The price jump between subscription tiers is so high that relatively few people will upgrade instead of waiting a few more hours, and even if somebody does upgrade to the next subscription level, Anthropic still has an incentive to provide satisfactory answers as quickly as possible, to minimize tokens used per subscription, and because there is plenty of competition so any frustrated users are potential lost customers.

I swear this whole conversation is motivated reasoning from AI holdouts who desperately want to believe everybody else is getting scammed by a gambling scheme, that they don't stop and think about the situation rationally. Insofar as Claude is dominant, it's only because Claude works the best. There is meaningful competition in this market, as soon as Anthropic drops the ball they'll be replaced.