Scale & Strategy
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This is Scale & Strategy, the newsletter that keeps you informed without stealing your whole afternoon.
Here’s what we’ve got for you today:
- Anthropic Just Drew a Line on Agents
- Google Ads Kills Your Targeting — Now What?
Anthropic Just Drew a Line on Agents
Anthropic is shutting the door on third-party agent platforms running on standard Claude plans.
If you want to run agents now, you’re paying separately. Add-ons, API keys, the whole thing.
This isn’t a feature update. It’s a pricing model breaking in real time.
Here’s what actually happened.
Agent platforms like OpenClaw started hammering Claude with nonstop requests. Way beyond what flat-rate subscriptions were designed to handle.
The irony is those same models were powering a lot of that agent growth.
Success created the problem.
Anthropic’s message is pretty straightforward.
They need to “manage growth” so the product doesn’t degrade for everyone else.
Translation: power users were eating the system alive.
So now they’re splitting the world:
- Regular users stay on plans
- Agent-heavy usage moves to usage-based pricing
Which, if we’re being honest, was inevitable.
They’re softening the blow a bit.
Credits worth a month of subscription, discounted add-ons, refunds for people who want out.
But that’s damage control, not strategy.
The pushback was immediate.
OpenClaw’s creator called it out directly: first you copy features into your own stack, then you block the open ecosystem.
Not a great look if you’re trying to position yourself as the “open, safe” alternative.
The real tension here is structural.
Agents are high-frequency, high-volume by design. Flat pricing works for humans. It breaks when software starts talking to software all day.
Anthropic didn’t design Claude for that level of load.
Now they’re retrofitting the model.
Timing isn’t ideal either.
They were already catching heat over rate limits. Now they’re drawing a harder boundary around their most engaged users.
Meanwhile, OpenAI is sitting right there as the obvious alternative.
This is one of those moves that makes perfect sense internally and still costs you externally.
They’re protecting the system.
But they’re also telling their most advanced users: you’re no longer the default case.
Finally, a creator marketing platform built on real performance data
Most teams buy UGC videos and hope they perform.
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Google Ads Kills Your Targeting — Now What?
If you’re in a sensitive category, you’ve already felt it.
Remarketing? Gone.
Custom segments? Gone.
Lookalikes? Forget it.
Feels like Google just took away every lever that actually worked.
But it’s not as dead as it looks.
Here’s the reality.
Google restricts personalized targeting in categories like healthcare, housing, and employment. Not because they hate marketers, but because regulators do.
So you can still run ads.
You just can’t stalk your users across the internet anymore.
What’s left is more than people think.
Keywords. Dynamic search. In-market segments. Affinity audiences. Life events. Performance Max.
Not sexy. Still usable.
The mistake is pulling back when these restrictions hit. The better move is shifting how you target.
First shift: stop targeting people, start targeting context.
If you can’t follow the user, go where they already are.
A divorce lawyer can’t retarget visitors, but they can run ads on content about relationships, breakups, or personal finance. Same intent, different path.
You’re not chasing the user. You’re intercepting them.
Second: use Google’s pre-built audiences like proxies.
You’re not getting precision targeting anymore, so you work with broader buckets.
Plastic surgeon? Go after “anti-aging skincare” or “recently retired.” Your customer is in there somewhere.
Your job is to filter with the ad, not the targeting.
Which leads to the third shift.
If your targeting is broad, your creative has to be sharp.
Generic ads will pull in everyone. Specific ads attract the right people and push everyone else away.
That’s not a downside. That’s how you train the algorithm.
This is the part most people miss.
Sensitive categories don’t remove your ability to target. They just move the responsibility from the platform to you.
Less precision in inputs. More precision in execution.
It’s a constraint, sure.
But most good strategies start there anyway.
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