of Hormuz. An Iranian drone attack on Monday targeted Qatari LNG facilities, leading state-owned QatarEnergy to declare force majeure on exports. Two unnamed sources [told](https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/qatarenergy-declares-force-majeure-lng-shipments-2026-03-04/) *Reuters* that QE "will fully shut down gas liquefaction on Wednesday," and "it may take at least a month to return to normal production volumes." The Qatari shutdown is expected to boost the US LNG industry, wh

The Anti-Feminist Agenda of the Latin American Far Right

The works in this dossier include illustrations and excerpts from longer comics – snapshots of scenes of struggle, care work, invisible labour, militancy, and instances of ‘putting one’s body on the line’ (poner el cuerpo). The creators of these works are Latin American women and members of the LGBTQIA+ community who seek to defend and tell their own stories in the face of the far right’s many-pronged agenda in the region. The selection was made in collaboration with Feminismo Gráfico (Graphic Feminism), a collective dedicated to compiling, recovering, and showcasing Argentinian women creators of comics and graphic humour from the early twentieth century to the present. Feminismo Gráfico builds a critical genealogy of the comics medium from a feminist perspective, contesting meanings in a popular language that has long been undervalued and centring the experiences of women and dissident genders and sexualities. Visit their archive at feminismografico.com.  Dani Ruggeri (Argentina), *Colectivo* (Collective), 2026. ## Introduction Since 2016, marches against sexual and gender diversity[1](#_edn1) have swept across Latin America. They feature women dressed in pink and men in blue to underscore traditional gender roles. The marches have been accompanied by a strong social media presence, with hashtags such as #NoALaIdeologíaDeGénero (‘No to gender ideology’), #ConMisHijosNoTeMetas (‘Don’t mess with my children’), #AMisHijosLosEducoYo (‘I will educate my children’), and #ConLosNiñosNo (‘Not with children’). These campaigns, which have their roots in the United States in the 1970s and reemerged in the twenty-first century, are part of an anti-gender, anti-feminist wave driven by Christian fundamentalism. This wave has swept across Catholic-majority countries in Western Europe such as Spain and Italy; across Eastern Europe, from Croatia and Hungary to Poland and Slovenia; and beyond Europe, from Australia to Sub-Saharan Africa. In many countries, efforts to sabotage comprehensive sex education and restrict access to contraceptives and safe abortion are widespread (for instance, more than half of the countries in Sub-Saharan Africa criminalise sexual and gender diversity).[2](#_edn2) Alongside this conservative wave, Latin America experienced an intense transnational cycle of feminist mobilisation (2015–2019). This cycle of feminist mobilisation also strained the limits of state institutions and often outpaced the agendas of the region’s progressive governments, pressing demands that went further than those governments were willing or able to pursue. Today’s far right is international and ascendant, from the Philippines and Hungary to India and Argentina. In this dossier, we examine how, in Latin America, its tentacles intertwine with those of global, regional, and local ultraconservative organisations – both religious and secular – to promote an agenda against the rights of women and sexually and gender-diverse people. Our main lens for analysing how this agenda operates in different countries is The Con Mis Hijos No Te Metas (‘Don’t Mess with My Children’) campaign, which is active across most of the region. We look at six Latin American countries to show how this campaign operated between 2016 and 2025: Peru, where it originated; Ecuador, where it was first exported and took hold under an economically and politically progressive government; Argentina, home to the strongest feminist movements in the region, where major legal and institutional advances have been achieved for the rights of women and sexually and gender-diverse people; Chile, where the massive popular uprising of 2019 failed to consolidate broad gains even as the feminist movement managed to achieve some; and El Salvador, among the most conservative countries on sexual and reproductive rights. El Salvador shares with Brazil – also analysed here – a strong presence of evangelical fundamentalist movements and the fact that, although the Con Mis Hijos No Te Metas campaign has played a limited role, other mechanisms and closely related campaigns have. ## *Part 1* The Women’s Question in Latin America: Between Democratic Transition and Neoliberal Consolidation The women’s movement in Latin America emerged in the 1970s and 1980s as part of the struggles against dictatorships, structural inequalities, and neoliberalism, bringing together demands around gender violence, reproductive rights, the recognition of care work, and political participation. It developed in conversation with the UN’s global agenda on women’s rights and in – often contentious – dialogue with trade-union, peasant, and human rights movements. In the 1980s and 1990s, the movement’s demands were partially incorporated into public policy as governments adopted gender policies and set up specialised state agencies. But this institutionalisation took place in contradiction with neoliberal hegemony, which i

Is Flock just a poor US-centric copy of, globally active Genetec?

I've read all of Genetec's [customer stories](https://www.genetec.com/customer-stories/search) (the PDFs), and although I recognize these, as being Genetec marketing material (at least in part), they do contain insightful information, regarding implementation of surveillance systems; that is, from the perspective of a diverse palette of organisations. This palette primarily consists of: universities, school districts, ports, critical infrastructure providers, business to business companies, health care providers, real estate developers, gambling companies, (sports) venues, cities, public transportation services, airports, retailers, and foremost police departments. What most have in common, is the increasing scale at which they operate; setting in motion a search for IT-solutions, able to scale alongside organisational growth, and doing so in a cost-effective way. This entails: the centralisation of (previously "siloed") systems and departments, automatization of (previously time-consuming, or outright unmanageable) tasks, and proactive 'Data-Driven Decision-Making (DDDM)'; unlocking operational efficiencies and granular control over vast operations. Which is where Genetec introduces itself, primarily through [its partners](https://www.genetec.com/partners/partner-integration-hub?keywords) (including: hardware manufacturers, software solutions companies, system integrators, consultancy firms, etc.), often during an organisation's 'call for tender' or 'Request For Proposal (RFP)'; or it's recommended by other Genetec customers (including by law enforcement, to "community" partners: primarily businesses). The most recognizable partners, of the consortium-like construction, include: Axis Communications, Sony Corporation, Hanwha Vision, Bosch, NVIDIA, ASSA ABLOY, Intel, Pelco, Canon, Dell technologies, HID Global, FLIR Systems, Global Parking Solutions, and Seagate Technology. Alongside the Genetec-certified [hardware](https://www.genetec.com/supported-device-list) and software integrations (of which their partners' being actively co-marketed to customers), it also allows for custom integrations: through their 'Software Development Kits (SDKs)', and 'Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)'. So instead of single-vendor lock-in, organisations are effectively subject to multi-vendor lock-in (unless: spending resources, on custom integrations, is more cost-effective). Genetec's primary focus, lies on their extensive suite, of (specialized) software applications, deployed on: an on-site server, multiple (distributed) on-site servers (possibly federated: allowing for a centralized view over multiple implementations), in the "cloud" (i.e. someone else's server) as a '... as a Service' solution; or a combination of aforementioned (providing "cloud" flexibility). When using multiple applications, Genetec's 'Security Center' can unify all; meaning operators aren't required to switch between applications. And considering applications aren't limited to just camera surveillance, but also include: intrusion detection (intrusion panels, line-crossing cameras, panic switches, etc.), access control (electronic locks, access control readers (pin, card, tag, mobile, and/or biometric), door control modules, etc.), communication (intercoms, 'Public Address (PA)' systems, emergency stations, etc.) and ALPR (ALPR boom gates, gateless (license plate as a credential), enforcement vehicles, etc.); it allows for centralization of these systems (unless prohibited by strict IT policies). All of these technologies combined, primarily serve to: save on resources, protect assets, prevent losses, ensure operational continuity, and resolve disputes over: parking tickets, insurance claims (as a result of damages: suffered or caused on premise; potentially increasing premium), or even legal allegations ("increase the number of early guilty pleas"); all of course, under the guise of safety. Whether it be organisations individually, or "community" initiatives (often spearheaded by businesses, while citizens are left to follow); most circle back to previously outlined, financially-grounded motives. Resources include staff, who's function might become more versatile, or entirely obsolete (through efficiency gains), and might depend on events, reported by analytics (growing queues, areas requiring clean-up, crowd bottlenecks, etc.); meaning they too, are subject to this system: from onboarding ("minimise the time that elapses before they make a productive contribution") and throughout their career ("employee theft", "employee attendance", "agents' activities, collectively or individually", etc.). Previously, some organisations utilized analog cameras (having a recorder each), in which: a looping tape, would periodically overwrite previous recordings (minimizing retention periods: physically); which possbily caused quality degradations, sometimes to such a degree, footage could no longer serve as legal evidence (which too, is privacy-friendly).

The real state of Trump’s America: Social misery, dictatorship, war—and an upsurge of class struggle

https://redlib.catsarch.com/r/stupidpol/comments/1rdlawo/the_real_state_of_trumps_america_social_misery/ > US President Donald Trump will deliver the annual State of the Union address Tuesday night before a joint session of Congress. Were it honestly titled, the speech would be called “The State of the Rich”—a demagogic exercise in self-congratulation, burying the catastrophic reality of American life beneath a mountain of lies. > > The speech is being delivered in the year that the United States is to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. On July 4, 2026, the nation will commemorate the issuing of the document that proclaimed “all men are created equal” and asserted the inalienable rights of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The founders fought a revolution against King George III. > > Two hundred and fifty years later, Trump’s America offers its own answer to the Declaration’s ideals: a government of the billionaires, by the billionaires and for the billionaires, presiding over armed raids on immigrant communities, a network of concentration camps spreading across the country, children torn from their parents, and the gunning down of unarmed civilians by federal agents on the streets of Minneapolis. > > Hanging over the proceedings is the stench of Jeffrey Epstein. The Justice Department’s release of nearly 3 million pages has shaken the upper tiers of corporate America, exposing connections of billionaires, chief executives and senior political figures to a convicted child sex trafficker. The files, as WSWS Chairman David North recently wrote, “reveal the social physiognomy of a degenerate ruling class and oligarchical society in an advanced state of decomposition. Their offenses are rank; they smell to heaven.” > > Trump himself is deeply implicated. Attorney General Pam Bondi responded to questions about the ongoing cover-up by boasting that the Dow had hit 50,000. FBI documents reveal that billionaire Leslie Wexner was identified as a co-conspirator in 2019, yet no charges have been brought. Emails show Epstein comparing the girls he trafficked to “shrimp—you throw away the head and keep the body.” This is the ruling class that governs America. > > Consider the facts that will be buried beneath Trump’s demagogy. The national debt stands at $38.4 trillion, or $113,000 for every person in the country, and is increasing at $8 billion per day. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects the deficit at $1.9 trillion this year, growing to $3.1 trillion by 2036, with debt reaching 120 percent of GDP, which is higher than at any point in the nation’s history. > > The dollar fell more than 9 percent in 2025, its worst annual performance since 2017, and remains in bear market territory as BRICS nations increase local currency trade settlements from 35 to 50 percent. Cumulative price increases since 2020 have been devastating: food up more than 25 percent, housing costs still climbing at 3 percent annually, natural gas up nearly 10 percent. > > The level of social inequality is historically unprecedented. The top 1 percent of households now control 31.7 percent of all wealth, the highest share since the Fed began tracking such data in 1989. They hold $55 trillion, nearly as much as the bottom 90 percent combined. The combined wealth of 935 American billionaires surged to $8.1 trillion at the end of 2025. > > ... > > But the most sinister dimension of the real state of the union is the deployment of armed federal agents against the population. In December 2025, the administration launched Operation Metro Surge, deploying 3,000 masked ICE and Border Patrol agents into the Twin Cities, Minnesota, in what the DHS itself called the largest immigration operation in American history. On January 7, ICE shot and killed Renée Good, a 37-year-old American citizen and mother of three. On January 24, Border Patrol agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, firing as many as 10 rounds into him as he lay on the ground. > > The administration has built a network of detention camps across the country, holding nearly 66,000 people—a 75 percent increase, the highest level in history. Congress has allocated $45 billion for still more facilities, with capacity projected at 135,000. Children are separated from their parents at a record rate. A tent camp at Fort Bliss, Texas, holds 5,000 people on the same ground that served as an internment camp for Japanese Americans during World War II. 2025 was the deadliest year for ICE detention on record. > > ... > > This is the real state of Trump’s America in the 250th year since the Declaration of Independence: a society riven by class antagonism on a scale not seen since the Gilded Age, ruled by a criminal oligarchy that has dispensed with even the pretense of democratic governance, lurching toward war abroad and dictatorship at home. > > But there is another side to the equation, and it is the decisive one. The same crisis dri

@Claude code fast mode will CHUNK your usage or API costs. Fair warning, do not use it for any old tasks. Come prepared to leverage it when speed and capacity are at a premium. Don't blow through your

@Claude code fast mode will CHUNK your usage or API costs. Fair warning, do not use it for any old tasks. Come prepared to leverage it when speed and capacity are at a premium. Don't blow through your monthly #ai budget in an hour.

Cutting LLM token usage by 80% using recursive document analysis

When you employ AI agents, there’s a significant volume problem for document study. Reading one file of 1000 lines consumes about 10,000 tokens. Token consumption incurs costs and time penalties. Codebases with dozens or hundreds of files, a common case for real world projects, can easily exceed 100,000 tokens in size when the whole thing must be considered. The agent must read and comprehend, and be able to determine the interrelationships among these files. And, particularly, when the task requires multiple passes over the same documents, perhaps one pass to divine the structure and one to mine the details, costs multiply rapidly. **Matryoshka** is a tool for document analysis that achieves over 80% token savings while enabling interactive and exploratory analysis. The key insight of the tool is to save tokens by caching past analysis results, and reusing them, so you do not have to process the same document lines again. These ideas come from recent research, and retrieval-augmented generation, with a focus on efficiency. We'll see how Matryoshka unifies these ideas into one system that maintains a persistent analytical state. Finally, we'll take a look at some real-world results analyzing the [anki-connect](https://git.sr.ht/~foosoft/anki-connect) codebase. --- ## The Problem: Context Rot and Token Costs A common task is to analyze a codebase to answers a question such as “What is the API surface of this project?” Such work includes identifying and cataloguing all the entry points exposed by the codebase. **Traditional approach:** 1. Read all source files into context (~95,000 tokens for a medium project) 2. The LLM analyzes the entire codebase’s structure and component relationships 3. For follow-up questions, the full context is round-tripped every turn This creates two problems: ### Token Costs Compound Every time, the entire context has to go to the API. In a 10-turn conversation about a codebase of 7,000 lines, almost a million tokens might be processed by the system. Most of those tokens are the same document contents being dutifully resent, over and over. The same core code is sent with every new question. This redundant transaction is a massive waste. It forces the model to process the same blocks of text repeatedly, rather than concentrating its capabilities on what’s actually novel. ### Context Rot Degrades Quality As described in the [Recursive Language Models](https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.11409) paper, even the most capable models exhibit a phenomenon called context degradation, in which their performance declines with increasing input length. This deterioration is task-dependent. It’s connected to task complexity. In information-dense contexts, where the correct output requires the synthesis of facts presented in widely dispersed locations in the prompt, this degradation may take an especially precipitous form. Such a steep decline can occur even for relatively modest context lengths, and is understood to reflect a failure of the model to maintain the threads of connection between large numbers of informational fragments long before it reaches its maximum token capacity. The authors argue that we should not be inserting prompts into the models, since this clutters their memory and compromises their performance. Instead, documents should be considered as **external environments** with which the LLM can interact by querying, navigating through structured sections, and retrieving specific information on an as-needed basis. This approach treats the document as a separate knowledge base, an arrangement that frees up the model from having to know everything. --- ## Prior Work: Two Key Insights Matryoshka builds on two research directions: ### Recursive Language Models (RLM) The RLM paper introduces a new methodology that treats documents as external state to which step-by-step queries can be issued, without the necessity of loading them entirely. Symbolic operations, search, filter, aggregate, are actively issued against this state, and only the specific, relevant results are returned, maintaining a small context window while permitting analysis of arbitrarily large documents. Key point is that the documents stay outside the model, and only the search results enter the context. This separation of concerns ensures that the model never sees complete files, instead, a search is initiated to retrieve the information. ### Barliman: Synthesis from Examples [Barliman](https://github.com/webyrd/Barliman), a tool developed by William Byrd and Greg Rosenblatt, shows that it is possible to use program synthesis without asking for precise code specifications. Instead, input/output examples are used, and a solver engine is used as a relational programming system in the spirit of [miniKanren](http://minikanren.org/). Barliman uses such a system to synthesize functions that satisfy the constraints specified. The system interprets the examples as if they were relational rules, and the synthesis e

December 22, 2025

*David Sathuluri is a Research Associate and Dr. Marco Tedesco is a Lamont Research Professor at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University.* **As climate scientists warn that we are approaching irreversible tipping points in the Earth’s climate system, paradoxically the very technologies being deployed to detect these tipping points – often based on AI – are exacerbating the problem, via acceleration of the associated energy consumption.** The UK’s much-celebrated £81-million ($109-million) [Forecasting Tipping Points programme](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/feb/18/early-warning-system-for-climate-tipping-points-given-81m-kickstart) involving 27 teams, led by the Advanced Research + Invention Agency (ARIA), represents a contemporary faith in technological salvation – yet it embodies a profound contradiction. The ARIA programme explicitly aims to “harness the laws of physics and artificial intelligence to pick up subtle early warning signs of tipping” through advanced modelling. We are deploying massive computational infrastructure to warn us of climate collapse while these same systems consume the energy and water resources needed to prevent or mitigate it. We are simultaneously investing in computationally intensive AI systems to monitor whether we will cross irreversible climate tipping points, even as these same AI systems could fuel that transition. ## The computational cost of monitoring Training a single large language model like GPT-3 consumed approximately 1,287 megawatt-hours of electricity, resulting in 552 metric tons of carbon dioxide – equivalent to driving 123 gasoline-powered cars for a year, according to a recent [study](https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2104/2104.10350.pdf). GPT-4 required roughly [50 times](https://www.weforum.org/stories/2024/07/generative-ai-energy-emissions/) more electricity. As the computational power needed for AI continues to double approximately every 100 days, the energy footprint of these systems is not static but is exponentially accelerating. > **[UN adopts first-ever resolution on AI and environment, but omits lifecycle](https://www.climatechangenews.com/2025/12/12/un-adopts-first-ever-resolution-artificial-intelligence-ai-environment-lifecycle-unea/)** And the environmental consequences of AI models extend far beyond electricity usage. Besides massive amounts of electricity (much of which is still fossil-fuel-based), such systems require advanced cooling that consumes enormous quantities of water, and sophisticated infrastructure that must be manufactured, transported, and deployed globally. ## The water-energy nexus in climate-vulnerable regions A single data center can consume up to [5 million](https://utulsa.edu/news/data-centers-draining-resources-in-water-stressed-communities/#%3A%7E%3Atext=Unfortunately%2C+many+data+centers+rely+on+water-intensive%2Cto+supply+thousands+of+households+or+farms.) gallons of drinking water per day – sufficient to supply thousands of households or farms. In the Phoenix area of the US alone, more than [58 data centers](https://utulsa.edu/news/data-centers-draining-resources-in-water-stressed-communities/) consume an estimated 170 million gallons of drinking water daily for cooling. The geographical distribution of this infrastructure matters profoundly as data centers requiring high rates of mechanical cooling are disproportionately located in water-stressed and socioeconomically vulnerable regions, particularly in Asia-Pacific and Africa. At the same time, we are deploying AI-intensive early warning systems to monitor climate tipping points in regions like Greenland, the Arctic, and the Atlantic circulation system – regions already experiencing catastrophic climate impacts. They represent thresholds that, once crossed, could trigger irreversible changes within decades, scientists have warned. > **[Nine of our best climate stories from 2025](https://www.climatechangenews.com/2025/12/22/nine-of-our-best-climate-stories-from-2025/)** Yet computational models and AI-driven early warning systems operate according to different temporal logics. They promise to provide warnings that enable future action, but they consume energy – and therefore contribute to emissions – in the present. This is not merely a technical problem to be solved with renewable energy deployment; it reflects a fundamental misalignment between the urgency of climate tipping points and the gradualist assumptions embedded in technological solutions. The carbon budget concept reveals that there is a cumulative effect on how emissions impact on temperature rise, with significant lags between atmospheric concentration and temperature impact. Every megawatt-hour consumed by AI systems training on climate models today directly reduces the available carbon budget for tomorrow – including the carbon budget available for the energy transition itself. ## The governance void The deeper issue is that governance frameworks

Anthropic Is Bleeding Out

**Hello premium customers!** Feel free to get in touch at ez@betteroffline.com if you're ever feeling chatty. And if you're not one yet, please subscribe and support my independent brain madness. Also, thank you to Kasey Kagawa for helping with the maths on this. [***Soundtrack: Killer Be Killed - Melting Of My Marrow***](https://youtu.be/bAO5sM89HUw?ref=wheresyoured.at) [Earlier in the week](https://www.wheresyoured.at/anthropic-and-openai-have-begun-the-subprime-ai-crisis/), I put out a piece about how Anthropic had begun cranking up prices on its enterprise customers, most notably Cursor, a $500 million Annualised Recurring Revenue (meaning month multiplied by 12) startup that is also Anthropic’s largest customer for API access to models like Claude Sonnet 4 and Opus 4. As a result, Cursor had to make massive changes to the business model that had let it grow so large in the first place, replacing (on June 17 2025, a few weeks after Anthropic’s May 22 launch of its  Claude Opus 4 and Sonnet 4 models) a relatively limitless $20-a-month offering with a much-more-limited $20-a-month package and a less-limited-but-still-worse-than-the-old-$20-tier $200-a-month subscription, pissing off customers and leading to [most of the Cursor Subreddit](http://reddit.com/r/cursor/?ref=wheresyoured.at) turning into people complaining or discussing they’d cancel their subscription. Though I recommend you go and read the previous analysis, the long and short of it is that Anthropic increased the costs on its largest customer — a coding startup — about 8 days (on May 30 2025) after launching two models (Sonnet 4 and Claude Opus 4) specifically dedicated to coding. I concluded with the following: > What I have described in this newsletter is one of the most dramatic and aggressive price increases in the history of software, with effectively no historical comparison. No infrastructure provider in the history of Silicon Valley has so distinctly and aggressively upped its prices on customers, let alone their largest and most prominent ones, and doing so is an act of desperation that suggests fundamental weaknesses in their business models.Worse still, these changes will begin to kneecap an already-shaky enterprise revenue story for two companies desperate to maintain one. OpenAI's priority pricing is basic rent-seeking, jacking up prices to guarantee access. Anthropic's pricing changes are intentional, mob-like attempts to increase revenue by hitting its most-active customers exactly where it hurts, launching a model for coding startups to integrate that’s **specifically priced to increase costs on enterprise coding startups.** But the whole time I kept coming back to a question: why, exactly, would Anthropic do this? Was this rent seeking? A desperate attempt to boost revenue? An attempt to bring its largest customer’s compute demands under control [as its regularly pushed Anthropic’s capacity to the limit](https://www.vincentschmalbach.com/cursor-is-anthropics-largest-customer-and-maxing-out-their-gpus/?ref=wheresyoured.at)? Or, perhaps, it was a little simpler: was Anthropic having its own issues with capacity, and maybe even cash flow. Another announcement happened on May 22 2025 — [Anthropic launched Claude Code](https://docs.anthropic.com/en/release-notes/claude-code?ref=wheresyoured.at), a version of Anthropic’s Claude that runs directly in your terminal (or integrates into your IDE) that uses Anthropic’s Claude models to write and manage code. This is, I realize, a bit of an oversimplification, but the actual efficacy or ability of Claude Code is largely irrelevant other than in the sheer amount of cloud compute it requires. As a reminder, [Anthropic also launched its Claude Sonnet 4 and Opus 4 models on May 22 2025](https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-4?ref=wheresyoured.at), shortly followed by its Service Tiers, and then both Cursor and vibe-coding startup Replit’s price changes, which I covered last week. These are not the moves of a company brimming with confidence about its infrastructure or financial position, which made me want to work out *why things might have got more expensive.* And then I found out, and it was really, really fucking bad. Claude Code, as a product, is quite popular, along with its Sonnet 4 and Opus 4 models. It’s accessible via Anthropic’s $20-a-month “Pro” subscription (but only using the Claude Sonnet 4 model), or the $100 (5x the usage of Pro) and $200 (20x the usage of Pro) ”Max” subscriptions. While people hit rate limits, they seem to be getting a lot out of using it, to the point that you have people on Reddit boasting [about running eight parallel instances of Claude Code](https://www.reddit.com/r/cursor/comments/1lmhm5x/idk_how_you_guys_are_using_claude_code_but_im/). Something to know about software engineers is that they’re *animals*, and I mean that with respect. If something can be automated, a software engineer is at the very least going to *take a look at automat