They know they need to differentiate from other offerings that are catching up, but I don't know anyone who has just left their work up to any of these specialised products. Most try it say "it's interesting" and then move on.
This is akin to a demo / SDK ready to plug into a store, it’s just making it easy for devs to get started. it’s still using core models and APIs, no special magic models.
You posited two extremes, with no evidence for either, and with no other possibilities in between, or even outside the spectrum. That's beyond mere conjecture: it's just nonsense. I hope you realize that.
Having said that Terra is awesome for clearly defined (by Opus/Fable) research task, and Sol is amazing for adversarial review, but I won’t allow them to touch my codebase any more.
If someone has a workflow where they keep tight control over agents, reviews the code by hand and so on, I can imagine them being useful.
For example, this exact narrative you're framing was said back during Opus 4.6/4.7 and fast forward to today we have open weight models that perform at Opus 4.6 level.
Too many people, hence all the friction and cost.
It's pretty clear that there is massive unmet demand for AI, and compute cannot keep up. So you can pretty reliably dial in the "free compute for inference" situation for any given lab based on their pricing and friction tactics.
Anthropic/Google getting stuffed (Google is an odd case here)
OAI doing alrightish
Grok/Meta basically doing giveaways
Chinese models trying to fill vacancies on 3rd party compute
I suspect they just have loads of subscription users, probably many enterprise seats, but I sort of doubt there are agentic pipelines built on their metered pricing in the same scale as they may have subscription seats.
I think the whole pentagon thing really cast Anthropic into the spotlight, and their aesthetic is pure marketing excellence. It is the "trendy" AI to use. However on the backend, they did not have the compute available to serve everyone, especially since they seem to lean towards massive parameter models.
If you're using Claude in a pair-programming/"exoskeleton" sense, you'll probably never get close to maxing your subscription allotment unless you really lean on Fable.
The "you can't get anything done" comment confounds me, frankly.
I feel like this is a messed up thing to brag about. From dark patterns now to whatever this is. Like a dark nudge from something that can appear intelligent, acting as a person, with the goal of selling more and more.
From a consumer perspective, I'm going to avoid coming anywhere near something like this. They've got data harvested from all of humankind and are weaponizing it as this discrete marketing tactic, convincing me to spend 35% more money on things I didn't actually need.
Such a bleak outlook. "Robot tells me to buy so I buy"...
The LAST thing you want to be non-deterministic is a payment system, right? What is the possible use of AI in the payment process? I fill in fields and that gets whisked away to an API somewhere to verify. Why do I possibly need Claude involved?
I'd enthusiastically pay a large premium for this, if any hungry startup people are looking for ideas.
I'm not interested in using agents controlled by vendors. Our interests are adverse! Even plain text search on modern storefronts is an anti-consumer tarpit that promotes (upranks) defective products and things I wasn't deliberately seeking, and hides what I actually need, to maximize my eyeball time in their store. Imagine how much worse the experience could get, with a predatory AI guiding the process—studying the hapless human's psyche; gaming it.
No; I don't want that at all. I want to view as few commercial offers as possible. I want to invest as little time as possible in these meaningless-to-my-life consumerism chores.
> "Retailers running shopping agents on Claude have seen carts up to 35% larger..."
Yup; the opposite of that, please!
This would also be more transparently a benefit to consumers, as I recall one of the hurdles in the present state of anti monopoly law is present monopolies (like notably Amazon) have rather obviously reduced costs/made life easier for consumers.
This tension between these companies and consumers becomes more obvious as companies resist these moves while more and more consumers adopt LLM intermediaries.
It's really a shame, because it would 100% be nice to have a one-stop shop that you can find the exact same SKU product and figure out who has it the cheapest.
Dropshipping as a "make $10k/week and be your own boss" idea is back?
Fern, a popular human made channel published this yesterday: https://youtu.be/-Gnrp_caPvo?si=H9V6Pa3rwJr5UzeW
You know, maybe merchants now have to "justify to the bank why they are using Shopify instead of Anthropic" just like your software engineers have to "justify not using AI".
A new AI purity spiral is emerging that devours one by one.
this is just marketing for them, they will do these kinds of posts for every possible industry.
Automating the checkout is tricky, but with WebMCP, I feel like agents will be able to go and checkout directly on websites soon. I myself am building an open-source agentic commerce chat that uses MCP-UI under the hood and brings the full checkout experience to the chat.
Also, we bring in the PayPal and Stripe Elements directly into the chat so you can enter your credit card info. Just like entering it on that merchants website.
What is even the legal basis here? Can the agent sign contracts on your behalf? What if it is tricked by the vendor into signing for a monthly subscription you never wanted?
I'm not sure I would risk building an agentic app that competes with this on Anthropic models out of fear of that scenario.
Thats more of a 2 year old thing...
I'm also a little worried about their example of "two buyer messages contain instructions to refund and reprice the store" - the intent is clearly to show the agent refusing the command, but the fact it has made it into it's context here shows this is a terrible idea
This has nothing to do with Claude - just showing neat things out into the world for people to find.