Why Anthropic does not incentivize users to keep using it

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]I thought you all wanted us over attached to the models. I thought you wanted us to just to be on the models and never So, we should talk about incentives here because we don't do ads.

[00:00:10]>> Um, so when you do ads, your incentive is to keep people on exactly as you say, as many hours as possible because like every every second their eyeball is on the screen is a second that they see the ad. So we don't do ads. We do subscriptions. We sell to companies. Our our our consumer, you know, consumer version of the model is is you know is is free up to a point and you pay a subscription if you know if you want to get if you want to get a lot more >> because that that the incentive that gives is for the models to be useful.

[00:00:46]People say well I'm you know I'm I'm paying for this. I want I want this to pro provide value to me. I want this to be useful. not, you know, I want the the the user to spend the most number of hours >> looking at it. I think I think that's a warped incentive, right? Because in in the in the in the contrast that we drew between, you know, do do you want to be addicted to these things or do you want them to help you live your life? Um I think the model that we've chosen does you know helps you live your life instead of instead of being instead of being addicted >> and we make different technical choices based on those incentives right so at anthropic we say you know when you've completed a conversation with claude and you've gotten the answer you want um the goal of the model is not to keep you engaged right whereas if you imagine you're a company that does serve ads every extra minute that you are on the platform you're more likely to buy something and that's how the company makes money. You would make different technical choices about how you want the model to end or continue a conversation.