Anthropic’s Claude just made Ferrari’s mistake

The most revealing story in technology right now has nothing to do with technology. It’s about what happens when a company optimizes for metrics that its most valuable users never asked for, and then watches the backlash arrive in real time. Anthropic, the company behind Anthropic’s AI model Claude, built its reputation on a specific quality: depth of reasoning. Claude Opus 4.6 became the model of choice for writers, strategists, and analysts because it felt like a thinking partner. It held nuance. It picked up on what you meant, even when you did not spell it out. It had depth. Opus 4.6 quickly became the “luxury” option among AI tools, commanding a significant price premium. Then Anthropic shipped Opus 4.7, optimized for coding efficiency and structured output. Within 24 hours, the community revolted. One of the most widely shared user comments captured it perfectly: “It used to feel like talking to a thoughtful colleague. Now it feels like getting a memo.” Users described it as corporate, mechanical, hollowed out. The experience degraded while the benchmarks improved, eroding the brand premium. I have seen this exact pattern destroy value in luxury repeatedly. When optimization undermines the experience Ferrari just lived through the same cycle and, unlike many other luxury houses, had the discipline to reverse course. When Ferrari designed the SF90, the team pursued the fastest possible interface for its most performance-oriented car. They replaced physical steering wheel buttons with capacitive touch controls, borrowing the logic of smartphone interaction. Faster inputs, a cleaner design, and a more modern cockpit. The logic was internally coherent. The experience was a disaster. Owners fumbled through menus mid-corner. They accidentally activated cruise control while trying to enjoy a drive. Ferrari had to implement a timeout feature that deactivated the touch surfaces after ten seconds of inactivity to prevent accidental inputs. Think about that for a moment: a workaround to protect drivers from the interface itself. Ferrari’s marketing chief Enrico Galliera was candid about what went wrong. The company’s philosophy had always been “hands on the wheel, eyes on the road,” but they found that drivers increasingly had their eyes on the wheel too. The human-machine interface, he admitted, was “probably too advanced and not 100% perfect in use.” With the Amalfi, Ferrari brought physical buttons back. Then they went further, offering a retrofit program so that owners of the Purosangue, 12Cilindri, 296, and SF90 could replace the touch controls with tactile buttons at their local dealer. The steering wheel center swaps out without sending the car back to Maranello. The story becomes a lesson for every luxury brand. Ferrari CEO Benedetto Vigna recently revealed that touch controls are approximately 50% cheaper to manufacture than physical buttons. The touch interface was, in Vigna’s own words, “something made for the supplier’s advantage.” The cost savings were real, and the efficiency gains were measurable. But the experience Ferrari owners actually pay for was being quietly dismantled in the name of those savings. The efficiency trap This is the efficiency trap, and it’s a common form of value destruction I see across luxury today. A brand identifies an internal optimization, validates it against operational metrics, and implements it without measuring what it costs in experiential terms. The spreadsheet improves, yet the client relationship thins. By the time the erosion shows up in brand perception data or, worse, in client defection, the damage is structural. The pattern repeats across categories. A hotel group replaces concierge depth with app-based service flows because digital interactions are cheaper to scale. A fashion house accelerates its design calendar because more drops generate more revenue per quarter. A jeweler consolidates its client advisors into shared service pools because the headcount efficiency looks better on the P&L. Every one of these decisions is defensible on its own metrics. However, every one of them degrades the experience that justified the price. What Ferrari understood, and what Anthropic is now learning the hard way, is that the qualities creating the premium are often the qualities that are most expensive to maintain. Physical buttons cost more than touch surfaces. Deep reasoning costs more than structured output. A dedicated client advisor costs more than a shared service pool. The efficiency case for cutting them is always easy to make. The value case for keeping them requires a different kind of measurement altogether. Audit the trade-off My guidance for brands: audit your last three years of operational improvements and ask one question about each. Did this make the experience better for the client, or did it make the operation cheaper for you? If the answer is the latter, you have not improved anything. You have extracted margin from the client relationship. Ferrari earned something rare by reversing course publicly. Vigna did not frame the retreat as innovation. He named the cost advantage, acknowledged the experience failure, and offered a fix. That transparency is its own form of extreme value creation because it signals to the most discerning owners that Ferrari prioritizes their experience over its margin. The broader principle is simple and unforgiving. In luxury, the client is paying for the experience, the weight of the physical button, the depth of the human conversation, the unhurried pace of a service interaction that could have been automated but was not. Every time a brand removes that experience in the name of efficiency, it removes a piece of what the client is actually buying. Ask yourself if you are one of them. This is an opinion piece by Daniel Langer, CEO of Équité, recognized as one of the “Global Top Five Luxury Key Opinion Leaders,” and advisor to some of the most iconic luxury brands in the world. He serves as an executive professor of luxury strategy and pricing at Pepperdine University in Malibu and as a professor of luxury at NYU, New York. Daniel has authored best-selling books on luxury management in English and Chinese, and is a respected global keynote speaker. Daniel conducts in-person masterclasses on various luxury topics across the world. As a luxury expert featured on Bloomberg TV, Forbes, The Economist, and others, Daniel holds an MBA and a Ph.D. in luxury management and has received education from Harvard Business School. Sign up for his online luxury masterclasses at the Jing Academy.

Anthropic’s Claude just made Ferrari’s mistake

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Anthropic’s Claude just made Ferrari’s mistake

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