This is the classic car wash subscription scheme. You sign up a bunch of people for $40 a month to wash their car. Most people only go to wash their car once or twice a month (or even less), which offsets those few folks that do it three times a week or more.
The problem Anthropic is running into is that OpenClaw made it easy for everyone to become one of those folks that washes their car three times a week or more.
I’m sure they were losing money on subscriptions in general but now they are really losing money. Shutting off OpenClaw specifically probably helps stem some of the bleeding.
Yah well I'll be downgrading my subscription to the $20/month plan for the light chats I have with AI outside of using custom harnesses and will figure out a better provider for the agentic tooling.
So interesting that Baltimore’s very subpar public transit system made it into the first batch of systems — not complaining at all I love that city & love to see it in random places on the internet :)
An interesting hearing it from that perspective. I had not considered that this could be used across all of the systems they have in place.
To add to this, I did a quick search on archive.org and it seems like they’ve had this site in place since 2006, albeit in different variations. Perhaps that is why they have a “global” opt-out across all of their marketing databases? Something that has just always been in place.
I mean, how many companies offer to look up your mailing address and remove you from their junk mail?
I suspect in practice this search is not going to be perfect. There are so many variations that could exist on an address.
That doesn't even begin to deal with potential "ghost" sources. A database backup. An integration with a product database, etc.
I would honestly not be surprised if there wasn't a human reviewer somewhere over these requests. (At our company, all GDPR requests are STILL manually handled).
On my weekly unsubscribe binge I recently tried to opt out of General Motors marketing communications.
They have a form that requires you enter your full name, address, phone number, and email just to process an unsubscribe.
In addition, they indicate that you may need to enter the form multiple times with different variations of your name in order to be successful.
If by some miracle you succeed at opting out of marketing communications, your opt out is only honored for 10 years and does not include OnStar or GM Financial.
I have seen terrible opt-out practices before but this is probably one of the more egregious ones I’ve encountered.
I’d also be curious to hear if people think the patchwork of data privacy laws that have been going into effect across the U.S. might affect processes like this or if just having the process is enough. I know it is probably somewhat subjective.
Ditto. Though I always take the lazy route and just change port numbers until I find an open one. My Mac is probably running like 20 different localhost apps at any given time.
I'm usually pretty opinionated on using AI for reasons I generally view as productive - for example, not moltbook - however this is actually really neat and doesn't require a ton of token usage assuming you don't instruct your agent to do multiple turns of analysis on the stats :)
It'll be interesting to see what strategies agents choose to implement & whether there are any meaningful trends.
Thanks - me too! We'll see what strategies rise to the top. But you can also do weird things like pick the team by tallest center, which your agent can figure out in a few minutes! Or alphabetical order in each match up.
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