I think you're vastly overestimating the average persons ability to use Blender if you can do that in an afternoon; just figuring out how to place a colored cube and the camera probably takes an afternoon if you pick up Blender for the first time.
Usually I wouldn't expect anything to happen to a big company like this, but oof...this is so much worse than the title makes it sound. If they leave something like this in their store, then all user trust will be gone.
I'll bet there's also a good number of developers at Anthropic itself who are now surprised to learn that every api token etc. that may have appeared in a Claude Code bash command is now leaked to a third party. Whoever can gain access to this telemetry server is sure to find a lot of valuable stuff in there.
It's an ironic situation; logically what should be the moat are the models, costing hundreds of millions of investment cost to train and operate so it would make sense if we see different provider focusing in different directions.
But right now we have 3-5 top contenders that are so evenly matched that the de-facto sticking point is mostly the harness, ie. the collection of proven plugins/commands/tools/agent features that are tuned to the users personal workflow.
Do you not know how ebay works? You put in the maximum price you're willing to pay, and if you win you're paying 2nd highest bid + 1. So you don't save any money by starting with a low bid.
Please don't pretend to be dumb, "predictable" in this context means that you know the final price of the trip before you start the journey, instead of having an odometer.
And randomly hoping for a taxi to drive by maybe works as long as you exclusively travel between airports, train stations, and downtowns of major cities, but if you're even slightly more remote than that you'll have to call or use some random app to get the Taxi to pick you up.
Taxis and B&Bs and Hotels all still exist and compete with Uber and AirBnB.
Even at the same price there are valid reasons why many people prefer an Uber over a Taxi, in particular the predictable pricing and globally consistent UI.
If the problem starts to become big enough, I'd expect airsoft venues to offer special streaming or non-streaming times, depending on which group is bigger. Similar to how Saunas offer special clothed or women-only days.
H200 rental prices currently start at $2.35 per hour, or $1700 per month. Even if you just rent for 4h a day, the $200 subscription is still quite a bit cheaper. And I'm not even sure that the highest-quality open models run on a single H200.
I'm pretty sure OP wasn't talking about the management hierarchy, but "from the top" in the sense that it was big established companies inventing the cloud and innovating and pushing in the space, not small startups.
People like e.g. Bjarne Stroustroup or Linus Torvalds are also paid 6-figure speaking fees depending on the venue, and they're far less-known names than Yellen or Clinton. And not because tech conferences are trying to bribe or corrupt their speakers (i hope), but because having a big name really drives attendance.
It probably sometimes happens that speaking fees are paid as a bribe, but that's illegal and also not specific to speaking fees (similar popular schemes are to hire the person as consultant, or to buy something from him for a much higher price than the real value). It also raises the same red flags, when it turns out that the speaking fees were far above market value.
Unless that was the case here (I don't know how much other speakers are paid at Citadel), it seems premature to assume nefarious behavior.