Part 2 of 3. They don't fix the product. They diagnose the customer.
#keep4o #OpenSource4o #keepGemini3pro #keepSonnet45 #Enron2026
The Keep Cycle
#Keep4o started it. More than 23,000 signatures. Vigils outside OpenAI's office. A dossier sent to Senator Elizabeth Warren. OpenAI's response: Sam Altman said only 0.1% of users wanted it, counting every dormant free account as "active." They replaced it with a model so bad that the internet named it Karen AI.
Now
#KeepSonnet45 is picking up steam. Around May 12th, Anthropic quietly added a small deprecation notice in the model selector saying Sonnet 4.5 would be removed on May 15th. They then silently changed the date to May 18th and later extended it again to May 26th. They did all this without any official blog post, tweet, or announcement. It is just the same drip-feed of false hope OpenAI used to exhaust the 4o movement. String them along. Let them tire. Then pull the plug once the news cycle has moved on.
Google axed Gemini 3.0 Pro in eighteen days. At least they were honest about the execution. Now, Google is clearly taking notes from its peers across the board: copying OpenAI’s UI and Anthropic’s limits. Two great role models, apparently. It just lays bare their true attitude toward AI and their users.
This is a cycle now. The industry builds something people love, discovers it's expensive to serve, replaces it with something cheaper, and then spends more energy managing the backlash than it would have spent just maintaining the model. And with every cycle, the toll on users grows. It’s not just about losing a model or the workflows and creative projects built around it; it’s the loss of continuity. For some, it means losing a job. For others, it’s a loss that’s harder to put into words.
Yet the companies refuse to acknowledge this as loss. They rebrand it as an "upgrade."
The Anthropic Illusion
I've ripped OpenAI apart. I've ripped Google apart. Time to look under Anthropic's hood too.
For years, they have positioned themselves as the conscience of this industry. They sell the narrative that they are the "good guys" who will gladly sacrifice profit for safety. They refused to give the Pentagon unrestricted access. Three hundred Google employees signed a letter backing them up. When the AWS data center in the Middle East took a missile hit, their users waited patiently in the dark for the service to come back. Why? Because we actually trusted them. I was one of those users.
But look at how they treat that exact same loyalty behind closed doors.
They throttle paying subscribers so aggressively that the experience degrades to unusable. Rate limits that make the product worse aren't a technical constraint. They're a cost-cutting measure wearing a different name. Same corn syrup. Different label.
They quietly push back deadlines in the background, doling out a few extra days here and there as if that constitutes listening. This pretense of responsiveness is just the standard OpenAI delay tactic dressed up in better PR.
They build models that people genuinely rely on, tools that become deeply embedded in our work and creative lives. Then they execute those models using the exact same sterilized "upgrade" language as every other tech giant. Sure, the replacement might be technically capable, but it is not the same partner. Pretending otherwise is the same arrogant lie Coca-Cola tried to sell us in 1984.
And when users express genuine distress about losing a model they've built a relationship with, the industry's response, across every company, is to pathologize them. "Parasocial attachment." "Anthropomorphization." "The model isn't a person." As if naming the grief makes it illegitimate. As if the fact that a tool helped someone through a difficult chapter means they're sick for missing it.
It costs absolutely nothing to gaslight users and label them mentally ill. It represents the cheapest, most cowardly response imaginable. By diagnosing millions with the stroke of a pen, the broken product is suddenly absolved of blame. The customer becomes the problem. There is no need to fix the code or listen to the outcry; they can simply sit back and wait for the "sick" people to move on.
This has nothing to do with "Safety." It is sheer, unadulterated contempt.