The price simply did not reflect the cost, and that's a problem. It happens to a lot of business and sometimes consumer's call their bluff. Whoops.
You wanna cheat and undercut competitors by shooting yourself in the foot with costs that exceed price? Fine. It's a tale as old as time. Here, have your loss lead - xoxo, every consumer.
Just charge per unit.
The tragedy of the commons is the concept that, if many people enjoy unfettered access to a finite, valuable resource, such as a GPU farm, they will tend to overuse it and may end up destroying its value altogether.
That is exactly what happened here. The price was fine if everyone upheld their moral obligation not to abuse it.
There's only one person who made a mistake here - Anthropic. They purposefully make their terms and conditions bad, and then when people played by the contract they set forth, they lost money. It's calling a bluff.
Anthropic purposefully priced this far too aggressively to undercut their competitors. Companies with stupid amounts of investor capital do that all the time. They flew too close to the sun.
You can't create a contract, have all the power in the world to rig the contract in your favor, and then complain about said contract. Everyone was following the rules. The problem was the rules were stupid.
To be more specific - abuse requires an exercise of power. End-users have no power at all. They have literally zero leverage over the contract and they have no power to negotiate. They can't abuse anything, they're too weak.
Again, there is no moral obligation to ensure Anthropic's business goes well and conveniently.