> Claude Code authenticates with Anthropic’s servers using OAuth tokens or API keys. These authentication methods serve different purposes:
> OAuth authentication (used with Free, Pro, and Max plans) is intended exclusively for Claude Code and Claude.ai. Using OAuth tokens obtained through Claude Free, Pro, or Max accounts in any other product, tool, or service — including the Agent SDK — is not permitted and constitutes a violation of the Consumer Terms of Service.
> Developers building products or services that interact with Claude’s capabilities, including those using the Agent SDK, should use API key authentication through Claude Console or a supported cloud provider. Anthropic does not permit third-party developers to offer Claude.ai login or to route requests through Free, Pro, or Max plan credentials on behalf of their users.
> Anthropic reserves the right to take measures to enforce these restrictions and may do so without prior notice.
Opencode as well. Folks have been getting banned for abusing the OAuth login method to get around paying for API tokens or whatever. Anthropic seems to prefer people pay them.
a 200 dollar a month customer isn't trying to get around paying for tokens, theyre trying to use the tooling they prefer. opencode is better in a lot of ways.
tokens get counted and put against usage limits anyway, unless theyre trying to eat analytics that are CC exclusive they should allow paying customers to consume to the usage limits in however way they want to use the models.
A $200/m max subscriber using OpenCode and not wanting to use API keys with pay-per-token pricing is very clearly trying to get around paying for tokens.
There is no monthly limit, it (currently) is a weekly and 5-hourly limit. If they allow anyone to use any tool with their subscription service, you could have a system (like OpenClaw) which involves 0 human interaction and is constantly consuming 100% of your token limit, then waiting until limits reset to do it all over again. It seems fairly clear that Anthropic is probably losing money on such usage patterns.
Once again: you can use API keys and pricing to get UNLIMITED usage whenever you want. If you are choosing to pay for a subscription instead, it is because Anthropic is offering those subscriptions at a much better value-per-token. They are not offering such a subscription out of the goodness of their heart.
Anthropic is offering a steep discount in their plans. I highly doubt they want you using it in a harness where you can trivially switch away when someone else releases a better model
They even block Claude Code of you've modified it via tweakcc. When they blocked OpenCode, I ported a feature I wanted to Claude Code so I could continue using that feature. After a couple days, they started blocking it with the same message that OpenCode gets. I'm going to go down to the $20 plan and shift most of my work to OpenAI/ChatGPT because of this. The harness features matter more to me than model differences in the current generation.
I wonder if it has to do with Grok somehow. They had a suspiciously high reputation until they just binarily didn't, after Anthropic said they did something.
I really hope someone from any of those companies (if possible all of them) would publish a very clear statement regarding the following question: If I build a commercial app that allows my users to connect using their OAuth token coming from their ChatGPT/Claude etc. account, do they allow me (and their users) to do this or not?
I totally understand that I should not reuse my own account to provide services to others, as direct API usage is the obvious choice here, but this is a different case.
I am currently developing something that would be the perfect fit for this OAuth based flow and I find it quite frustrating that in most cases I cannot find a clear answer to this question. I don't even know who I would be supposed to contact to get an answer or discuss this as an independent dev.
EDIT: Some answers to my comment have pointed out that the ToS of Anthropic were clear, I'm not saying they aren't if taken in a vacuum, yet in practice even after this being published some confusion remained online, in particular regarding wether OAuth token usage was still ok with the Agent SDK for personal usage. If it happens to be, that would lead to other questions I personally cannot find a clear answer to, hence my original statement. Also, I am very interested about the stance of other companies on this subject.
Maybe I am being overly cautious here but I want to be clear that this is just my personal opinion and me trying to understand what exactly is allowed or not. This is not some business or legal advice.
Usually, it is already stated in their documentation (auth section). If a statement is vague, treat it as a no. It is not worth the risk when they can ban you at any time. For example, ChatGPT allows it, but Claude and Gemini do not.
Maybe I am missing something from the docs of your link, but I unfortunately don't think it actually states anything regarding allowing users to connect and use their Codex quota in third party apps.
From TFA: “OAuth authentication (used with Free, Pro, and Max plans) is intended exclusively for Claude Code and Claude.ai. Using OAuth tokens obtained through Claude Free, Pro, or Max accounts in any other product, tool, or service — including the Agent SDK — is not permitted and constitutes a violation of the Consumer Terms of Service.”
It is pretty obviously no. API keys billed by the token, yes, Oauth to the flat rate plans no.
> OAuth authentication (used with Free, Pro, and Max plans) is intended exclusively for Claude Code and Claude.ai. Using OAuth tokens obtained through Claude Free, Pro, or Max accounts in any other product, tool, or service — including the Agent SDK — is not permitted and constitutes a violation of the Consumer Terms of Service.
If you look at this tweet [1] and in particular responses under it, it still seems to me like some parts of it need additional clarification. For instance, I have seen some people interpret the tweet as meaning using the OAuth token is actually ok for personal experimentation with the Agent SDK, which can be seen as a slight contradiction with what you quoted. A parent tweet also mentioned the docs clean up causing some confusion.
None of this is legal advice, I'm just trying to understand what exactly is allowed or not.
Then they should speak to legal about fixing the ToS before making public statements about their intentions with it. It won't look good to show up at arbitration and have to explain why your public comms contradict your ToS.
>A flat fee, also referred to as a flat rate or a linear rate refers to a pricing structure that charges a single fixed fee for a service, regardless of usage.
There are no other definitions that‘s why they why internet flat rates got throttled instead of capped.
Throttling is the loop bole because you paid for usage not for speed but flat rate with a cap is simply a lie.
That’s very clearly a no, I don’t understand why so many people think this is unclear.
You can’t use Claude OAuth tokens for anything. Any solution that exists worked because it pretended/spoofed to be Claude Code. Same for Gemini (Gemini CLI, Antigravity)
Codex is the only one that got official blessing to be used in OpenClaw and OpenCode, and even that was against the ToS before they changed their stance on it.
By default, assume no. The lack of any official integration guide should be a clear sign. Even saying that you reverse-engineer Codex for apps to pretend to be Codex makes it clear that this is not an officially endorsed thing to do
Codex is Open Source though, so I wonder at what stage me adding features to Codex is different from me starting a new project and using the subscription.
But I believe OpenAI does let you use their subscription in third parties, so not an issue anyway.
Codex app-server is the interface Codex uses to power rich clients (for example, the Codex VS Code extension). Use it when you want a deep integration inside your own product.
It mentions 'Inside your own product', but not sure if that means also your own commercial application.
But wouldn't a less efficient tool simply consume your 5-hour/weekly quota faster? There's gotta be something else, probably telemetry, maybe hoping people switch to API without fighting, or simply vendor lock-in.
> But wouldn't a less efficient tool simply consume your 5-hour/weekly quota faster?
Maybe.
First, Anthropic is also trying to manage user satisfaction as well as costs. If OpenCode or whatever burns through your limits faster, are you likely to place the blame on OpenCode?
Maybe a good analogy was when DoorDash/GrubHub/Uber Eats/etc signed up restaurants to their system without their permission. When things didn't go well, the customers complained about the restaurants, even though it wasn't their fault, because they chose not to support delivery at scale.
Second, flat-rate pricing, unlike API pricing, is the same for cached vs uncached iirc, so even if total token limits are the same, less caching means higher costs.
Presumably most people also do not use their full quota when using the official client, whereas third-party clients could be set up to start back up every 5 hours to use 100% of the quota every day and week.
It's the whole "unlimited storage" discussion again.
They'll own entire pipeline interface, conduit, backend. Interface is what people get habitual to. If I am a regular user of Claude Code, I may not shift to competitor for 10-20% gains in cost.
The biggest reason why this is confusing is the Claude Agent SDK[0] will use subscription/oauth credentials if present. The terms update implies that there's some use cases where that's ok and other use cases (commercial?) where using their SDK on a user's device violates terms.
The SDK is Claude Code in a harnesss, so it works with your credentials the same way CC does.
But they're stating you can only use your subscription for your personal usage, not someone else's for their usage in your product.
I honestly think they're being short sighted not just giving a "3rd party quota" since they already show users like 4 quotas.
If the fear is 3rd party agents screwing up the math, just make it low enough for entry level usage. I suspect 3rd party token usage is bi-modal where some users just need enough to kick tires, but others are min-maxing for how mamy tokens they can burn as if that's its own reward
I agree, it'd actually be great if they did give maybe $5 or $10 worth of API tokens per month to max subscribers, since they're likely to be the most likely to actually build stuff that uses the Claude APIs.
I built a quick thing to download YouTube videos and transcribe them using with whisper, but it kind of feels clunky to summarize them using the claude CLI, even though that works.
just ran into this myself. I got Claude Code to build a tool that calls Claude for <stuff>. Now I have to create a console account and do the API thing and it sucks balls.
How can they be clearer that the Agents SDK is not allowed?
> OAuth authentication (used with Free, Pro, and Max plans) is intended exclusively for Claude Code and Claude.ai. Using OAuth tokens obtained through Claude Free, Pro, or Max accounts in any other product, tool, or service — including the Agent SDK — is not permitted and constitutes a violation of the Consumer Terms of Service.
> not someone else's for their usage in your product.
what if the "product" is a setup of documents that concisely describe the product so that a coding agent can reliable produce it correctly. Then the install process becomes "agent, write and host this application for the user's personal use on their computer". Now all software is for personal use only. Companies released these things and, like Frankenstein, there's a strong possibility they will turn on their creators.
That should be fine, because it's still using their tooling. And this seems like the better way to go. I have a couple of tools that work like this. I think the issue is mostly 3rd party harnesses that seek to do the same as Claude Code. And it seems reasonable that Anthropic decides how you can use the subscription, because it's heavily subsidized. Get a Claude $200 sub and max out the usage limits, then compare that usage to the cost of using their API. The difference is significant, which is why people are getting multiple $200 subs rather than paying for API usage (and I have seen reports where they are cracking down on this as well.)
Okay, I was mistaken. The tooling I was speaking of uses Claude Code rather than the SDK. One uses the Zed ACP protocol. I'm not sure about the other. I should have said Claude Code rather than the SDK. For example, I can run a session through one of the tools, and then access that session directly in Claude Code. It's still Claude though. It seems the important element is that you're not using OAuth tokens from a sub to use in a different tool. If you go through Claude Code, then Claude Code is handling everything and giving your tool the output. Thanks for the correction.
You are talking about Anthropic and indeed compared to OpenAI or GitHub Copilot they have seemed to be the ones with what I would personally describe as a more restrictive approach.
On the other hand OpenAI and GitHub Copilot have, as far as I know, explicitly allowed their users to connect to at least some third party tools and use their quotas from there, notably to OpenCode.
What is unclear to me is whether they are considering also allowing commercial apps to do that. For instance if I publish a subscription based app and my users pay for the app itself rather than for LLM inference, would that be allowed?
Same question here. A while ago I read rumors OpenAI might build a "Login with OpenAI" (comparable to login with Apple, Facebook, Google) so people can also use their existing sub in commercial apps. Hope it's true.
This can make Opencode work with Claude code and the added benefit of this is that Opencode has a Typescript SDK to automate and the back of this is still running claude code so technically should work even with the new TOS?
So in the case of the OP. Maybe Opencode TS SDK <-> claude code (using this tool or any other like this) <-> It uses the oauth sign in option of Claude code users?
Also, zed can use the ACP protocol itself as well to make claude code work iirc. So is using zed with CC still allowed?
> I don't see how they can get more clear about this, considering they have repeatedly answered it the exact same way.
This is confusing quite frankly, there's also the claude agent sdk thing which firloop and others talked about too. Some say its allowed or not. Its all confusing quite frankly.
And at that point, you might as well use OpenRouter's PKCE and give users the option to use other models..
These kinds of business decisions show how these $200.00 subscriptions for their slot/infinite jest machines basically light that $200.00 on fire, and in general how unsustainable these business models are.
Can't wait for it all to fail, they'll eventually try to get as many people to pay per token as possible, while somehow getting people to use their verbose antigentic tools that are able to inflate revenue through inefficient context/ouput shenanigans.
I think the subscription pricing exists because it’s a far more palatable way to bill people for day to day personal use.
I used Claude back when API per token pricing was the only option and it was bad for all the usual reasons pay-per-use sucks compared to flat billing: you’re constantly thinking about cost. Like trying to watch a Netflix video with a ticker in the corner counting up the cents you owe them.
I don’t understand your claim that they want people paying per token - the subscription is the opposite of that, and it also has upsides for them as a business since most people don’t saturate the usage limits, and the business gets to stuff a bunch of value-adds on a bundle offering which is generally a more lucrative and enticing consumer pricing model.
The bundle only works if it’s +EV for them. A lot of analyses (though not all - it’s complicated) say that the $200/mo bundle (and certainly the $20/mo bundle) costs more than that for most users, and the bundle is currently a loss leader. If so, then eventually prices will need to go up, and API per usage pricing will seem much more attractive.
At least theoretically, the bill would work on a “wallet” system, where you fill up your account with $X every month, and then you’re charged per use. That keeps there from being a huge bill, worst case you’re just on hold until the next fill up.
I'm not going to say what platform but it's an agentic coding tool, I know for a fact the platform loses in the mid $200.00s on a $20.00 plan. 10:1 loss leader for customer acquisition is crazy, and they'll have to make that up in the future somehow, they're all fumbling on how to vendor lock their customers, and its not necessarily clear they're going to be able to.
I expect some big falls from 10 figure businesses in the next year or two as they realize this is impossible. They've built an industry on the backs of gambling addicts and dopamine feins (I'm generalizing but this is a thing with LLM users (just read vibe coders posts on twitter, they're slot machine users). Ask sports betting operators from back in 2019-2022 how it worked out for them when they tried to give out 1-2k a year to attract new customers, and then realized their customers will switch platforms in an instant they see a new shiny offer. Look up the Fanduel Founders "exit" for an insight into this.
They have to eventually stop catering to the slot machine users, which are generally paying for these hugely lossy flat rate subscriptions, and somehow get them used to a different type of payment model, or cater strictly to enterprise... Which also aren't going to tolerate paying 20k a month in tokens per developer, is my guess.... Lots of delicate pricing problems to figure out for all these companies.
That's crazy. I'm already barely willing to pay $10/month on Github Copilot. A product I love. Best value for money.
If they pump it up to $200 (or to $20). I'll simply use crappier local model. It won't be as good. But I already own my gaming PC that can run local models, and electricity is cheap.
If the pay-per-use cost predictable enough, it’s less of an issue. That’s how electricity works and it’s fine.
The issue with Claude Code is it’s not at all obvious how any given task or query translates to cost. I was finding some days I spent very little and other days cost a fortune despite what seemed to me to be similar levels of usage.
The cost difference is pretty staggering for the same usage. Being on the sub hacks your reward system to push you to be productive, legitimately hitting limits feels like a win, and you start looking for ways to max your utilization %. A lot of people get quite obsessive about it. The sub is 100% the innovation that makes Claude Code "work."
I think you're just trying to see ambiguity where it doesn't exist because the looser interpretation is beneficial to you. It totally makes sense why you'd want that outcome and I'm not faulting you for it. It's just that, from a POV of someone without stake in the game, the answer seems quite clear.
One set of applications to build with subscription is to use the claude-go binary directly. Humanlayer/Codelayer projects on GitHub do this. Granted those are not ideal for building a subscription based business to use oathu tokens from Claude and OpenaAI. But you can build a business by building a development env and gating other features behind paywall or just offering enterprise service for certain features like vertical AI(redpanada) offerings knowledge workers, voice based interaction(there was a YC startup here the other day doing this I think), structured outputs and workflows. There is lots to build on.
Acceptable use
Claude Code usage is subject to the Anthropic Usage Policy. Advertised usage limits for Pro and Max plans assume ordinary, individual usage of Claude Code and the Agent SDK
"""
That tool clearly falls under ordinary individual use of Claude code. https://yepanywhere.com/ is another such tool. Perfectly ordinary individual usage.
The TOS are confusing because just below that section it talks about authentication/credential use. If an app starts reading api keys / credentials, that starts falling into territory where they want a hard line no.
Is there a way to legally or even practically prevent this? `claude` CLI execution in a shell is certainly included in the subscription - it’s the product.
In the case you are asking in good faith, a) X requires logging in to view most of its content, which means that much of your audience will not see the news because b) much of your audience is not on X, either due to not having social media or have stopped using X due to its degradation to put it generally.
He's few borders behind that bridge now. They've been injecting faults left and right, from hiding tweets and accounts as "unavailable" to sorting replies by spamminess and everything.
I'm not signed in but I can view the above linked tweet just fine.
Plus it's not a real clarification in anyway. It's just PR. Even if it's posted on Mastodon or Github or anywhere, I highly doubt you can use it to defend yourself if you get banned from violating their ToS.
You can’t view answers and the tweet threat.
You need to know every single tweet.
You can’t open the politician‘s feed so you have to know that there is a tweet and which it is to get information.
Yeah. I know it’s dumb but it’s also a very expensive machine to run BlueBubbles, because iMessage requires a real Mac signed into an Apple ID, and I want a persistent macOS automation host with native Messages, AppleScript, and direct access to my local dev environment, not just a headless Linux box calling APIs.
Hey, I made the same decision (except I went with the 24gb model, not the 16gb). The other thing I like about having it on a separate Mac Mini is that it it's completely sandboxed, and I don't log into anything with it on my personal machine. It's VERY nice to have this as an isolated environment, and the extra VRAM means that I can run my own local models, and it's got enough beef to do long-running tasks (right now I have it chugging through several gigs of images and building embeddings for them with DINOv2) -- that's the sort of local workload that would crush a Raspberry Pi, but the Macbook is hitting 17 images per second -- all managed by OpenClaw.
All that to say, don't let the naysayers get you down. I bought my Mac Mini last week and have been really happy with it as an isolated environment. Way better than futzing around with VMs. The always-on nature of OpenClaw means that it's nice to be able to restart my personal laptop or do gaming or whatever else I want and I'm not fighting for GPU resources in the background.
Apple has been doing personal agents for a while. They're crushing it so hard they must be tired of winning at this point.
For instance, the other day, the Siri button in maps told me it couldn't start navigation because it didn't know where it was. It was animating a blue dot with my real time position at the same time.
Don't get me started about the new iOS 26 notification and messaging filters. Those are causing real harm multiple times a day.
how can they even enforce this? can't you just spoof all your network requests to appear like it's coming from claude code?
in any case Codex is a better SOTA anyways and they let you do this. and if you aren't interested in the best models, Mistral lets you use both Vibe and their API through your vibe subscription api key which is incredible.
They can't catch everything but they can make your product you're building on top of it non viable when it gets popular enough to look for, like they did with opencode.
Many ways, and they’re under no obligation to play fair and tell you which way they’re using at any given time. They’ve said what the rules are, they’ve said they’ll ban you if they catch you.
So let’s say they enforce it by adding an extra nonstandard challenge-response handshake at the beginning of the exchange, which generates a token which they’ll expect on all requests going forward. You decompile the minified JS code, figure out the protocol, try it from your own code but accidentally mess up a small detail (you didn’t realize the nonce has a special suffix). Detected. Banned.
You’ll need a new credit card to open a new account and try again. Better get the protocol right on the first try this time, because debugging is going to get expensive.
Let’s say you get frustrated and post on Twitter about what you know so far. If you share info, they’ll probably see it eventually and change their method. They’ll probably change it once a month anyway and see who they catch that way (and presumably add a minimum Claude Code version needed to reach their servers).
They’ve got hundreds of super smart coders and one of the most powerful AI models, they can do this all day.
If your service's traffic is literally indistinguishable from Claude Code, then all it can do is what Claude Code does. Then why are the users going to choose your service instead of Claude Code?
Maybe because the UI doesn't flicker? There's a lot you can do to improve the UI for starters, and then the harness around the agent could also be improved upon, as long as the prompts are the same.
OK sure, but you’d better hope Claude Code gets it right on the first try, or that’s $200 down the drain. Also, what if the detection mechanism involves a challenge-response that happens once a week? Or randomly a couple times a month? Or after 15 minutes of use from a new public IP? Or arbitrarily if you ask it to code something with a particular topic?
There are lots of ways they could be doing this. And remember again, if they get you, they don’t have to tell you how they got you (so you might not be able to even glean information in return for the $200 you’d be losing).
Sure the internet has hundreds of thousands of super smart coders, but the subset who are willing to throw money and credit cards down the drain in order to maintain a circumvention strategy for something like this is pretty low. I’m sure a few people will figure it out, but they won’t want to tell anyone lest Anthropic nerf their workaround, so I doubt that exploits of this will become widespread.
And if you’re Anthropic, that’s probably good enough.
When they blocked OpenCode, I was in the middle of adding a feature. I don't think it's possible to mimic CC in an undetectable way and have the feature work.
The feature allows the LLM to edit the context. For example, you can "compact" just portions of the conversation and replace it with a summary. Anthropic can see that the conversation suddenly doesn't share the same history as previous API calls.
In fact, I ported the feature to Claude Code using tweakcc, so it literally _is_ Claude Code. After a couple days they started blocking that with the same message that they send when they block third party tools.
see my comment here but I think instead of worrying about the decompile minified JS code etc., you can just essentially use claude code in the background and still do it even using opencode/its SDK thus giving sort of API access over CC subscription https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47069299#47070204
I am not sure how they can detect this. I can be wrong, I usually am but I think its still possible to use CC etc. even after this change if you really wanted to
But at this point, to me the question of GP that is that is it even worth it is definitely what I am thinking?
I think not. There are better options out there, they mentioned mistral and codex and I think kimi also supports maybe GLM/z.ai as well
Pretty easy to enforce it - rather than make raw queries to the LLM Claude Code can proxy through Anthropic's servers. The server can then enforce query patterns, system prompts and other stuff that outside apps cannot override.
And once all the Claude subscribers move over to Codex subscriptions, I'd bet a large sum that OpenAI will make their own ToS update preventing automated/scripted usage.
It's not, but do you really think the people having Claude build wrappers around Claude were ever aware of how services like this are typically offered.
That's too bad, in a way it was a bit of an unofficial app store for Anthropic - I am sure they've probably looked at that and hopefully this means there's something on it's way.
I don't think it's a secret that AI companies are losing a ton of money on subscription plans. Hence the stricter rate limits, new $200+ plans, push towards advertising etc. The real money is in per-token billing via the API (and large companies having enough AI FOMO that they blindly pay the enormous invoices every month).
I agree; unfortunately when I brought up that they're losing before I get jumped on demanding me to "prove it" and I guess pointing at their balance sheets isn't good enough.
My crude metaphor to explain to my family is gasoline has just been invented and we're all being lent Bentley's to get us addicted to driving everywhere. Eventually we won't be given free Bentley's, and someone is going to be holding the bag when the infinite money machine finally has a hiccup. The tech giants are hoping their gasoline is the one that we all crave when we're left depending on driving everywhere and the costs go soaring.
Why? Computers and anything computer related have historically been dropping in prices like crazy year after year (with only very occasional hiccups). What makes you think this will stop now?
I don't think it would even feel safe to drive at all compared to what we have got use to with modern cars. It broke down 3 times while I had it and stranded me on the road. No cell phone of course to call anyone.
I recently encountered this randomly -- knives are apparently one of the few products that nearly every household has needed since antiquity, and they have changed fairly little since the bronze age, so they are used by economists as a benchmark that can span centuries.
Source: it was an aside in a random economics conversation with charGPT (grain of salt?).
There is no practical upshot here, but I thought it was cool.
Yeah I’d definitely take that knife thing with a grain of salt. I have most of a history degree, took a lot of Econ classes (before later going back for CS), and it’s a topic I’m very interested in and I’ve never heard that (and some digging didn’t find anything).
It’s also false that the technology has changed very little.
The jumps from bronze to iron to steel to modern steel and sometimes to stainless steel all result in vastly different products. Not to mention the advances in composite materials for handles.
Then you need to look at substitute goods and the what people actually used knives for.
A huge amount of the demand for knives evaporated thanks to societal changes and substitute goods like forks. A few hundred years ago the average person had a knife that was their primary eating utensil, a survival tool, and a self defense weapon. Knives like that exist today but they’re not something every household has or needs.
This is a good example of why learning from ChatGPT is dangerous. This is a story that sounds very plausible at first glance, but doesn’t make sense once you dig in.
Short term squeeze, because building capacity takes time and real funding. The component manufacturers have been here before. Booms rarely last long enough to justify a build-out. If AI demand turns out to be sustained, the market will eventually adapt by building supply, and prices will drop. If AI demand turns out to be transient, demand will drop, and prices will drop.
> Commodity hardware and software will continue to drop in price.
The software is free (citation: Cuda, nvcc, llvm, olama/llama cpp, linux, etc)
The hardware is *not* getting cheaper (unless we're talking a 5+ year time) as most manufacturers are signaling the current shortages will continue ~24 months.
In the GP's analogy, the Bentley can be rented for $3/day, but if you want to purchase it outright, it will cost you $3,000,000.
Despite the high price, the Bentley factory is running 24/7 and still behind schedule due to orders placed by the rental-car company, who has nearly-infinite money.
On consumer side looking at a few past generations I question that. I would guess that we are nearing some sort of plateau there or already on it. There was inflation, but still not even considering RAM prices from last jump gains relative to cost were not that massive.
After hearing this 10 times a day for the last 5 years I'm starting to get a bit tired. Do you have a rough time for when this great replacement is coming? 1 year? 2? 5? If it's longer than that can we shut up about it for a few years please.
A poor economy that is still dealing with a decade+ of ZIRP, COVID shock, tariffs, and political strife; I don't see how AI has much, if anything, to do with this when compared with other options.
If AI was truly this productive they wouldn't be struggling so hard to sell their wares.
From what I understand, they make money per-token billing. Not enough for how much it costs to train, not accounting for marketing, subscription services, and research for new models, but if they are used, they lose less money.
Finance 101 tldr explanation:
The contribution margin (= price per token -variable cost per token ) this is positive
Profit (= contribution margin x cuantity- fix cost)
if 100% of the money they spend is in inference priced by tokens (they don't say about subscriptions so i asume they lost money), yes they make money, but their expenses are way higher than inference alone.
so they can make the gpu cost if they sell tokens but in reality this isnt the case, becouse they have to constaly train new models, subscription marketing, R&D, And overhead.
antropic in general lost way less money than their competitors
i will take this number in particular the projected break even but googling say
Gross margin in this case is how much money they do whit the GPU
"
Gross Margins: Projected to swing from negative 94% last year to as much as 50% this year, and 77% by 2028.
Projected Break-even: The company expects to be cash flow positive by 2027 or 2028. "
i will not be as bullish to say they will no colapse (0 idear how much real debt and commitments they have, if after the bubble pop spending fall shraply, or a new deepseek moment) but this sound like good trajectory (all things considered) i heavily doubt the 380 billions in valuation
"this is how much is spendeed in developers
between $659 billion and $737 billion. The United States is the largest driver of this spending, accounting for more than half of the global total ($368.5 billion in 2024)"
so is like saying that a 2% of all salaries of developers in the world will be absorbed as profit whit the current 33.3 ratio, quite high giving the amount of risk of the company.
Honestly I think I am already sold on AI, who is the first company that is going to show us all how much it really costs and start enshitification? First to market wins right?
They are not losing money on subscription plans. Inference is very cheap - just a few dollars per million tokens. What they’re trying to do is bundle R&D costs with inference so they can fund the training of the next generation of models.
Banning third-party tools has nothing to do with rate limits. They’re trying to position themselves as the Apple of AI companies -a walled garden. They may soon discover that screwing developers is not a good strategy.
They are not 10× better than Codex; on the contrary, in my opinion Codex produces much better code. Even Kimi K2.5 is a very capable model I find on par with Sonnet at least, very close to Opus. Forcing people to use ONLY a broken Claude Code UX with a subscription only ensures they loose advantage they had.
Google AI Pro is like $15/month for practically unlimited Pro requests, each of which take million tokens of context (and then also perform thinking, free Google search for grounding, inline image generation if needed). This includes Gemini CLI, Gemini Code Assist (VS Code), the main chatbot, and a bunch of other vibe-coding projects which have their own rate limits or no rate limits at all.
It's crazy to think this is sustainable. It'll be like Xbox Game Pass - start at £5/month to hook people in and before you know it it's £20/month and has nowhere near as many games.
I agree that the TPUs are one of the things that are underestimated (based on my personal reading of HN).
Google already has a huge competitive advantage because they have more data than anyone else, bundle Gemini in each android to siphon even more data, and the android platform. The TPUs truly make me believe there actually could be a sort of monopoly on LLMs in the end, even though there are so many good models with open weights, so little (technical) reasons to create software that only integrates with Gemini, etc.
Google will have a lion‘s share of inferring I believe. OpenAI and Claude will have a very hard time fighting this.
> They are not losing money on subscription plans. Inference is very cheap - just a few dollars per million tokens. What they’re trying to do is bundle R&D costs with inference so they can fund the training of the next generation of models.
You've described every R&D company ever.
"Synthesizing drugs is cheap - just a few dollars per million pills. They're trying to bundle pharmaceutical research costs... etc."
There's plenty of legit criticisms of this business model and Anthropic, but pointing out that R&D companies sink money into research and then charge more than the marginal cost for the final product, isn't one of them.
I’m not saying charging above marginal cost to fund R&D is weird. That’s how every R&D company works.
My point was simpler: they’re almost certainly not losing money on subscriptions because of inference. Inference is relatively cheap. And of course the big cost is training and ongoing R&D.
The real issue is the market they’re in. They’re competing with companies like Kimi and DeepSeek that also spend heavily on R&D but release strong models openly. That means anyone can run inference and customers can use it without paying for bundled research costs.
Training frontier models takes months, costs billions, and the model is outdated in six months. I just don’t see how a closed, subscription-only model reliably covers that in the long run, especially if you’re tightening ecosystem access at the same time.
> Yes, and my point is that thinking the cost of subscriptions is only inference, and not the research, is mistaken.
Of course they are losing money when you factor in R&D. Everybody knows that. That is not what people mean when they say that they "lose money" on subscriptions.
The trick is that the jump goes from 20 to 100 Dollar for the Pro to Max subscription. Pro is not enough for me, Max is too much. 60 would be ideal, but currently at 100 it's worth the cost.
But this is how every subscription works. Most people lose money on their gym subscription, but the convenience takes us.
What can bite them in this case though is alternate providers at the same price point that can bridge the gap. e.g. you currently get a lot more bang for your buck with the $20 OpenAI Codex subscription than you get for the $20 Claude Code subscription.
For example, OpenAI’s agent (Codex) is open source, and you can use any harness you want with your OpenAI subscription. Anthropic keeps its tooling closed source and forbids using third-party tooling with a Claude subscription.
I’m not familiar with the Claude Code subscription, but with Codex I’m able to use millions of tokens per day on the $200/mo plan. My rough estimate was that if I were API billing, it would cost about $50/day, or $1200/mo. So either the API has a 6x profit margin on inference, the subscription is a loss leader, or they just rely on most people not to go anywhere near the usage caps.
Yeah what's crazy is most of these companies are making accounting choices that obscure the true cost. By extending the stated useful life of their equipment, in some cases from 3 years to 6. Perfectly legal. And it has the effect of suppressing depreciation expenses and inflating reported earnings.
GPUs do not wear down from being ran at 100%, unless they're pushed past their voltage limits, or gravely overheating.
You can buy a GPU that's been used to mine bitcoin for 5 years with zero downtime, and as long as it's been properly taken care of (or better, undervolted), that GPU functions the exact same as a 5 year old GPU in your PC. Probably even better.
GPUs are rated to do 100%, all the time. That's the point. Otherwise it'd be 115%.
No, you're fundamentally wrong. There's the regular wear & tear of GPUs that all have varying levels of quality, you'll have blown capacitors (just as you do with any piece of hardware), but running in a datacenter does not damage them more. If anything, they're better taken care of and will last longer. However, since instead of having one 5090 in a computer somewhere, you have a million of them. A 1% failure rate quickly makes a big number. My example included mining bitcoin because, just like datacenters, they were running in massive farms of thousands of devices. We have the proof and the numbers, running at full load with proper cooling and no over voltage does not damage hardware.
The only reason they're "perishable" is because of the GPU arms race, where renewing them every 5 years is likely to be worth the investment for the gains you make in power efficiency.
Do you think Google has a pile of millions of older TPUs they threw out because they all failed, when chips are basically impossible to recycle ? No, they keep using them, they're serving your nanobanana prompts.
GPU bitcoin mining rigs had a high failure rate too. It was quite common to run at 80% power to keep them going longer. That's before taking into account that the more recent generations of GPUs seems to be a lot more fragile in general.
They paid about $10B on inference and had about $10B in revenue in 2025. The users and numbers of zeroes on those numbers are not relevant. What is relevant is the ratio of those numbers. They apparently are not even profitable on inference, wich is the cheap part of the whole business.
And cost of inference tripled from $3B in 2024 to $10B in 2025, so cost of revenue linearly grows with number of users, i.e. it does not get cheaper.
Of course they bundle R&D with inference pricing, how else could you the recoup that investment.
The interesting question is: In what scenario do you see any of the players as being able to stop spending ungodly amounts for R&D and hardware without losing out to the competitors?
Inference might be cheap, but I'm 100% sure Anthropic has been losing quite a lot of money with their subscription pricing with power users. I can literally see comparison between what my colleagues Claude cost when used with an API key vs when used with a personal subscription, and the delta is just massive
That doesn’t mean that the subscription itself is losing money. The margin on the subscription could be fine, but by using that margin to R&D the next model, the org may still be intentionally unprofitable. It’s their investment/growth strategy, not an indictment of their pricing strategy.
They have investors that paid for training of these models too. It could be argued that R&D for the next generation is a separate issue, but they need to provide a return on the R&D in this generation to stay in business.
Does a GPU doing inference server enough customers for long enough to bring in enough revenue to pay for a new replacement GPU in two years (and the power/running cost of the GPU + infrastructure). That's the question you need to be asking.
If the answer is not yes, then they are making money on inference. If the answer is no, the market is going to have a bad time.
Depends on how you do the accounting. Are you counting inference costs or are you amortizing next gen model dev costs. "Inference is profitable" is oft repeated and rarely challenged. Most subscription users are low intensity users after all.
The pressure is to boost revenue by forcing more people to use the API to generate huge numbers of tokens they can charge more for.
LLMs are becoming common commodities as open weight models keep catching up. There are similarities with pirating in the 90s when users realize they can ctrl+c ctrl+v to copy a file/model and you don't need to buy a cd/use their paid API.
And that is how it should be - the knowledge that the LLM trained on should be free, and cannot (and should never be) gatekept behind money.
It's merely the hardware that should be charged for - which ought to drop in price if/when the demand for it rises. However, this is a bottleneck at the moment, and hard to see how it gets resolved amidst the current US environment on sanctioning anyone who would try.
That value is there, but google has decided to give it away as public knowledge (ala, their transformer paper).
And i would also argue that the researchers doing this are built on shoulders of other public knowledge - things funded by public institutions with taxpayer money.
Two accounts of mine were banned for some reason and my sub was refunded. Literally from just inane conversations. Conversations also disappear and break randomly, but this happens on ChatGPT too sometimes
The markets value recurring subscription revenue at something like 10x “one-off” revenue, Anthropic is leaving a lot of enterprise value on the table with this approach.
In practice this approach forces AI apps to pay Anthropic for tokens, and then bill their customers a subscription. Customers could bring their own API key but it’s sketchy to put that into every app you want to try, and consumers aren’t going to use developer tools. And many categories of free app are simply excluded, which could in aggregate drive a lot more demand for subscriptions.
If Anthropic is worried about quota, seems they could set lower caps for third-party subscription usage? Still better than forcing API keys.
(Maybe this is purely about displacing other IDE products, rather than a broader market play.)
I think they are smart making a distinction between a D2C subscription which they control the interface to and eat the losses for vs B2B use where they pay for what they use.
Allows them to optimize their clients and use private APIs for exclusive features etc. and there’s really no reason to bootstrap other wannabe AI companies who just stick a facade experience in front of Anthropic’s paying customer.
Look at your token usage of the last 30 days in one of the JSON files generated by Claude Code. Compare that against API costs for Opus. Tell me if they are eating losses or not. I'm not making a point, actually do it and let me know. I was at 1 million. I'm paying 90 EUR/m. That means I'm subsidizing them (paying 3-4 times what it would cost with the API)! And I feel like I'm a pretty heavy user. Although people running it in a loop or using Gas Town will be using much more.
My hopes are on harness engineering allowing cheaper (but still large) models to shine. I'm evaluating DeepSeek because it would allow insane agent armies. Although DeepSeek charges for thinking tokens, something easy to overlook.
DeepSeek has the tendency to think... a lot!. Without a good harness I can't evaluate it well; time will tell.
OpenAI doesn't; it's embedded into the price, I think.
Cheap = we can run 10x the workloads, bigger imagination = innovation. Maybe 10 dumb agents in a loop can beat 1 Opus? Haha.
That’s not true, the market loves pay per use, see ”cloud”. It outperforms subscriptions by a lot, it’s not ”one-off”.
And your example is not how companies building on top tend to charge, you either have your own infrastructure (key) or get charged at-cost + fees and service costs.
I don’t think Anthropic has any desire to be some B2C platform, they want high paying reliable customers (B2B, Enterprise).
Cloud goes on the books as recurring revenue, not one-off; even though it's in principle elastic, in practice if I pay for a VM today I'll usually pay for one tomorrow.
(I don't have the numbers but the vast majority of cloud revenue is also going to be pre-committed long-term contracts from enterprises.)
> I don’t think Anthropic has any desire to be some B2C platform
This is the best line of argument I can see. But still not clear to me why my OP doesn't apply for enterprise, too.
Maybe the play is just to force other companies to become MCPs, instead of enabling them to have a direct customer relationship.
Sure, but even if a subscription and per per use are both recurring revenue, pay per use is not a subscription.
The point I was trying to make is that there’s a lot of money to be made in the model Anthropic seems to be going for, more than a monthly subscription fee would allow for.
there’s a million small scale AI apps that just aren’t worth building because there’s no way to do the billing that makes sense. If anthropic wanted to own that market, they could introduce a bring-your-own-Claude metaphor, where you login with Claude and token costs get billed to your personal account (after some reasonable monthly freebies from your subscription).
But the big guys don’t seem interested in this, maybe some lesser known model will carve out this space
I am a bit worried that this is the situation I am in with my (unpublished) commercial app right now: one of the major pain points I have is that while I have no doubt the app provides value in itself, I am worried about how many potential users will actually accept paying inference per token...
As an independent dev I also unfortunately don't have investors backing me to subsidize inference for my subscription plan.
I recommend kimi. It's possible for people to haggle with it to get cheap for the first month and as such try out your project and best part of the matter is that kimi intentionally supports api usage in any of their subscribed plan and they also recently changed their billing to be more token usage based like others instead of their previous tool calling limits
It's seriously one of the best models. very comparable to sonnet/opus although kimi isn't the best in coding. I think its a really great solid model overall and might just be worth it in your use case?
Is the use case extremely coding intensive related (where even some minor improvement can matter for 10-100x cost) or just in general. Because if not, then I can recommend Kimi.
I shudder to think what the industry will look like if software development and delivery becomes like Youtubing, where the whole stack and monetization is funneled through a single company (or a couple) get to decide who gets how much money.
Incorrect, the third-party usage was already blocked (banned) but it wasn't officially communicated or documented. This post is simply identifying that official communication rather than the inference of actual functionality.
They really need to correct that. I understand jack shit. Is openclaw banned under these terms? Or just abuse where I build a business on top of that? And why does it matter anyway? I have my token restrictions ... So let me do what I want.
OpenAI has endorsed OAuth from 3rd party harnesses, and their limits are way higher. Use better tools (OpenCode, pi) with an arguably better model (xhigh reasoning) for longer …
I was stuck on the part where they said neither party could provide cheap abundant decentralized clean energy. Biden / Obama did a great job of providing those things, to the point where dirty coal and natural gas are both more expensive than solar or wind.
So, which two parties could they be referring to? The Republicans and the Freedom Caucus?
They don't get as much visibility into your data, just the actual call to/from the api. There's so much more value to them in that, since you're basically running the reinforcement learning training for them.
If you buy a 'Season's Pass' for Disneyland, you cant 'sublet' it to another kid to use on the days you don't; It's not really buying a 'daily access rate'.
Anthropic subs are not 'bulk tokens'.
It's not an unreasonable policy and it's entirely inevitable that they have to restrict.
It’s not a literal sublet to someone else, it’s subletting your tokens to another tool.
At its core it’s a tragedy of commons situation. Using a third party tool like OpenClaw is augmenting your usage far beyond what was anticipated when the subscription plan was made.
Same deal for unlimited storage on drive until people started abusing it.
You have strong dedication towards taking things literally.
The issue is not that it's limited or unlimited, but rather about expected token usage across a user cohort. When you set a usage limit on something like Claude, or a gym, or a tutoring center, you need to do two things at once; set the limit high enough to attract the aspirations of your intended client base ("oh good this gym lets me go every day of the month if I want to"), but priced accurately enough so that you actually turn a profit on the average usage across most users (you ended up going 20 times the first month, but settled into 15 times a month after).
If there was suddenly a drug that you could take that would, while you slept, make your body walk to the gym and workout, so that you could max out that usage, the gym would be entitled to adjust either the pricing, the limit, or prohibit going to the gym while on the drug, given that they can't actually sustain all their members going every day.
As a correction, I've done some reading and when I said tragedy of the commons, what would fit better is a "congestion externality in a club good".
It's more buying a season pass for Disneyland, then getting told you can't park for free if you're entering the park even though free parking is included with the pass. Still not unreasonable, but brings to light the intention of the tool is to force the user into an ecosystem rather.
It's not a disingenuous analogy ... whatever it is.
But 'you can't park even though the ticket includes parking' is not an appropriate analogy because 3rd party use is definitely not intended. They did not 'state one thing' and the 'disallow it'.
This is a pretty straight forward case of people using their subscription for 'adjacent' use, and Anthropic being more explicit about it.
Disingenuous or not, it was a bad analogy because it inferred that it was intentionally being abused which is completely false. The proof of that is this original post - Anthropic did not clearly (or even at all) identify how you could use your tokens with the subscription regardless of their intentions.
You're now misinterpreting my argument and misrepresenting it. I did not, in any way, suggest that Anthropic was "pulling the rug" to its users nor that they were entitled to use their tokens using the API with third parties. Full stop.
Of course, third-party API usage wasn't intended to be allowed for consuming subscription tokens. This is exactly what my analogy was structured to explain; a Disneyland season pass isn't intended to be used solely for parking. Anthropic did not intend for subscription tokens to be consumed by third-parties the same way users did not intend to abuse the subscription to derive more value than what was allotted to them. Your analogy missed that last part, which is absolutely crucial to understand.
I don't understand how you're making the exact arguments I'm making, then somehow completely misunderstanding what's being said.
Increasing the friction of switching providers as much as possible is part of their strategy to push users to higher subscription tiers and deny even scraps to their competitors.
They're losing money on this $200 plan and they're essentially paying you to make you dependent on Claude Code so they can exploit this (somehow) in the future.
Skills is a generic construct.
System prompt is generic as well.
Subagents, AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md etc. these are generic, "please care for my instruction" kind of constructs without any real guarantee to close gaps.
Tool is generic (CC vs OpenCode)
Ecosystem is already same everywhere.
The point is that wrappers matter. Orchestration, tool calls, reasoning loops, system prompts, agentic capabilities. Output is different, quality is different.
When using Claude Code, it's possible to opt out of having one's sessions be used for training. But is that opt out for everything? Or only message content, such that there could remain sufficient metadata to derive useful insight from?
Oh crap. I just logged into HN to ask if anyone knew of a working alternative to the Claude Code client. It's lost Claude's work multiple times in the last few days, and I'm ready to switch to a different provider. (4.6 is mildly better than 4.5, but the TUI is a deal breaker.)
So, I guess it's time to look into OpenAI Codex. Any other viable options? I have a 128GB iGPU, so maybe a local model would work for some tasks?
Local? No, not currently. You need about 1TB VRAM. There are many harnesses in development at the time, keep a good look out. Just try many of them, look at the system prompts in particular. Consider DeepSeek using the official API. Consider also tweaking system prompts for whatever tool you end up using. And agree that TUI is meh; we need GUI.
The economic tension here is pretty clear: flat-rate subscriptions are loss leaders designed to hook developers into the ecosystem. Once third parties can piggyback on that flat rate, you get arbitrage - someone builds a wrapper that burns through $200/month worth of inference for $20/month of subscription cost, and Anthropic eats the difference.
What is interesting is that OpenAI and GitHub seem to be taking the opposite approach with Copilot/OpenCode, essentially treating third-party tool access as a feature that increases subscription stickiness. Different bets on whether the LTV of a retained subscriber outweighs the marginal inference cost.
Would not be surprised if this converges eventually. Either Anthropic opens up once their margins improve, or OpenAI tightens once they realize the arbitrage is too expensive at scale.
these subscriptions have limits.. how could someone use $200 worth on $20/month.. is that not the issue with the limits they set on a $20 plan, and couldn't a claude code user use that same $200 worth on $20/month? (and how do i do this?)
The usage limit on your $20/month subscription is not $20 of API tokens (if it was, why subscribe?). Its much much higher, and you can hit the equivalent of $20 of API usage in a few days.
I do believe it's unreasonable. The limits are the limits, you reach them there's no more free lunch after.
Fix the limits, so the limits are reached at a rate that sustains their business.. ? obviously this WILL happen eventually when they need to pay for things.
"A rate that sustains their business" at the moment probably looks like API pricing or maybe even higher. That means subscriptions get significantly more expensive and/or limited, which is maybe where things are headed.
Their bet is that most people will not fill up 100% of their weekly usage for 4 consecutive weeks of their monthly plan, because they are humans and the limits impede long running tasks during working hours.
I'd agree on this. I ended up picking up a Claude Pro sub and am very less than impressed at the volume allowance. I generally get about a dozen queries (including simple follow up/refinements/corrections) across a relatively small codebase, with prompts structured to minimize the parts of the code touched - and moving onto fresh contexts fairly rapidly, before getting cut off for their ~5 hour window. Doing that ~twice a day ends up getting cut off on the weekly limit with about a day or two left on it.
I don't entirely mind, and am just considering it an even better work:life balance, but if this is $200 worth of queries, then all I can say is LOL.
Bumping into those limits is trivial, those 5 hour windows are anxiety inducing, and I guess the idea is to have a credit card on tap to pay for overages but…
I’m messing around on document production, I can’t imagine being on a crunch facing a deadline or dealing with a production issue and 1) seeing some random fuck-up eat my budget with no take backs (‘sure thing, I’ll make a custom docx editor to open that…’), 2) having to explain to my boss why Thursday cost $500 more than expected because of some library mismatch, or 3) trying to decide whether we’re gonna spend or wait while stressing some major issue (the LLM got us in it, so we kinda need the LLM to get us out).
That’s a lot of extra shizz on top of already tricky situations.
The limits in the max subscriptions are more generous and power users are generating loss.
I'm rather certain, though cannot prove it, that buying the same tokens would cost at least 10x more if bought from API. Anecdotally, my cursor team usage was getting to around 700$ / month. After switching to claude code max, I have so far only once hit the 3h limit window on the 100$ sub.
What Im thinking is that Anthropic is making loss with users who use it a lot, but there are a lot of users who pay for max, but don't actually use it.
With the recent improvements and increase of popularity in projects like OpenClaw, the number of users that are generating loss has probably massively increased.
This exactly. I think this is why Anthropic simply don’t want 3rd party businesses to max out the subscription plans by sharing them across their own clients.
I've spent $17.64 on on-demand usage in cursor with an estimated API cost of $350, mostly using Claude Opus 4.5. Some of this is skewed since subagents use a cheaper model, but even with subagents, the costs are 10x off the public API costs. Either the enterprise on-demand usage gets subsidized, API costs are 10x higher, or cursor is only billing their 10% surplus to cover their costs of indexing and such.
edit: My $40/month subscription used $662 worth of API credits.
The median subscriber generates about 50% gross margin, but some subscribers use 10x the amount of inference compute as other subscribers (due to using it more...), and it's a positive skewness distribution.
Going to keep using the agents sdk with my pro subscription until I get banned.
It's not openclaw it's my own project. It started by just proxying requests to claude code though the command line, the sdk just made it easier. Not sure what difference it makes to them if I have a cron job to send Claude code requests or an agent sdk request. Maybe if it's just me and my toy they don't care. We'll see how the clarify tomorrow.
OpenAI have been very generous in their plans in terms of token and what you use it with. Is Codex better or as good as Opus for coding? No. Is it a decent alternative? Very.
They probably are but I don’t think that’s what this confirms. Most consumer flat rate priced services restrict usage outside of the first party apps, because 3rd party and scripted users can generate orders of magnitude more usage than a single user using the app can.
So it makes sense to offer simple flat pricing for first party apps, and usage priced apis for other usage. It’s like the difference between Google Drive and S3.
I get your point - they might count on the user not using their full quota they're officially allowed to use (and if that's the case, Anthropic is not losing money). But then still - IF the user used the whole quota, Anthropic loses.. so what's advertised is not actually honest.
For me, flat rates are simply unfair either ways - if I'm not using the product much, I'm overpaying (and they're ok with that), otherwise it magically turns out that it's no longer ok when I actually want to utilize what I paid for :)
At any rate, they offer the option to be billed exactly on your usage via the API. But if you tell the average person the service costs $x/million tokens they will have no idea how much that actually costs, they won't know what a token is or how much their employees are likely to use. While $30/user/month is something they can easily budget for and get approved.
OK I hope someone from anthropic reads this. Your API billing makes it really hard to work with it in India. We've had to switch to openrouter because anthropic keeps rejecting all the cards we have tried. And these are major Indian banks. This has been going on for MONTHS
Their model actually doesn't have that much of a moat if at all. Their agent harness also doesn't, at least not for long. Writing an agent harness isn't that difficult. They are desperately trying to stay in power. I don´t like being a customer of this company and am investing lots of my time in moving away from them completely.
They are obviously losing money on these plans, just like all of the other companies in the space.
They are all desperately trying to stay in power, and this policy change (or clarification) is a fart in the wind in the grand scheme of what's going on in this industry.
AI is the new high-end gym membership. They want you to pay the big fee and then not use what you paid for. We'll see more and more roadblocks to usage as time goes on.
This feels more like the gym owner clarifying it doesn't want you using their 24-hour gym as a hotel just because you find their benches comfortable to lie down on, rather than a "roadblock to usage"
So here goes my OpenClaw integration with Anthropic via OAuth…
While I see their business risk I also see the onboarding path for new paying customers. I just upgraded to Max and would even consider the API if cost were controllable. I hope that Anthropic finds a smart way to communicate with customers in a constructive way and offers advice for the not so skilled OpenClaw homelabbers instead of terminating their accounts…
Is anybody here from Anthropic that could pick up that message before a PR nightmare happens?
At this point, where Kimi K2.5 on Bedrock with a simple open source harness like pi is almost as good the big labs will soon have to compete for users,... openai seems to know that already? While anthropic bans bans bans
Do you know by any chance if Bedrock custom model import also works with on-demand use, without any provisioned capacity? I'm still puzzled why they don't offer all qwen3 models on Bedrock by default.
Just a friendly reminder also to anyone outside the US that these subscriptions cannot be used for commercial work. Check the consumer ToS when you sign up. It’s quite clear.
Non-commercial use only. You agree not to use our Services for any commercial or business purposes and we (and our Providers) have no liability to you for any loss of profit, loss of business, business interruption, or loss of business opportunity.
Your core customers are clearly having a blast building their own custom interfaces, so obviously the thing to do is update TOS and put a stop to it! Good job lol.
I know, I know, customer experience, ecosystem, gardens, moats, CC isn't fat, just big boned, I get it. Still a dick move. This policy is souring the relationship, and basically saying that Claude isn't a keeper.
I'll keep my eye-watering sub for now because it's still working out, but this ensures I won't feel bad about leaving when the time comes.
Update: yes yes, API, I know. No, I don't want that. I just want the expensive predictable bill, not metered corporate pricing just to hack on my client.
Imagine having a finite pool of GPUs worth more than their weight in gold, and an infinite pool of users obsessed with running as many queries against those GPUs in parallel as possible, mostly to review and generate copious amounts of spam content primarily for the purposes of feeling modern, and all in return for which they offer you $20 per month. If you let them, you must incur as much credit liability as OpenAI. If you don't, you get destroyed online.
It almost makes me feel sorry for Dario despite fundamentally disliking him as a person.
The only thing I've seen from him that I don't like is the "SWEs will be replaced" line (which is probably true and it's more that I don't like the factuality of it).
It’s kinda obvious he’s a well spoken shark. Personally not an issue for me, you have to be at the top of a unicorn, but it isn’t something people in general like.
Interesting, are there any sources for the shark claims ? I recently saw an interview with Hassabis and him and thought: <well at least those are two actual scientist leading AI labs/devisions>, so that gave me some hope that what they discussed regarding security and eventual equal distribution of "AI" benefits had some genuine intention.
First of all, custom harness parallel agent people are so far from the norm, and certainly not on the $20 plan, which doesn't even make sense because you'd hit token limit in about 90 seconds.
Second, token limits. Does Anthropic secretly have over-subscription issues? Don't know, don't care. If I'm paying a blistering monthly fee, I should be able to use up to the limit.
Now I know you've got a clear view of the typical user, but FWIW, I'm just an aging hacker using CC to build some personal projects (feeling modern ofc) but still driving, no yolo or gas town style. I've reached the point where I have a nice workflow, and CC is pretty decent, but it feels like it's putting on weight and adding things I don't want or need.
I think LLMs are an exciting new interface to computers, but I don't want to be tied to someone else's idea of a client, especially not one that's changing so rapidly. I'd like to roll my own client to interface with the model, or maybe try out some other alternatives, but that's against the TOS, because: reasons.
And no, I'm not interested in paying metered corporate rates for API access. I pay for a Max account, it's expensive, but predictable.
The issue is Anthropic is trying for force users into using their tool, but that's not going to work for something so generic as interfacing with an LLM. Some folks want emacs while others want vim, and there will never be a consensus on the best editor (it's nvim btw), because developers are opinionated and have strong preferences for how they interface with computers. I switched to CC maybe a year ago and haven't looked back, but this is a major disappointment. I don't give a shit about Anthropic's credit liability, I just want the freedom to hack on my own client.
You're not "rolling your own client." You're using a subscription that prices in a specific usage pattern, the one mediated by their client, and trying to route around it to extract more value than you're paying for. That's not hacking, it's arbitrage, and pretending it's about editor philosophy is cope.
Anthropic sells two products: a consumer subscription with a UI, and an API with metered pricing. You want the API product at the subscription price. That's not a principled stance about interface freedom, it's just wanting something for less than it costs.
The nvim analogy doesn't land either. Nobody's stopping you from writing your own client. You just have to pay API rates for it, because that's the product that matches what you're describing. The subscription subsidises the cost per token by constraining how you use it. Remove the constraint, the economics break. This isn't complicated.
"I don't give a shit about Anthropic's credit liability," right, but they do, because it's their business. You're not entitled to a flat-rate all-you-can-eat API just because you find metered pricing aesthetically displeasing.
As my sibling mentioned, it's not all-you-can-eat, it's metered and capped. Is it the client mediating usage patterns? I don't know, but why not do it server-side and let people use it however they want? Control of course, but that's not in the interest of users.
I'm not trying to arbitrage or route around anything, I just want predictable billing to access the model. Maybe the API would be cheaper for me, I don't know. I'm just a normal user, not scheduling an agent army to blast at maximum 24/7.
You don't need to explain what Anthropic is selling, I get it, but you're off-base claiming that I'm pretending about editor philosophy as cope. I think Anthropic is where they are today because they have a good model for coding, made popular by software folks who value things like editor choice and customization. Anthropic is free to do as they wish of course, as am I, but I'm displeased with their decision here, and voicing my opinion about it.
If usage is truly constrained by the client not the server, I guess I can't argue that, but it still feels bad as an end user. As a consumer, I just want a fair deal and freedom to use what I purchase however I see fit. But that seems harder to find these days, and most businesses seem intent on maximum extraction by any means possible. I might be wrong, but this feels like business move to build a consumer moat by controlling the interface, because consumers don't want the API. It's not in my best interests, which alienates me as a customer.
Oh I'm not mad, it's more of a sad clown type of thing. I'm still stoked to use it for now. We can always go back to the old ways if things don't work out.
Unstoppable monopoly will be extremely hard to pull off given the number of quality open (weights) alternatives.
I only use LLMs through OpenRouter and switch somewhat randomly between frontier models; they each have some amount of personality but I wouldn't mind much if half of them disappeared overnight, as long as the other half remained available.
In the first years, I remember no other search engine was close to Google quality. We all ditched AltaVista because Google was incredibly better. It would have been awful to switch back to any other options.
We can already switch between the 3 big proprietary models without feeling too much differences, so it’s quite a different landscape.
I too am old. Google search is free, hard to replicate, and while there used to be lots of search engines, Google was (and arguably still is) miles ahead of all the others in terms of quality and performance.
A model is hard to train but it doesn't need to be hyper up to date / have a new version come out every day. Inference is cheap (it seems?) and quality is comparable. So it's unclear how expensive offerings could win over free alternatives.
I could be wrong of course. I don't have a crystal ball. I just don't think this is the same as Google.
Of course I could be entirely mistaken and there could emerge a single winner
I would say Google's monopoly mainly comes from its name recognition, definitely not because its still ahead in core search as I have been using DuckDuckGo for 2 years once I noticed search results are the same or better than Google.
I think the big difference is that Google is free: everyone is using Google because it doesn’t cost anything and for a long time was the best search engine out there. I am sure that if Google would suddenly charge a few dollars per month for access, Bing market share would explode overnight, because it would become “good enough but cheaper”.
With the AI models, using a model that is “good enough but cheaper” is already an option.
There's no reason that a sizeable portion of LLM usage can't and won't end up free/ad-sponsored. Cutting edge stuff for professional use will probably be monetized via subscription or API credits for a long time to come. But running an older and less resource intensive model works just fine for tasks like summarization. These models will just become another feature in a "free" product that people pay for by watching or clicking ads.
I imagine the split will look a lot like b2b vs b2c in other technologies, b2b customers tend to be willing to pay for tech when it offers a competitive advantage, reduces their operating costs etc. b2c customers mostly just guzzle free slop.
It's actually pretty bonkers when you think about how basically every cutting edge professional you deal with is getting ads for all of their top search results for all of their work.
(Not quite "every", but outside of tech, most professional workplaces don't support ad blocking or Kagi.)
This is saying we have hundreds of open source OSes and Windows will never be a monopoly.
Software always gets monopoly simply by usage. Every time a model gets used by esoteric use cases, it gets more training data (that a decentralized open weight model doesn't get) and it starts developing its moat.
>This is saying we have hundreds of open source OSes
we don't, we have about 3 operating systems that have the decades of hardware and software compatibility that makes them widely usable. They're the most complex and complicated things we've built. LLMs are a few thousand lines of python hooked up to a power plant and graphics cards. This is the least defensible piece of software there ever has been.
They will [try to] ban open weights for ethics / security reasons: to stop spammers, to protect children, to stop fascism, to defend minorities. Take your pick; it won't matter why, it will only matter which media case can they thrust in the spotlight first.
And if the frontier continues favouring centralised solutions, they'll get it. If, on the other hand, scaling asymptotes, the competition will be running locally. Just looking at how much Claude complains about me not paying for SSO-tier subscriptions to data tools when they work perfectly fine in a browser is starting to make running a slower, less-capable model locally competitive with it in some research contexts.
"Naveen Rao, the Gen AI VP of Databricks, phrased it quite well:
all closed AI model providers will stop selling APIs in the next 2-3 years. Only open models will be available via APIs (…) Closed model providers are trying to build non-commodity capabilities and they need great UIs to deliver those. It's not just a model anymore, but an app with a UI for a purpose."
Nowhere did I say they're indispensable, and I explicitly said I'm still paying for it. If all AI companies disappear tomorrow that's fine. I'm just calling out what I think is tone-deaf move, by a company I pay a large monthly bill to.
This article is somewhat reassuring to me, someone experimenting with openclaw on a Max subscription. But idk anything about the blog so would love to hear thoughts.
In my opinion (which means nothing). If you are using your own hardware and not profiting directly from Claude’s use (as in building a service powered by your subscription). I don’t see how this is a problem. I am by no means blowing through my usage (usually <50% weekly with max x5).
This is something I think Anthropic does not get. They want to be Microsoft of AI, make people their solution, so they will not to move to the other provided. Thing is, giving access to a text prompt is not something that you can monopolize easily. Even if you provide some stuff like skills, MCP server integration, that is not a big deal.
I'm only waiting for OpenAI to provide an equivalet ~100 USD subscription to entirely ditch Claude.
Opus has gone down the hill continously in the last week (and before you start flooding with replies, I've been testing opus/codex in parallel for the last week, I've plenty of examples of Claude going off track, then apologising, then saying "now it's all fixed!" and then only fixing part of it, when codex nailed at the first shot).
I can accept specific model limits, not an up/down in terms of reliability. And don't even let me get started on how bad Claude client has become. Others are finally catching up and gpt-5.3-codex is definitely better than opus-4.6
Everyone else (Codex CLI, Copilot CLI etc...) is going opensource, they are going closed. Others (OpenAI, Copilot etc...) explicitly allow using OpenCode, they explicitly forbid it.
No offense, but this is the most predicable outcome ever. The software industry at large does this over and over again and somehow we're surprised. Provide thing for free or for cheap, and then slowly draw back availability once you have dominant market share or find yourself needing money (ahem).
The providers want to control what AI does to make money or dominate an industry so they don't have to make their money back right away. This was inevitable, I do not understand why we trust these companies, ever.
Well, yes. They know what they are doing. They know when given the option the consumer makes the affordable choice. I just don't have to like or condone their practices. Maybe instead of taking on billions of dollars of debt they should have thought about a business model that makes sense first? Maybe the collective "we" (consumers and investors, but especially investors) should keep it in our pants until the product is proven and sustainable?
It will be real interesting if the haters are right and this technology is not the breakthrough the investors assume it to be AFTER it is already sewn into everyone's work flows. Everyone keeps talking about how jobs will be displaced, yet few are asking what happens when a dependency is swept out from underneath the industry as a whole if/when this massive gamble doesn't pay off.
Whatever. I am squawking into the void as we just repeat history.
Or the companies can be transparent about their product roadmap. I can guarantee this enshittification was on the roadmap way before we knew about it. They let us operate under false information, that's just weak behavior.
First, we are not talking about a cheap service here. We are talking about a monthly subscription which costs 100 USD or 200 USD per month, depending on which plan you choose.
Second, it's like selling me a pizza and pretending I only eat it while sitting at your table. I want to eat the pizza at home. I'm not getting 2-3 more pizzas, I'm still getting the same pizza others are getting.
Opus 4.6 genuinely seems worse than 4.5 was in Q4 2025 for me. I know everyone always says this and anecdote != data but this is the first time I've really felt it with a new model to the point where I still reach for the old one.
It is (slower), especially at xhigh setting. But if I have to redo things three times, keep confirming trivial stuff (Claude Code seems to keep changing the commands it uses to read code... once it uses "bash-read", once it uses "tree", once it uses "head" and I have to keep confirming permission), I definitely waste more time than give a command to codex (or in my case OpenCode + codex model) and come back after 10 minutes.
Funnily enough I've been using Codex 5.3 on maximum thinking for bug hunting and code reviews and it's been really good at it (it's just seem to have a completely different focus than Opus.)
I generally don't like the way codex approaches coding itself so I just feed its review comments back in to Claude Code and off we go.
I just created an OpenCode skill where both these models will talk to each other and discuss bug-finding approaches.
In my experience, two different models together works much better than one, that's why this subscription banning is distressing. I won't be able to use a tool that can use both models.
Heh, I find Codex to be a far, far smarter model than Claude Code.
And there's a good reason the most "famous" vibe coders, including the OpenClaw creator all moved to Codex, it's just better.
Claude writes a lot more code to do anything, tons of redundent code, repeated code etc. Codex is only model I've seen which occasionally removes more code than it writes.
Huh… I’ve seen this comment a lot in this thread but I’ve really been impressed with both Anthropic’s latest models and latest tooling (plugins like /frontend-design mean it actually designs real front ends instead of the vibe coded purple gradient look). And I see it doing more planning and making fewer mistakes than before. I have to do far less oversight and debugging broken code these days.
But if people really like Codex better, maybe I’ll try it. I’ve been trying not to pay for 2 subscriptions at once but it might be worth a test.
> And I see it doing more planning and making fewer mistakes than before
Anecdotally, maybe this is the reason? It does seem to spend a lot more time “thinking” before giving what feels like equivalent results, most of the time.
Probably eats into the gambling-style adrenaline cycles.
We’re still in the mid-late 2020s. Once we really get to the late 2020s, attention spans won’t be long enough to even finish reading your comment. People will be speaking (not typing) to LLMs and getting distracted mid-sentence.
It's the most overrated model there is. I do Elixir development primarily and the model sucks balls in comparison to Gemini and GPT-5x. But the Claude fanboys will swear by it and will attack you if you ever say even something remotely negative about their "god sent" model. It fails miserably even in basic chat and research contexts and constantly goes off track. I wired it up to fire up some tasks. It kept hallucinating and swearing it did when it didn't even attempt to. It was so unreliable I had to revert to Gemini.
It might simply be that it was not trained enough in Elixir RL environments compared to Gemini and gpt.
I use it for both ts and python and it's certainly better than Gemini. For Codex, it depends on the task.
I regularly run the same prompts twice and through different models. Particularly, when making changes to agent metadata like agent files or skills.
At least weekly I run a set of prompts to compare codex/claude against each other. This is quite easy the prompt sessions are just text files that are saved.
The problem is doing it enough for statistical significance and judging the output as better or not.
I suspect you may not be writing code regularly...
If I have to ask Claude the same things three times and it keeps saying "You are right, now I've implemented it!" and the code is still missing 1 out of 3 things or worse, then I can definitely say the model has become worse (since this wasn't happening before).
I haven't experiences this with gpt-5.3-codex (xhigh) for example. Opus/Sonnet usually work well when just released, then they degrade quite regularly. I know the prompts are not the same every day or even across the day, but if the type of problems are always the same (at least in my case) and a model starts doing stupid things, then it means something is wrong. Everyone I know who uses Claude regularly, usually have the same esperience whenever I notice they degrade.
When I use Claude daily (both professionally and personally with a Max subscription), there are things that it does differently between 4.5 and 4.6. It's hard to point to any single conversation, but in aggregate I'm finding that certain tasks don't go as smoothly as they used to. In my view, Opus 4.6 is a lot better at long standing conversations (which has value), but does worse with critical details within smaller conversations.
A few things I've noticed:
* 4.6 doesn't look at certain files that it use to
* 4.6 tends to jump into writing code before it's fully understood the problem (annoying but promptable)
* 4.6 is less likely to do research, write to artifacts, or make external tool calls unless you specifically ask it to
* 4.6 is much more likely to ask annoying (blocking) questions that it can reasonably figure out on it's own
* 4.6 is much more likely to miss a critical detail in a planning document after being explicitly told to plan for that detail
* 4.6 needs to more proactively write its memories to file within a conversation to avoid going off track
* 4.6 is a lot worse about demonstrating critical details. I'm so tired of it explaining something conceptually without it thinking about how it implements details.
Just hit a situation where 4.6 is driving me crazy.
I'm working through a refactor and I explicitly told it to use a block (as in Ruby Blocks) and it completely overlooked that. Totally missed it as something I asked it to do.
I was underwhelmed by Opus4.6. I didn’t get a sense of significant improvement, but the token usage was excessive to the point that I dropped the subscription for codex. I am suspect that all the models are so glib that they can create a quagmire for themselves in a project. I have not yet found a satisfying strategy for non-destructive resets when the systems own comments and notes poisons new output. Fortunately, deleting and starting over is cheap.
Claude has gotten a lot of popular media attention in the last few weeks, and the influx of users is constraining compute/memory on an already compute heavy model.
So you get all the suspected "tricks" like quantization, shorter thinking, KV cache optimizations.
It feels like the same thing that happened to Gemini 3, and what you can even feel throughout the day (the models seem smartest at 12am).
Dario in his interview with dwarkesh last week also lamented the same refrain that other lab leaders have: compute is constrained and there are big tradeoffs in how you allocate it. It feels safe to reason then that they will use any trick they can to free up compute.
I would expect, it still is only enforced in a semi-strict way.
I think what they want to achieve here is less "kill openclaw" or similar and more "keep our losses under control in general". And now they have a clear criteria to refer when they take action and a good bisection on whom to act on.
In case your usage is high they would block / take action. Because if you have your max subscription and not really losing them money, why should they push you (the monopoly incentive sounds wrong with the current market).
Many people use the Max subscription OAuth token in OpenClaw. The main chat, heartbeat, etc., functionality does not call the Claude Code CLI. It uses the API authenticated via subscription OAuth tokens, which is precisely what Anthropic has banned.
There are many other options too: direct API, other model providers, etc. But Opus is particularly good for "agent with a personality" applications, so it's what thousands of OpenClaw users go with, mostly via the OAuth token, because it's much cheaper than the API.
I have no issues with this. Anthropic did a great job with Claude Code.
It's a little bit sleazy as a business model to try to wedge one's self between Claude and its users.
OpenAI acquiring OpenClaw gives me bad vibes. How did OpenClaw gain so much traction so quickly? It doesn't seem organic.
I definitely feel much more aligned with Anthropic as a company. What they do seems more focused, meritocratic, organic and genuine.
OpenAI essentially appropriated all their current IP from the people... They basically gutted the non-profit and stole its IP. Then sold a huge chunk to Microsoft... Yes, they literally sold the IP they stole to Microsoft, in broad daylight. Then they used media spin to make it sound like they appropriated it from Elon because Elon donated a few millions... But Elon got his tax deduction! The public footed the bill for those deductions... The IP belonged to the non-profit; to the public, not Elon, nor any of the donors. I mean let's not even mention Suchir Balaji, the OpenAI researcher who supposedly "committed suicide" after trying to warn everyone about the stolen IP.
OpenAI is clearly trying to slander Anthropic, trying to present themselves as the good guys after their OpenClaw acquisition and really rubbing it in all over HN... Over which they have much influence.
I pay a Max subscription since a long time, I like their model but I hate their tools:
- Claude Desktop looks like a demo app. It's slow to use and so far behind the Codex app that it's embarassing.
- Claude Code is buggy has hell and I think I've never used a CLI tool that consume so much memory and CPU. Let's not talk about the feature parity with other agents.
- Claude Agent SDK is poorly documented, half finished, and is just thin wrapper around a CLI tool…
Oh and none of this is open source, so I can do nothing about it.
My only option to stay with their model is to build my own tool. And now I discover that using my subscription with the Agent SDK is against the term of use?
I'm not going to pay 500 USD of API credits every months, no way. I have to move to a different provider.
I regret ever promoting that Claude Code crap. I remember when it was nothing but glowing reviews everywhere. Honestly AI companies should stick to what they are good at: direct API interface to powerful models.
We are heading toward a $1000/month model just to use LLMs in the cloud.
I got so tired of cursor that I started writing down every bug I encountered. The list is currently at 30 entries, some of them major bugs such as pressing "apply" on changes not actually applying changes or models getting stuck in infinite loops and burning 50 million tokens.
It might be some confirmation bias here on my part but it feels as if companies are becoming more and more hostile to their API users. Recently Spotify basically nuked their API with zero urgency to fix it, redit has a whole convoluted npm package your obliged to use to create a bot, Facebook requires you to provide registered company and tax details even for development with some permissions. Am I just old man screaming at cloud about APIs used to being actually useful and intuitive?
Instead, many, many websites (especially in the music industry) have some sort of funky API that you can only get access to if you have enough online clout. Very few are transparent about what "enough clout" even means or how much it'd cost you, and there's like an entire industry of third-party API resellers that cost like 10x more than if you went straight to the source. But you can't, because you first have to fulfill some arbitrary criteria that you can't even know about ahead of time.
I don't it's particularly hard to figure it out: APIs have been particularly at risk of being exploited for negative purposes due the explosion of AI powered bots
Facebook doing that is actually good, to protect consumers from data abuse after incidents like cambridge analytica. They are holding businesses who touches your personal data responsible.
Is it? I’ve never touched Facebook api, but it sounds ridiculous that you need to provide tax details for DEVELOPMENT. Can’t they implement some kind of a sandbox with dummy data?
WhatsApp takes bot spam very very seriously, and as a result, there is zero bot spam.
Before you can sign up to build a WhatsApp bot, you need to jump through a million hoops, and after that, every automated message template must be vetted by Meta before it can be sent out, apple style.
I'm glad of this, because unlike SMS and other messaging platforms, WhatsApp is spam free and a pleasure to use.
At least here in Italy whatsapp is a spam house unless you actively update the default privacy settings in-app. There is no discernable difference between SMS and WhatsApp to spammers.
You can mock their API all you want for development and there are many pre-built options for that, but it you want to touch their systems, they're sending a very clear signal. You must be a corporate with an RBO. Seems prudent to me.
> Facebook doing that is actually good, to protect consumers from data abuse after incidents like cambridge analytica.
There is nothing here stopping cambridge analytica from doing this again, they will provide whatever details needed. But a small pre launch personal project work that might use a facebook publishing application can't be developed or tested without first going through all the bureaucracy.
Nevermind the non profit 'free' application you might want to create on the FB platform, lets say a share chrome extension "Post to my FB", for personal use, you can't do this because you can't create an application without a company and IVA/TAX documents. It's hostile imo.
Before, you could create an app, link your ToS, privacy policy etc, verify your domain via email, and then if users wanted to use your application they would agree, this is how a lot of companies still do it. I'm actually not sure why FB do this specifically.
Facebook knew very early and very well about the data harvesting that was going on at Cambridge Analytica through their APIs. They acted so incredibly slowly and not-harsh that it's IMO hard to believe that they did not implicitly support it.
> to protect consumers
We are talking about Meta. They have never, and will never, protect customers. All they protect is their wealth and their political power.
They just want people to use facebook. If you can see facebook content without being signed in they have a harder time tracking you and showing you ads.
They put no limits on the API usage, as long as you pay.
Here, they put limits on the "under-cover" use of the subscription. If they can provide a relatively cheap subscription against the direct API use, this is because they can control the stuff end-to-end, the application running on your system (Claude Code, Claude Desktop) and their systems.
As you subscribe to these plans, this is the "contract", you can use only through their tools. If you want full freedom, use the API, with a per token pricing.
Their subscriptions aren't cheap, and it has nothing really to do with them controlling the system.
It's just price differentiation - they know consumers are price sensitive, and that companies wanting to use their APIs to build products so they can slap AI on their portfolio and get access to AI-related investor money can be milked. On the consumer-facing front, they live off branding and if you're not using claude code, you might not associate the tool with Anthropic, which means losing publicity that drives API sales.
I don't and would never pay for an LLM, but presumably they also want for force ads down your throat eventually, yea? Hard to do if you're just selling API access.
But the idea of an API is more to encourage creativity and other people/companies building products and services on or around your systems. This used to be seen as a positive as it would mean you were an important cog in other peoples products and so more users, exposure, brand awareness etc.
You aren't paying for usage, you are paying for the product that the subscription is offered to. If you are paying for usage, well, that's their billed by token-usage API plan, which they are quite happy for you to use with any client you want.
You are free to not use it. You are not free to use the API provided specifically for the product, which you are not explicitly paying for, for a different product.
You can of course use OpenCode or any other project with the API, which is also offered as a separate product. People just don't want to do that because it's not subsidized, ie. more expensive. But the entire reason it's subsidized is that Anthropic can use the data to improve their product.
> But the entire reason it's subsidized is that Anthropic can use the data to improve their product.
This is grade A, absolute crap. It's subsidized because everyone else is subsidizing it, and everyone is doing it because they are trying to lock their consumer share.
The solution is quite simple. Just get the FTC to forbid tie-in sales so that we don't get the huge corporations using their infinite resources to outlive the competition. Anthropic/Amazon/Google/OpenAI/Facebook can offer any type of service they want, but if the access to the API costs $X when offered standalone, then that is the baseline price for anything that depends on the API to work.
I'm fine with this as well. I just dislike everyone here presenting it like this is Anthropic being unreasonable. Given the product that is offered and why it's being offered, this is completely reasonable to do.
I’m not saying this is a bubble; I don’t know whether than it is or not. But if it is a bubble, I’ve only seen one bubble this big in tech. When that bubble popped, the only companies that survived kept their costs in check. Some raised a round right before the bubble popped but cost control was always part or their survival.
You are not paying for usage. You are paying for usage via their application.
If their business plan is based on how quickly a human can enter requests and react to the results, and Claude Code is optimized for that, why should you be allowed to use an alternative client that e.g. always tries to saturate the token limits?
The speculative reasoning I've seen is that they have optimizations in their CC client that reduces their costs. If that's true, I think it's fair that they can limit subscription usage to their client. If you don't want those optimizations and prefer more freedom, use the API.
They rather have yolo permissions to run arbitrary code on your machine and phone home all the time, then opencode having it and phoning home all the time.
They have rate limits, but they also want to control the nozzle, and not all their users use all their allocation all the time.
In reality, heavy subscription users are subsidized by light subscription users. The rate limits aren't everything.
If agent harnesses other than Claude Code consume more tokens than average, or rather, if users of agent harnesses other than CC consume more tokens than average, well, Anthropic wouldn't be unhappy if those consumers had to pay more for their tokens.
> If agent harnesses other than Claude Code consume more tokens than average, or rather, if users of agent harnesses other than CC consume more tokens than average
Read the ToS, you are paying to use their products. If you want to use other products that integrate with the Anthropic LLMs they offer a product which is the API. You can use Opencode by connecting your API and being charged per token.
Doesn't that make sense? If you use it more you get charged more, if you use it less you get charged less.
But you understand that they changed the ToS today, and that's what I'm complaining about, right? "Read the ToS" isn't an answer to "I don't like this ToS change".
I didn't see today's ToS change. But this was always against ToS. OpenClaw specifically is built against tech that breaks ToS.
Probably the ToS change was to make it more clear.
To be fair, the developer is the one breaking the ToS in the most significant way, breaking boilerplate reverse engineering clauses.
But the user also is very aware that they are doing something funny, in order to authenticate, the user is asked to authorize Claude Code, n ot Opencode or OpenClaw, it's clearly a hack and there is no authorization from Anthropic to OpenClaw, and you are not giving Anthropic authorization to give access to OC, the user asks Anthropic to give access to Claude Code, the only reason this works is because OC is pretending to be Claude Code.
The bottom line issue is that as a user you are paying for a subscription to a package that includes an expected usage. That package is not metered, but it is given on the condition that you will use it as it is expected to be used, by chatting manually with the chatbot, which results in a reasonable expected token usage. By using a program that programatically calls the chat interface, the token consumption increases beyond what was part of the original deal, and so the price should be different.
A similar scenario would be if you go to an all you can eat buffet, you pay for a single person, but then you actually unload an army of little clones that start eating the whole buffet. Technically it was an all you can eat buffet and you paid the price right? Well no, come on, don't play dumb.
You're touching on the eternal App Store debate. "It's my phone, I should be able to install whatever I want on it!" Which is true, but also hasn't been true since the mid-90s (early 2000s at the latest).
Not quite though. You can install Claude's apps wherever they're supported, and maybe even fiddle with the source code (I'm unsure). And you can use any other coding apps that you want. The only real restriction is how those apps are allowed to connect to the providers' services, which are running on their servers, etc. There's a movement from "my local domain" to "their remote domain", and they're allowed to have full control of theirs as you - would prefer, I think - full control of yours.
It doesn't really make sense to me because the subscriptions have limits too.
But I agree they can impose whatever user hostile restrictions they want. They are not a monopoly. They compete in a very competitive market. So if they decide to raise prices in whatever shape or form then that's fine.
Arbitrary restrictions do play a role for my own purchasing decisions though. Flexibility is worth something.
I think what most people don't realize is running an agent 24/7 fully automated is burning a huge hole in their profitability. Who even knows how big it is. It could be getting it on the 8/9 figures a day for all we know.
There's this pervasive idea left over from the pre-llm days that compute is free. You want to rent your own H200x8 to run your Claude model, that's literally going to cost $24/hour. People are just not thinking like that. I have my home PC, it does this stuff I can run it 24/7 for free.
This is honestly the key difference here. I’m morally okay with using Claude Max Whatever with something like OpenCode because it’s literally the same thing from the usage pattern perspective. Plugging Nanoclaw into it is a whole another thing.
It probably doesn't help that the creator of OpenClaw just got hired by Anthropic's competitor.
This sounds like engineering, finance, and legal got together and decided they were in an untenable position if OpenAI started nudging OpenClaw to burn even more tokens on Anthropic (or just never optimize) + continually updated workarounds to using subscription auth. But I'm sure OpenAI would never do something like that...
At the end of the day, it's the same 'fixed price plan for variable use on a constrained resource' cellular problem: profitability becomes directly linked to actual average usage.
I understand you mean for free in the sense that you don't pay a third party to use it, however let's no forget that you still use the power grid and that's not free. Also worth to note that energy prices have increased worldwide.
Depending on utilisation and good use of low-power or sleep (or full off) states when things aren't actively processing, it can still be a _lot_ cheaper to run things at home than on a rented service. Power costs have increased a lot in recent years, but so have compute-per-watt ratios and you are not paying the that indirect compute price when the processors are asleep or off whereas with subscription access to LLMs you are paying at least the base subscription each month even if you don't use it at all in that period. Much the same as the choice between self-hosting an open-source project or paying for a hosted instance - and in both cases people don't tend to consider the admin cost (for some of us the admin is “play time”!) so the self-hosted option it does practically feel free.
Sure it's $24/hour, but it'll crank through tens of thousands of tokens per second --- those beefy GPUs are meant for large amounts of parallel workflow. You'll never _get_ that many tokens for a single request. That's why the mathematics work when you get dozens or hundreds of people using it.
No. The sauce is in KV caching: when to evict, when to keep, how to pre-empt an active agent loop vs someone who are showing signs of inactivity at their pc, etc.
Coder doing the coding should use subscription, and now they ban the choice of your preferred ide for agentc coding. API is for automation not coding. I'm going to cancel their subscription today, I already use codex with opencode.
> If they can provide a relatively cheap subscription against the direct API use
Except they can't. Their costs are not magically lower when you use claude code vs when you use a third-party client.
> For me, this is fair.
This is, plain and simple, a tie-in sale of claude code. I am particularly amused by people accepting it as "fair" because in Brazil this is an illegal practice.
I've heard they actually cache the full Claude Code system prompt on their servers and this saves them a lot of money. Maybe they cache the MCP tools you use and other things. If another harness like Opencode changes that prompt or adds significantly to it, that could increase costs for them.
What I don't understand is why start this game of cat and mouse? Just look at Youtube and YT-DLP. YT-DLP, and the dozens of apps that use it, basically use Youtube's unofficial web API and it still works even after Youtube constantly patches their end. Though now, YT-DLP has to use a makeshift JS interpreter and maybe even spawn Chromium down the line.
Some people drop out of the game as it gets harder. I've basically stopped looking at youtube videos unless I want it enough to download it (and wait if the current workarounds broke) with how much they've clamped down on no-account usage. Most I suspect just give in to the company's terms.
> Except they can't. Their costs are not magically lower when you use claude code vs when you use a third-party client.
I don't have a dog in this fight but is this actually true? If you're using Claude Code they can know that whatever client-side model selection they put into it is active. So if they can get away with routing 80% of the requests to Haiku and only route to Opus for the requests that really need it, that does give them a cost model where they can rely on lower costs than if a third-party client just routes to Opus for everything. Even if they aren't doing that sort of thing now, it would be understandable if they wanted to.
It (CC) does have a /models command, you can still decide to route everything to Opus if you just want to burn tokens
I guess it's not default so most wouldn't, but still, people willing to go to a third party client are more likely that kind of power user anyway
They still have the total consumption under their control (*bar prompt caching and other specific optimizations) where in the past they even had different quotas per model, it shouldn't cost them more money, just be a worse/different service I guess
> It (CC) does have a /models command, you can still decide to route everything to Opus if you just want to burn tokens I guess it's not default so most wouldn't
Opus is claude code's default model as of sometime recently (around Opus 4.6?)
As things are currently, better models mean bigger models that take more storage+RAM+CPU, or just spend more time processing a request. All this translates to higher costs, and may be mitigated by particular configs triggered by knowledge that a given client, providing particular guarantees, is on the other side.
That’s kind of the point. Even if users can choose which model to use (and apparently the default is the largest one), they could still say (For roughly the same cost): your Opus quota is X, your Haiku quota is Y, go ham. We’ll throttle you when you hit the limit.
But they don't want the subscription to be quota'd like that. The API automatically does that though, as different models use different amounts of tokens when generating responses, and the billing is per token. And quite literally is having the user account for the actual costs of usage, which is the thing said users are trying to avoid, on their own terms, and getting upset about when they aren't.
> Their costs are not magically lower when you use claude code vs when you use a third-party client.
If subsidizing that offering is a good hook to get higher paying API users on board, then some of that cost is a customer aquisition cost, whereas the cost to them of providing the API doesn't have the same proportion that they can justify as a customer acquisition cost.
I absolutely have zero concerns about their cost to acquire new customers. As a (former) customer, all I am concerned is the freedom to consume the service I am paying for however I see fit.
> This is, plain and simple, a tie-in sale of claude code. I am particularly amused by people accepting it as "fair" because in Brazil this is an illegal practice
I am very curious what is particularly illegal about this. On the sales page nowhere do they actually talk about the API https://claude.com/pricing
Now we all know obviously the API is being used because that is how things work, but you are not actually paying a subscription for the API. You are paying for access to Claude Code.
Is it also illegal that if you pay for Playstation Plus that you can't play those games on an Xbox?
Is it illegal that you can't use third party netflix apps?
I really don't want to defend and AI company here but this is perfectly normal. In no other situation would we expect access to the API, the only reason this is considered different is because they also have a different service that gives access to the API. But that is irrelevant.
Imagine if video service came with a free TV that watched you, and was really opinionated about what you watch, and you could only watch your videos on the creeper TV.
Then I would not use it because it does not work the way I want it to work...
But if that is the service they are making and they are clear about what it is when you sign up... That does not make it illegal.
I can see why people think they should be entitled to do this, but it does not align with how they are selling the service or how many other companies sell services. In most situations you don't get unlimited access to the individual components of how a service works (the API), you are expected to use the service (in this case Claude Code) directly.
"Both parties are okay with the terms" is far from being sufficient to make something "legal".
Tie-in sales between software and services is not different from price dumping. If any of the Big Tech corporations were from any country that is not the US, the FTC would be doing anything in their power to stop them.
> Tie-in sales between software and services is not different from price dumping.
I disagree, in many cases what you are specifically paying for is the combination of the software and the service that are designed to work together. And in many cases do not work independent of eachother.
There are countless cases of this, that what you are paying for is a thing that is made up of a piece of software and a serverside component. MMO's (and gaming in general) being a major example of this, but so are many of the apps I pay for subscriptions for on my phone.
The actual technical implementation of how it works is irrelevant when it is clear what it is you are paying for.
> "Both parties are okay with the terms" is far from being sufficient to make something "legal".
True but the opposite is also true, just because you don't like the terms it does not make it illegal.
> in many cases what you are specifically paying for is the combination of the software and the service that are designed to work together
And in many cases like Claude Code and the Anthropic models, they can and do work perfectly independently.
> True but the opposite is also true, just because you don't like the terms it does not make it illegal.
This is not me "not liking it". Like I said somewhere else in this thread: these types of tie-in are illegal in Brazil. This practice is clearly not done to favor the consumer. You can bet that if the US was anything closer to a functional democracy and the laws were not written by lobbyists, this would be illegal in the US as well.
Are MMO’s illegal in Brazil? Is PlayStation Plus illegal in Brazil? Is Spotify, Apple Music, etc etc etc also illegal in Brazil?
It would be ridiculous to argue that I could pay for a subscription to World of Warcraft and make my own third party client to play the game with. (Obviously you are free to argue it all you want but I would be very surprised if this was actually illegal).
> And in many cases like Claude Code and the Anthropic models, they can and do work perfectly independently.
Unless I am mistaken Claude Code does not have a local model built into it, so it requires a server side component to work?
As far as the Anthropic models, yes like many other services they ALSO have a public API that is separate from the subscription that you are paying for.
The critical difference here being that in the subscription it is very clear that you are paying for “Claude Code” which is a combination of an application and a server side component. It makes no claims about API usage as part of your subscription, again the technical implementation of the service you are actually paying for “Claude Code” is irrelevant.
When it comes to “Claude Code” for all that we should care about, again given that “Claude Code” is what you are paying for, they could be sending the information to Gemini or or a human looks at it. Because it’s irrelevant to the end user when it comes to the technical implementation since you are not being granted access to any other parts of the system directly.
"Tie-in sale": the business practice where a seller conditions the sale of one product (the tying good) on the buyer’s agreement to purchase a different product (the tied good).
The examples you are giving are not "tie-in" sales because the service from Playstation Plus, Spotify, Apple Music, etc is the distribution of digital goods.
> Unless I am mistaken Claude Code does not have a local model built into it, so it requires a server side component to work?
Which part are you not understanding?
I don't care about Claude Code. I do not want it and do not need it. All I care about is the access to the models through the client that I was already using!
> When it comes to “Claude Code” for all that we should care about, again given that “Claude Code” is what you are paying for.
No, it is not! I paid for Claude Pro. Claude != Claude Code.
Claude Pro = claude.ai, and they made no changes to that arrangement. Both claude.ai and Claude Pro are products built on top of the Claude API. You are free to buy access to the Claude API itself, with or without the other two, but the pricing is different because the price of claude.ai and Claude Code includes the API charges they incur.
> but the pricing is different because the price of claude.ai and Claude Code includes the API charges they incur.
If that was true, then getting equivalent usage of the API without claude.ai and Claude Code should cost less, not more.
You can try to find all sorts of explanations for it, at the end of the day is quite simple: they are subsidizing one product in order to grow the market share, and they are doing it at a loss now, because they believe they will make up for it later. I understand the reasoning from a business point of view, but this doesn't mean they are entitled to their profits. I do not understand people that think we simply accept their premise and assume they can screw us over just because they asked and put it on a piece of paper.
- It was possible to do it.
- OpenCode did not break any security protocol in order to integrate with them.
- OAuth is *precisely* a system to let third-party applications use their resources.
It's not what they wanted, but it's not my problem. The fact that I was a customer does not mean that I need to protective of their profits.
> (from their business perspective)
So what?!
Basically, they set up an strategy they thought it was going to work in their favor (offer a subsidized service to try to lock in customers), someone else found a way to turn things around and you believe that we should be okay with this?!
Honestly, I do not understand why so many people here think it is fine to let these huge corporations run the same exploitation playbook over and over again. Basically they set up a mouse trap full of cheese and now that the mice found a way to enjoy the cheese without getting their necks broken, they are crying about it?
You'd have to point me to an authoritative source on that (explicitly saying users are allowed to use their models via private APIs in apps of the user's choosing). If something isn't explicitly provided in the contract, then it can be changed at any point in any way without notice.
Honestly, I'm not big on capitalism in general, but I don't understand why people should expect companies to provide things exactly the way they want at exactly the prices they would like to be charged (if at all). That's just not how the world/system works, or should, especially given there are so many alternatives available. If one doesn't like what's happening with some service, then let the wallet do the talking and move to another. Emigration is a far more effective message than complaining.
> I don't understand why people should expect companies to provide things exactly the way they want at exactly the prices they would like to be charged
This is a gross misrepresentation of my argument.
I wouldn't be complaining at all if they went up and said "sorry, we are not going to subsidize anyone anymore, so the prices are going up", and I wouldn't be complaining if they came up and said "sorry, using a third party client incurs an extra cost of on our side, so if you want to use that you'd have to pay extra".
What I am against is the anti-competitive practice of price discrimination and the tie-in sale of a service. If they are going to play this game, then they better be ready for the case the strategy backfires. Otherwise it's just a game of "heads I win, tails you lose" where they always get to make up the rules.
> Emigration is a far more effective message than complaining.
Why not both? I cancelled my Pro subscription today. I will stick with just Ollama cloud.
It's not tie-in. They give users 2 choices: a) use their service via their public API, with the client(s) of their choice, at the regular price point; b) use the apps they provide, which use a private API, at a discounted price point. The apps are technically negative value for them from a purely upfront cost perspective as their use trigger these discounts and they're free by themselves.
Good on you re that cancel. May you find greener grass elsewhere.
> "Tie-in sale": the business practice where a seller conditions the sale of one product (the tying good) on the buyer’s agreement to purchase a different product (the tied good)
I will keep my response to this part in particular limited because I have limited understanding of this law. However based on doing a little bit of searching around the law is not as cut and dry as you are presenting it to be. It is possible that Claude code would fall under being fine under that law or no one has gone after them. I honestly don’t know and I don’t feel like having an argument that it is highly likely both of us don’t fully understand the law.
That being said I do question how exactly “Claude code” differs from those services as a digital good.
> I don't care about Claude Code. I do not want it and do not need it. All I care about is the access to the models through the client that I was already using!
OK! That is not what you’re paying for as part of Claude Pro, end of story. You are not paying for the API. It is no different that the people that have a free plan and can only chat through the web and the app also don’t get access to the API even though it is obviously using an API to access those endpoints as well.
Or are you also going to argue that free users should have access to the API because they are already using them in the browser.
> No, it is not! I paid for Claude Pro. Claude != Claude Code.
Claude Code is one of the features you are paying for as part of Claude Pro so yes in a way you are paying for it. And again not on that list is the API.
Could you clarify exactly what you think is an illegal tie-in? Because it seems like what you are upset about is literally the opposite -- Anthropic unbundling their offerings so you aren't required to buy the ability to offer third party access when you purchase the ability to use Claude code and their other models. Unless I really misunderstand you, your complaint is literally thaf
The laws prohibiting tie-ins don't make it illegal to sell two products that work well together. That's literally what the laws are designed to make you do -- seperate products into seperate pieces. The problem tie-in laws were designed to combat was situations like Microsoft making a popular OS then making a mediocre spreadsheet program and pushing the cost of that spreadsheet program into the cost of buying the OS. That way consumers would go "well it's expensive but I get excel with it so it's ok" and even if someone else made a slightly better spreadsheet they didn't have the chance to convince users because they had to buy it all as one package.
Anthropic would be doing something much closer to that if they did what you wanted. They'd be saying: hey we have this neat Claude code thing you all want to use but you can't buy that without also purchasing third party access. Now some company offering a cheaper/better third party usage product doesn't get the chance to convince you because anthropic forced you to buy that just to get claude code.
Ultimately this change unbundled products the opposite of a tie-in. What is upsetting about it is that it no longer feels to you like you are getting a good deal because you now have to fork over a bunch more cash to keep getting what you want. But that's not illegal, that's just not offering good value for money.
Look at it this way: the service that you're accessing is really a (primarily desired) side-effect of the software. So re subscriptions, what they're actually providing are the apps (web, desktop, etc), and the apps use their service to aid the fulfillment of their functionality. Those wanting direct access to the internal service can get an API key for that purpose. That's just how their product offering is structured.
It's basically the difference between pro-market capitalism and pro-business capitalism. The value to the society comes from competition in the market and from the businesses' ability to choose freely how they do business. When those two goals are in conflict, which one should be prioritized?
Anthropic provides an API third-party clients can use. The pro-market position is that the API must be available at every pricing tier, as the benefits from increased competition outweigh the imposed restrictions to business practices. The pro-business position is that Anthropic must be allowed to choose which tiers can use the API, as the benefits from increased freedom outweigh the reduced competition in the market.
Like I mentioned somewhere else I can see why some people think they are entitled to do this and I also fully understand wanting to do it from a cost standpoint.
While I do personally disagree with thinking that you should be able to do this when it was never sold in that way, at the end of the day as a customer you can choose if you want to use the product in the way that they are saying or use something else if you don’t want to support that model.
However the person I was responding too brought up legality which is a very different discussion.
Unless it's illegal in more places, I think they won't care. In my experience, the percentage of free riders in Brazil is higher (due to circumstances, better said).
It would be less of an issue if Claude-Code was actually the best coding client, and would actually somehow reduce the amount of tokens used. But it's not. I get more things done with less tokens via OpenCode. And in the end, I hit 100% usage at the end of the week anyway.
The problem is incentives. The organization selling the per-token model doesn't have the incentive, at scale to have you reduce token consumption. Other technologies do, hence adding value.
I'm with the parent comment. It was inevitable Netflix would end password-sharing. It was inevitable you'd have to pick between freeform usage-based billing and a constrained subscription experience. Using the chatbot subscription as an API was a weird loophole. I don't feel betrayed.
APIs are the best when they let you move data out and build cool stuff on top. A lot of big platforms do not really want that anymore. They want the data to stay inside their silo so access gets slower harder and more locked down. So you are not just yelling at the cloud this feels pretty intentional.
I think that these companies are understanding that as the barrier to entry to build a frontend gets lower and lower, APIs will become the real moat. If you move away from their UI they will lose ad revenue, viewer stats, in short the ability to optimize how to harness your full attention. It would be great to have some stats on hand and see if and how much active API user has increased decreased in the last
two years, as I would not be surprised if it had increased at a much faster pace than in the past.
> the barrier to entry to build a frontend gets lower
My impression is the opposite: frontend/UI/UX is where the moat is growing because that's where users will (1) consume ads (2) orchestrate their agents.
I agree with you - we are saying the same thing, by restricting their API or making less developer friendly, they want you to be captive in their UI. This might not be true for Anthropic or OpenAI - another child commenter made a comment about ads in CLI, I would not be surprised if in a while we will have product placements in LLM responses exactly as we have it in movies - not a plain ad but just a slightly less subliminal suggestion.
It’s objectively easier to build a frontend now and therefore that moat is disappearing.
What you can argue is the moat is in incumbent advantage at the UI layer, not the UI itself.
Spotify in particular is just patently the very worst. They released an amazing and delightful app sdk, allowing for making really neat apps in the desktop app in 2011. Then cancelled it by 2014. It feels like their entire ecosystem has only ever gone downhill. Their car device was cancelled nearly immediately. Every API just gets worse and worse. Remarkable to see a company have only ever such a downward slide. The Spotify Graveyard is, imo, a place of singnificantly less honor than the Google Graveyard. https://web.archive.org/web/20141104154131/https://gigaom.co...
But also, I feel like this broad repulsive trend is such an untenable position now that AI is here. Trying to make your app an isolated disconnected service is a suicide pact. Some companies will figure out how to defend their moat, but generally people are going to prefer apps that allow them to use the app as they want, increasingly, over time. And they are not going to be stopped even if you do try to control terms!
Were I a smart engaged company, I'd be trying to build WebMCP access as soon as possible. Adoption will be slow, this isn't happening fast, but people who can mix human + agent activity on your site are going to be delighted by the experience, and that you will spread!
WebMCP is better IMHO than conventional APIs because it layers into the experience you are already having. It's not a separate channel; it can build and use the session state of your browsing to do the things. That's a huge boon for users.
APIs leak profit and control vs their counterpart SDK/platforms. Service providers use them to bootstrap traffic/brand, but will always do everything they can to reduce their usage or sunset them entirely if possible.
Everyone has heard the word "enshittification" at this point and this falls in line. But if you haven't read the book [0] it's a great deep dive into the topical area.
But the real issue is that these companies, once they have any market leverage, do things in their best interest to protect the little bit of moat they've acquired.
What is given can be taken away. Despite the extra difficult this is why unofficial methods (e.g. scraping) are often superior. Soon we'll see more fully independent data scraping done by cameras and microphones.
You're not wrong. Reddit & Elon started it and everyone laughed at them and made a stink. But my guess is the "last dying gasp of the freeloader" /s wasn't enough to dissuade other companies from jumping on the bandwagon, cause fiduciary responsibility to shareholders reigns supreme at the end of the day.
You're correct in your observations. In the age of agents, the walls are going up. APIs are no longer a value-add; they're a liability. MCP and the equivalent will be the norm interface. IMO.
It's because AI is being trained on all of these APIs and the platforms are at risk of losing what makes them valuable (their data). So they have to take the API down or charge enough that it wouldn't be worth it for an AI.
Does this mean that in an absurd way you can get banned if you use CodexBar https://github.com/steipete/CodexBar to keep track of your usage? It does use your credentials to fetch the usage, could they be so extreme that this would be an issue?
¡Quick reminder! We are in the golden era of big company programming agents. Enjoy it while you can because it is likely going to get worse over time. Hopefully, there were will be competitive open source agents and some benevolent nerds put together a reasonable service. Otherwise I can see companies investing in their own AI infrastructure and developers who build their own systems becoming the top performers.
This is the VC funded startup playbook. It has been repeated many times, but maybe for the younger crowd it is new. Start a new service that is relatively permissive, then gradually restrict APIs and permissions. Finally, start throwing in ads and/or making it more expensive to use. Part of the reason is in the beginning they are trying to get as many users as possible and burning VC money. Then once the honey moon is over, they need to make a profit so they cut back on services, nerf stuff, increase prices and start adding ads.
In the old days, think Gmail, or before the "unlimited" marketing scam. People genuinely are smart enough to know they are doing something that they are not suppose to be doing. Even Pirating software, say Windows or Adobe. I mean who can afford those when they were young?
Things get banned, but that is OK along as they give us weeks or days to prep for alternative solution. Users ( Not Customers ) are happy with it. Too bad, the good days are over.
Somewhere along the line, no just in software but even in politics, the whole world on entitlement. They somehow believe they deserve this, what they were doing were wrong but if it is allowed in the first place they should remain allowed to do so.
Judging from account opening time and comments we can also tell the age group and which camp they are on.
I think that their main problem is that they don't have enough resources to serve too many users, so they resort to this kind of limitations to keep Claude usage under control.
Otherwise I wouldn't be able to explain a commercial move that limits their offer so strongly in comparison to competitors.
The reason I find this so egregious is because I don’t want to use Claude Code! It’s complete rubbish, completely sidelines security, and nobody seems to care. So I’m forced to use their slop if I want to use Claude models without getting a wallet emptying API bill? Forget it, I will use Codex or Gemini.
Claude Code is not the apex. We’re still collectively figuring out the best way to use models in software, this TOS change kills innovation.
Always have been, unless you're using the API meant for apps.
But if you're doing something very basic, you might be able to slop together a tool that does local inferencing based on a small, local model instead, alleviating the need to call Claude entirely.
Anthropic is dead. Long live open platforms and open-weight models. Why would I need Claude if I can get Minimax, Kimi, and Glm for the fraction of the price?
To get comparable results you need to run those models on at least prosumer hardware and it seems that two beef-up Mac Studios are the minimum. Which means that instead of buying this hardware you can purchase Claude, Codex and many other subscriptions for next 20 years.
And because of this i'll obviously opt to not subscribe to a Claude plan, when i can just use something like Copilot and use the models that way via OpenCode.
There has been a false narrative that AI will get cheaper and more ubiquitous, but model providers have been stuck in a race for ever more capabilities and performance at higher costs.
People on here are acting like school children over this. It’s their product that they spent billions to make. Yet here we are complaining about why they should let you use third party products specifically made to compete against Anthropic.
introducing moderation, steerage and censorship in your LLM is a great way to not even show up to the table with a competitive product. builders have woken up to this reality and are demanding local models
OpenClaw, NanoClaw, et al all use AgentSDK which will from now on be forbidden.
They are literally alienating a large percentage of OpenClaw, NanoClaw, PicoClaw, customers because those customers will surely not be willing to pay API pricing, which is at least 6-10x Max Plan pricing (for my usage).
This isn’t too surprising to me since they probably have a direct competitor to openclaw et al in the works right now, but until then I am cancelling my subscription and porting my nanoclaw fork with mem0 integration to work with OpenAI instead.
Thats not a “That’ll teach ‘em” statement, it is just my own cost optimization. I am quite fond of Anthropic’s coding models and might still subscribe again at the $20 level, but they just priced me out for personal assistant, research, and 90% of my token use case.
Anthropic is just doing this out of spite. They had a real scenario to win mindshare and marketshare and they fucked up instead. They could have done what Open AI did - hired the OpenClaw/d founder. Instead, they sent him a legal notice for trademark violation. And now they're just pissed he works for their biggest competitor. Throw all tantrums you want, you're on the wrong side of this one, Anthropic.
Seems fair enough really, not that I like it either, but they could easily not offer the plans and only have API pricing. Makes it make more sense to have the plans be 'the Claude Code pricing' really.
Not sure what the problem is, I am on Max and use Claude Code, never get usage issues, that's what I pay for and want that to always be an option (capped monthly cost). For other uses it makes sense to go through their API service. This is less confusing and provides clarity for users, if you are a first party user use Claude's tools to access's the models otherwise API
I think I've made two good decisions in my life. The first was switching entirely to Linux around '05 even though it was a giant pain in the ass that was constantly behind the competition in terms of stability and hardware support. It took awhile but wow no regrets.
The second appears to be hitching my wagon to Mistral even though it's apparently nowhere as powerful or featureful as the big guys. But do you know how many times they've screwed me over? Not once.
Maybe it's my use cases that make this possible. I definitely modified my behavior to accommodate Linux.
I just cancelled my Pro subscription. Turns out that Ollama Cloud with GLM-5 and qwen-coder-next are very close in quality to Opus, I never hit their rate limits even with two sessions running the whole day and there zero advantage for me to use Claude Code compared to OpenCode.
Product usage subsidized by company, $100.
Users inevitably figure out how to steal those subsidies, agents go brrrrr.
Users mad that subsidy stealing gets cut off and completely ignore why they need to rely on subsidies in the first place, priceless.
Reading these comments aren't we missing the obvious?
Claude Code is a lock in, where Anthropic takes all the value.
If the frontend and API are decoupled, they are one benchmark away from losing half their users.
Some other motivations: they want to capture the value. Even if it's unprofitable they can expect it to become vastly profitable as inference cost drops, efficiency improves, competitors die out etc. Or worst case build the dominant brand then reduce the quotas.
Then there's brand - when people talk about OpenCode they will occasionally specify "OpenCode (with Claude)" but frequently won't.
Then platform - at any point they can push any other service.
Look at the Apple comparison. Yes, the hardware and software are tuned and tested together. The analogy here is training the specific harness,caching the system prompt, switching models, etc.
But Apple also gets to charge Google $billions for being the default search engine. They get to sell apps. They get to sell cloud storage, and even somehow a TV. That's all super profitable.
At some point Claude Code will become an ecosystem with preferred cloud and database vendors, observability, code review agents, etc.
Using an API key is orders of magnitude more expensive. That's the difference here. The Claude Code subscriptions are being heavily subsidized by Anthropic, which is why people want to use their subscriptions in everything else.
I think the people who use more than they pay for vastly outnumber those who pay for more than they use. It takes intention to sign up (not the default, like health care) and once you do, you quickly get in the habit of using it.
This move feels poorly timed. Their latest ad campaigns about not having ads, and the goodwill they'd earned lately in my book was just decimated by this. I'm sure I'm not the only one who's still just dipping their toes into the AI pool. And am very much a user that under utilizes what I pay for because of that. I have several clients who are scrambling to get on board with cowork. Eliminating API usage for subscription members right before a potentially large wave of turnover not only chills that motivation it signals a lack of faith in their marketing, which from my POV, put out the only AI super bowl campaign to escape virtually unscathed.
> the goodwill they'd earned lately in my book was just decimated by this
That sounds absurd to me. Committing to not building in advertising is very important and fundamental to me. Asking people who pay for a personal subscription rather than paying by the API call to use that subscription themselves sounds to me like it is. Just clarifying the social compact that was already implied.
I WANT to be able to pay a subscription price. Rather like the way I pay for my internet connectivity with a fixed monthly bill. If I had to pay per packet transmitted, I would have to stop and think about it every time I decided to download a large file or watch a movie. Sure, someone with extremely heavy usage might not be able to use a normal consumer internet subscription; but it works fine for my personal use. I like having the option for my AI usage to operate the same way.
The problem with fixed subscriptions in this model is that the service has an actual consumption cost. For something like internet service, the cost is primarily maintenance, unless the infrastructure is being expanded. But using LLMs is more like using water, where the more you use it, the greater the depletion of a resource (electricity in this case, which is likely being produced with fossil fuel which has to be sourced and transported, etc). Anthropic et al would be setting themselves up for a fall if they allow wholesale use at a fixed price.
The people mad about this feel they are entitled to the heavily subsidized usage in any context they want, not in the context explicitly allowed by the subsidizer.
It's kind of like a new restaurant started handing out coupons for "90% off", wanting to attract diners to the restaurant, customers started coming in and ordering bulk meals then immediately packaging them in tupperware containers and taking it home (violating the spirit of the arrangement, even if not the letter of the arrangement), so the restaurant changed the terms on the discount to say "limited to in-store consumption only, not eligible for take-home meals", and instead of still being grateful that they're getting food for 90% off, the cheapskate customers are getting angry that they're no longer allowed to exploit the massive subsidy however they want.
Anthropic is going to be on the losing side with this. Models are too fungible, it's really about vibes, and Claude Code is far too fat and opinionated. Ironically, they're holding back innovation, and it's burning the loyalty the model team is earning.
The competition angle is interesting - we're already seeing models like Step-3.5-Flash advertise compatibility with Claude Code's harness as a feature. If Anthropic's restrictions push developers toward more open alternatives, they might inadvertently accelerate competitor adoption. The real question is whether the subscription model economics can sustain the development costs long-term while competitors offer more flexible terms.
I think you have it exactly backwards, and that "owning the stack" is going to be important. Yes the harness is important, yes the model is important, but developing the harness and model together is going to pay huge dividends.
That was true more mid last year, but now we have a fairly standard flow and set of core tools, as well as better general tool calling support. The reality is that in most cases harnesses with fewer tools and smaller system prompts outperform.
The advances in the Claude Code harness have been more around workflow automation rather than capability improvements, and truthfully workflows are very user-dependent, so an opinionated harness is only ever going to be "right" for a narrow segment of users, and it's going to annoy a lot of others. This is happening now, but the sub subsidy washes out a lot of the discontent.
You're right, because owning the stack means better options for making tons of money. Owning the stack is demonstrably not required for good agents, there are several excellent (frankly way better than ol' Claude Code) harnesses in the wild (which is in part why so many people are so annoyed by Anthropic about this move - being forced back onto their shitty cli tool).
This coding agent is minimal, and it completely changed how I used models and Claude's cli now feels like extremely slow bloat.
I'd not be surprised if you're right in that this is companies / management will prefer to "pay for a complete package" approach for a long while, but power-users should not care for the model providers.
I have like 100 lines of code to get me a tmux controls & semaphore_wait extension in the pi harness. That gave me a better orchestration scheme a month ago when I adopted it, than Claude has right now.
As far as I can tell, the more you try to train your model on your harness, the worse they get. Bitter lesson #2932.
OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft certainly desire path dependence but the very nature of LLMs and intelligence itself might make that hard unless they can develop models which truly are differentiated (and better) from the rest. The Chinese open source models catching up make me suspect that won't happen. The models will just be a commodity. There is a countdown clock for when we can get Opus 4.6+ level models and its measured in months.
The reason these LLM tools being good is they can "just do stuff." Anthropic bans third party subscription auth? I'll just have my other tool use Claude Code in tmux. If third party agents can be banned from doing stuff (some advanced always on spyware or whatever), then a large chunk of the promise of AI is dead.
Amp just announced today they are dumping IDE integration. Models seem to run better on bare-bones software like Pi, and you can add or remove stuff on the fly because the whole things open source. The software writes itself. Is Microsoft just trying to cram a whole new paradigm in to an old package? Kind of like a computer printer. It will be a big business, but it isn't the future.
At scale, the end provider ultimately has to serve the inference -- they need the hardware, data centers & the electricity to power those data centers. Someone like Microsoft can also provide a SLA and price such appropriately. I'll avoid a $200/month customer acquisition cost rant, but one user, running a bunch of sub agents, can spend a ton of money. If you don't own a business or funding source, the way state of the art LLMs are being used today is totally uneconomical (easy $200+ an hour at API prices.)
36+ months out, if they overbuild the data centers and the revenue doesn't come in like OpenAI & Anthropic are forecasting, there will be a glut of hardware. If that's the case I'd expect local model usage will scale up too and it will get more difficult for enterprise providers.
(Nothing is certain but some things have become a bit more obvious than they were 6 months ago.)
Thinking about this a little more -> "nature of LLMs and intelligence"
Bloated apps are a material disadvantage. If I'm in a competitive industry that slow down alone can mean failure. The only thing Claude Code has going for it now is the loss making $200 month subsidy. Is there any conceivable GUI overlay that Anthropic or OpenAI can add to make their software better than the current terminal apps? Sure, for certain edge cases, but then why isn't the user building those themselves? 24 months ago we could have said that's too hard, but that isn't the case in 2026.
Microsoft added all of this stuff in to Windows, and it's a 5 alarm fire. Stuff that used to be usable is a mess and really slow. Running linux with Claude Code, Codex, or Pi is clearly superior to having a Windows device with neither (if it wasn't possible to run these in Windows; just a hypothetical.)
From the business/enterprise perspective - there is no single most important thing, but having an environment that is reliable and predictable is high up there. Monday morning, an the Anthropic API endpoint is down, uh oh! In the longer term, businesses will really want to control both the model and the software that interfaces with it.
If the end game is just the same as talking to the Star Trek computer, and competitors are narrowing gaps rather than widening them (e.g. Anthropic and OpenAI releases models minutes from each other now, Chinese frontier models getting closer in capability not further), then it is really hard to see how either company achieves a vertical lock down.
We could actually move down the stack, and then the real problem for OpenAI and Anthropic is nVidia. 2030, the data center expansion is bust, nVidia starts selling all of these cards to consumers directly and has a huge financial incentive to make sure the performant local models exist. Everyone in the semiconductor supply chain below nvidia only cares about keeping sales going, so it stops with them.
Maybe nvidia is the real winner?
Also is it just me or does it now feel like hn comments are just talking to a future LLM?
the fat and opinionated has always been true for them (especially compared to openai), and to all appearances remains a feature rather than a bug. i can’t say the approach makes my heart sing, personally, but it absolutely has augured tremendous success among thought workers / the intelligensia
I don't think many are confused about why Anthropic wants to do this. The crux is that they appear to be making these changes solely for their own benefit at the expense of their users and people are upset.
There are parallels to the silly Metaverse hype wave from a few years ago. At the time I saw a surprising number of people defending the investment saying it was important for Facebook to control their own platform. Well sure it's beneficial for Facebook to control a platform, but that benefit is purely for the company and if anything it would harm current and future users. Unsurprisingly, the pitch to please think of this giant corporation's needs wasn't a compelling pitch in the end.
"Training the specific harness" is marginal -- it's obvious if you've used anything else. pi with Claude is as good as (even better! given the obvious care to context management in pi) as Claude Code with Claude.
This whole game is a bizarre battle.
In the future, many companies will have slightly different secret RL sauces. I'd want to use Gemini for documentation, Claude for design, Codex for planning, yada yada ... there will be no generalist take-all model, I just don't believe RL scaling works like that.
I'm not convinced that a single company can own the best performing model in all categories, I'm not even sure the economics make it feasible.
> pi with Claude is as good as (even better! given the obvious care to context management in pi) as Claude Code with Claude
And that’s out of the box. With how comically extensible pi is and how much control it gives you over every aspect of the pipeline, as soon as you start building extensions for your own, personal workflow, Claude Code legimitely feels like a trash app in comparison.
I don’t care what Anthropic does - I’ll keep using pi. If they think they need to ban me for that, then, oh well. I’ll just continue to keep using pi. Just no longer with Claude models.
> At some point Claude Code will become an ecosystem with preferred cloud and database vendors, observability, code review agents, etc.
i've been wondering how anthropic is going to survive long term. If they could build out an infrastructure and services to complete with the hyperscalers but surfaced as a tool for claude to use then maybe. You pay Anthropic $20/user/month for ClaudeCode but also $100k/month to run your applications.
I'm wondering: why now, in early 2026? Why not last year? Why not in July? What changed? What does this teach us about Anthropic and what can we infer about their competition?
Especially how generous Anthropic has been recently with subscribers - extra usage in December, $50 credit earlier this month, $20 subscription getting access to Opus.
It suggests to me Anthropic is less concerned with the financial impact of letting subscribers use alternative tools and more concerned with creating lock in to their products and subscriptions. It very well might backfire though, I was not considering alternative models yesterday, but today I am actively exploring other options and considering cancelling my sub. I've been using my subscription primarily through pi recently, so if they aren't interested in me as a customer, pretty much everyone else is.
Am I the only one perplexed why folks find this stunning or meaningful. While LLMs are novel and different in that the subscription gives you access to compute, it does not feel foreign from the subscription, free or paid, landscape. I cannot recall many (if any?) companies that would freely let you use compute, private internal APIs or anything similar just because you have a login. Maybe I come from a different era of tech but it seems both reasonable and not surprising.
Why now? It would not surprise me that this was simply an after thought and once it hit critical mass (opencode) they locked it down.
I feel like they want to be like Apple, and open-code + open-source models are Linux. The thing is, Apple is (for some) way better in user experience and quality. I think they can pull it off only if they keep their distance from the others. But if Google/Chinese models become as good as Claude, then there won’t be a reason — at least for me — to pay 10x for the product
Hot take: trying to restrict what front end people use to access your service is almost always an anti-competitive, anti-consumer freedom move which should be legally prohibited for those reasons. (Not just for AI, I'm talking about any and all cloud services.)
Regarding consumer freedom, I believe software running on user machines should serve the interests of the user, not the company who wrote the software or anyone else for that matter. Trying to force users to run a particular client written by your company violates this principle.
Regarding competition, forcing users to run a particular client is a form of anti competitive bundling, a naked attempt to prevent alternative clients from being able to enter the market unless they are able to build a competing backed as well. Such artificial "moats" are great for companies but harmful to consumers.
Is it me, or will this just speed up the timeline where a 'good enough' open model (Qwen? Deepseek? - I'm sure the Chinese will see a value in undermining OpenAI/Anthropic/Google) combined with good enough/cheap hardware (10x inference improvement in a M7 Macbook Air?) makes running something like opencode code locally a no brainer?
People running models locally has always been the scare for the sama's of the world. "Wait, I don't need you to generate these responses for me? I can get the same results myself?"
The good enough alternative models are here or will be soon, depending on your definition of good enough. MiniMax-M2.5 looks really competitive and its a tenth of the cost of Sonnet-4.6 (they also have subscriptions).
Running locally is going to require a lot of memory, compute, and energy for the foreseeable future which makes it really hard to compete with ~$20/mo subscriptions.
Personally I am already there- I go to Qwen and Deepseek locally via ollama for my dumb questions and small tasks, and only go to Claude if they fail. I do this partially because I am just so tired of everything I do over a network being logged, tracked, mined and monetized, and also partially because I would like my end state to be using all local tools, at least for personal stuff.
This is a signal that everyone making AI apps should build on Gemini/OpenAI, and since there is a dance of code and model to get good results, inevitably Anthropic are now writing themselves out of being the backend for everyone elses AI apps going forward
Isn’t this flawed anyway? If an application communicates with Claude Code over ACP (like Zed), it works fine?
Instead of using SDKs, this will just shift the third party clients to use ACP to get around it - Claude Code is still under the hood but you’re using a different interface.
This all seems pretty idiotic on their part - I know why they’re trying it but it won’t work. There will always be someone working around it.
The people who they’re going to piss off the most with this are the exact people who are the least susceptible to their walled garden play. If you’re using OpenCode, you’re not going to stop using it because Anthropic tells you to; you’re just going to think ‘fuck Anthropic’, press whatever you’ve bound “switch model” to, and just continue using OpenCode. I think most power users have realized by now that Claude Code is sub-par software and probably actively holding back the models because Anthropic thinks they can’t work right without 20,000 tokens worth of system prompt (my own system prompt has around 1,000 and outperforms CC at every test I throw it at).
They’re losing the exact crowd that they want in their corner because it’s the crowd that’s far more likely to be making the decisions when companies start pivoting their workflows en-masse. Keep pissing on them and they’ll remember the wet when the time comes to decide whom to give a share from the potentially massive company’s potentially massive coffers.
The fundamental tension here is that AI companies are selling compute at a loss to capture market share, while users are trying to maximize value from their subscriptions.
From a backend perspective, the subscription model creates perverse incentives. Heavy users (like developers running agentic workflows) consume far more compute than casual users, but pay the same price. Third-party tools amplify this asymmetry.
Anthropic's move is economically rational but strategically risky. Models are increasingly fungible - Gemini 3.1 and Claude 4.5 produce similar results for most tasks. The lock-in isn't the model; it's the tooling ecosystem.
By forcing users onto Claude Code exclusively, they're betting their tooling moat is stronger than competitor models. Given how quickly open-source harnesses like pi have caught up, that's a bold bet.
is the tooling moat and secret sauce in Claude Code the client? That's super risky given the language it was written in ( javascript ). I bet Claude Code itself can probably reverse engineer the minimized javascript, trace the logic, and then name variables something sensible for readability. Then the secret sauce is exposed for all to see.
Also, can you not setup a proxy for the cert and a packet sniffer to watch whatever ClaudeCode is doing with respect to API access? To me, if you have "secret sauce" you have to keep it server side and make the client as dumb as possible. Especially if your client is executes as Javascript.
This feels perfectly justifiable to me. The subscription plans are super cheap and if they insist you use their tool I understand. Ya'll seem a bit entitled if I'm being honest.
For what it's worth, I built an alternative specifically because of the ToS risk. GhostClaw uses proper API keys stored in AES-256-GCM + Argon2id encrypted vault -no OAuth session tokens, no subscription credentials, no middleman. Skills are signed with Ed25519 before execution. Code runs in a Landlock + seccomp kernel sandbox. If your key gets compromised you rotate it; if a session token gets compromised in someone else's app you might not even know.
the subscription already has usage caps. if the caps are the caps, why does the client matter. if the caps aren't actually the caps, that's a different conversation.
There is a new breed of agent-agnostic tools that call the Claude Code CLI as if it's an API (I'm currently trying out vibe-kanban).
This could be used to adhere to Claude's TOS while still allowing the user to switch AI companies at a moment's notice.
Right now there's limited customizability in this approach, but I think it's not far-fetched to see FAR more integrated solutions in the future if the lock-in trend continues. For example: one MCP that you can configure into a coding agent like Claude Code that overrides its entire behavior (tools, skills, etc.) to a different unified open-source system. Think something similar to the existing IntelliJ IDEA's MCP that gives a separate file edit tool, etc. than the one the agent comes with.
Illustration of what i'm talking about:
- You install Claude Code with no configuration
- Then you install the meta-agent framework
- With one command the meta-agent MCP is installed in Claude Code, built-in tools are disabled via permissions override
- You access the meta-agent through a different UI (similar to vibe-kanban's web UI)
- Everything you do gets routed directly to Claude Code, using your Claude subscription legally. (Input-level features like commands get resolved by meta-agent UI before being sent to claude code)
- Claude Code must use the tools and skills directly from meta-agent MCP as instructed in the prompt, and because its own tools are permission denied (result: very good UI integration with the meta-agent UI)
- This would also work with any other CLI coding agent (Codex, Gemini CLI, Copilot CLI etc.) should they start getting ideas of locking users in
- If Claude Code rug-pulls subscription quotas, just switch to a competitor instantly
All it requires is a CLI coding agent with MCP support, and the TOS allowing automatic use of its UI (disallowing that would be massive hypocrisy as the AI companies themselves make computer use agents that allow automatic use of other apps' UI)
Could you think of it as ClaudeCode is just a tool used by another agent and that other agent is instructed to use the ClaudeCode tool for everything? Makes sense, i don't see why we can't have agents use these agents for us, just like the AI companies are proposing to use their agents in place of everything else we currently use.
Also, why not distribute implementation documentation so claudecode can write OpenCode itself and use your oauth token. Now you have opencode for personal use, you didn't get it from anywhere your agent created it for you and only you.
This is funny. This change actually pushes me into using a competitor more (https://www.kimi.com). I was trying out this provider with oh-my-pi (https://github.com/can1357/oh-my-pi) and was lamenting that it didn't have web search implemented using kimi.
The entitlement from many HN posters is astounding. "Companies must provide services in the way I want billed how I want and with absolutely zero restrictions at all!" Get over yourselves. You're not that important. Don't like it. Don't use it. Seems pretty straightforward.
[OP] theahura | 19 hours ago
> Authentication and credential use
> Claude Code authenticates with Anthropic’s servers using OAuth tokens or API keys. These authentication methods serve different purposes:
> OAuth authentication (used with Free, Pro, and Max plans) is intended exclusively for Claude Code and Claude.ai. Using OAuth tokens obtained through Claude Free, Pro, or Max accounts in any other product, tool, or service — including the Agent SDK — is not permitted and constitutes a violation of the Consumer Terms of Service.
> Developers building products or services that interact with Claude’s capabilities, including those using the Agent SDK, should use API key authentication through Claude Console or a supported cloud provider. Anthropic does not permit third-party developers to offer Claude.ai login or to route requests through Free, Pro, or Max plan credentials on behalf of their users.
> Anthropic reserves the right to take measures to enforce these restrictions and may do so without prior notice.
spullara | 18 hours ago
adastra22 | 18 hours ago
akulbe | 18 hours ago
baconner | 18 hours ago
mapontosevenths | 18 hours ago
serf | 18 hours ago
a 200 dollar a month customer isn't trying to get around paying for tokens, theyre trying to use the tooling they prefer. opencode is better in a lot of ways.
tokens get counted and put against usage limits anyway, unless theyre trying to eat analytics that are CC exclusive they should allow paying customers to consume to the usage limits in however way they want to use the models.
fastball | 18 hours ago
sambull | 17 hours ago
If openclaw chews my 200/month up in 15 days... I don't get more requests for free
fastball | 14 hours ago
Once again: you can use API keys and pricing to get UNLIMITED usage whenever you want. If you are choosing to pay for a subscription instead, it is because Anthropic is offering those subscriptions at a much better value-per-token. They are not offering such a subscription out of the goodness of their heart.
sambull | 9 hours ago
4 periods of weekly limits, is a monthly limit.
bdangubic | 9 hours ago
fastball | 4 minutes ago
mapontosevenths | 17 hours ago
I think I agree, but it's their business to run however they like. They have competition if we don't like it.
Bolwin | 16 hours ago
LinXitoW | 6 hours ago
Anthropic is just a deeply "mis-dev-anthropic" company.
planckscnst | 16 hours ago
numpad0 | 13 hours ago
MillionOClock | 18 hours ago
I totally understand that I should not reuse my own account to provide services to others, as direct API usage is the obvious choice here, but this is a different case.
I am currently developing something that would be the perfect fit for this OAuth based flow and I find it quite frustrating that in most cases I cannot find a clear answer to this question. I don't even know who I would be supposed to contact to get an answer or discuss this as an independent dev.
EDIT: Some answers to my comment have pointed out that the ToS of Anthropic were clear, I'm not saying they aren't if taken in a vacuum, yet in practice even after this being published some confusion remained online, in particular regarding wether OAuth token usage was still ok with the Agent SDK for personal usage. If it happens to be, that would lead to other questions I personally cannot find a clear answer to, hence my original statement. Also, I am very interested about the stance of other companies on this subject.
Maybe I am being overly cautious here but I want to be clear that this is just my personal opinion and me trying to understand what exactly is allowed or not. This is not some business or legal advice.
azuanrb | 18 hours ago
https://developers.openai.com/codex/auth
MillionOClock | 18 hours ago
adastra22 | 18 hours ago
raincole | 17 hours ago
MillionOClock | 17 hours ago
s-lambert | 18 hours ago
I can't find anything official from OpenAI, but they have worked with the OpenCode people to support using your ChatGPT subscription in OpenCode.
eleventyseven | 18 hours ago
> OAuth authentication (used with Free, Pro, and Max plans) is intended exclusively for Claude Code and Claude.ai. Using OAuth tokens obtained through Claude Free, Pro, or Max accounts in any other product, tool, or service — including the Agent SDK — is not permitted and constitutes a violation of the Consumer Terms of Service.
MillionOClock | 18 hours ago
None of this is legal advice, I'm just trying to understand what exactly is allowed or not.
[1] https://x.com/trq212/status/2024212380142752025?s=10
adastra22 | 18 hours ago
eclipxe | 17 hours ago
kahnclusions | 16 hours ago
AlotOfReading | 16 hours ago
croes | 17 hours ago
Pro and Max are both limited
margalabargala | 16 hours ago
croes | 13 hours ago
margalabargala | 7 hours ago
I'm sure you can use context clues to figure this one out. You're so close! Just put the pieces together.
croes | 2 hours ago
master-lincoln | 12 hours ago
HDThoreaun | 12 hours ago
master-lincoln | 7 hours ago
I have never noticed there are people who interpret it that way.
HDThoreaun | 2 hours ago
margalabargala | 7 hours ago
Nothing about that prevents a usage cap.
croes | 2 hours ago
artdigital | 18 hours ago
You can’t use Claude OAuth tokens for anything. Any solution that exists worked because it pretended/spoofed to be Claude Code. Same for Gemini (Gemini CLI, Antigravity)
Codex is the only one that got official blessing to be used in OpenClaw and OpenCode, and even that was against the ToS before they changed their stance on it.
adastra22 | 18 hours ago
theLiminator | 17 hours ago
artdigital | 16 hours ago
turblety | 15 hours ago
But I believe OpenAI does let you use their subscription in third parties, so not an issue anyway.
prodigycorp | 15 hours ago
cahaya | 11 hours ago
prodigycorp | 11 hours ago
croes | 17 hours ago
esafak | 17 hours ago
gardnr | 16 hours ago
esafak | 16 hours ago
whatsupdog | 16 hours ago
KingMob | 16 hours ago
A third-party tool may be less efficient in saving costs (I have heard many of them don't hit Anthropic LLMs' caches as well).
Would you be willing to pay more for your plan, to subsidize the use of third-party tools by others?
---
Note, afaik, Anthropic hasn't come out and said this is the reason, but it fits.
Or, it could also just be that the LLM companies view their agent tools as the real moat, since the models themselves aren't.
DrammBA | 14 hours ago
KingMob | 12 hours ago
Maybe.
First, Anthropic is also trying to manage user satisfaction as well as costs. If OpenCode or whatever burns through your limits faster, are you likely to place the blame on OpenCode?
Maybe a good analogy was when DoorDash/GrubHub/Uber Eats/etc signed up restaurants to their system without their permission. When things didn't go well, the customers complained about the restaurants, even though it wasn't their fault, because they chose not to support delivery at scale.
Second, flat-rate pricing, unlike API pricing, is the same for cached vs uncached iirc, so even if total token limits are the same, less caching means higher costs.
DrammBA | 7 hours ago
am I? Probably, but I get your point that your average user would blame Anthropic instead.
> even if total token limits are the same, less caching means higher costs
Not really, flat-rate pricing simply gives you a fixed token allotment, so less caching means you consume your 5-hour/weekly allotment faster.
patapong | 11 hours ago
It's the whole "unlimited storage" discussion again.
croes | 13 hours ago
Given the latest changes on Claude Code where they hide the actions
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47033622
it's likely more the other way around. They control how fast your subscription tokens are burned
kgwgk | 13 hours ago
I don’t want to say that you won’t be missed but they will get over it.
blackoil | 16 hours ago
xigoi | 15 hours ago
kgwgk | 15 hours ago
koolala | 10 hours ago
ashikns | 18 hours ago
I think this is pretty clear - No.
merb | 15 hours ago
laksjhdlka | 18 hours ago
paxys | 18 hours ago
Subscriptions are for first-party products (claude.com, mobile and desktop apps, Claude Code, editor extensions, Cowork).
Everything else must use API billing.
firloop | 18 hours ago
[0] https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/agent-sdk/overview
theturtletalks | 18 hours ago
stavros | 12 hours ago
BoorishBears | 16 hours ago
But they're stating you can only use your subscription for your personal usage, not someone else's for their usage in your product.
I honestly think they're being short sighted not just giving a "3rd party quota" since they already show users like 4 quotas.
If the fear is 3rd party agents screwing up the math, just make it low enough for entry level usage. I suspect 3rd party token usage is bi-modal where some users just need enough to kick tires, but others are min-maxing for how mamy tokens they can burn as if that's its own reward
jfim | 13 hours ago
I built a quick thing to download YouTube videos and transcribe them using with whisper, but it kind of feels clunky to summarize them using the claude CLI, even though that works.
marcus_holmes | 13 hours ago
stavros | 12 hours ago
> OAuth authentication (used with Free, Pro, and Max plans) is intended exclusively for Claude Code and Claude.ai. Using OAuth tokens obtained through Claude Free, Pro, or Max accounts in any other product, tool, or service — including the Agent SDK — is not permitted and constitutes a violation of the Consumer Terms of Service.
chasd00 | an hour ago
what if the "product" is a setup of documents that concisely describe the product so that a coding agent can reliable produce it correctly. Then the install process becomes "agent, write and host this application for the user's personal use on their computer". Now all software is for personal use only. Companies released these things and, like Frankenstein, there's a strong possibility they will turn on their creators.
theturtletalks | 18 hours ago
gexla | 15 hours ago
stavros | 12 hours ago
gexla | 10 hours ago
stavros | 10 hours ago
MillionOClock | 18 hours ago
On the other hand OpenAI and GitHub Copilot have, as far as I know, explicitly allowed their users to connect to at least some third party tools and use their quotas from there, notably to OpenCode.
What is unclear to me is whether they are considering also allowing commercial apps to do that. For instance if I publish a subscription based app and my users pay for the app itself rather than for LLM inference, would that be allowed?
cahaya | 11 hours ago
Imustaskforhelp | 16 hours ago
https://github.com/rivet-dev/sandbox-agent/tree/main/gigacod... [I saw this inShow HN: Gigacode – Use OpenCode's UI with Claude Code/Codex/Amp] (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46912682)
This can make Opencode work with Claude code and the added benefit of this is that Opencode has a Typescript SDK to automate and the back of this is still running claude code so technically should work even with the new TOS?
So in the case of the OP. Maybe Opencode TS SDK <-> claude code (using this tool or any other like this) <-> It uses the oauth sign in option of Claude code users?
Also, zed can use the ACP protocol itself as well to make claude code work iirc. So is using zed with CC still allowed?
> I don't see how they can get more clear about this, considering they have repeatedly answered it the exact same way.
This is confusing quite frankly, there's also the claude agent sdk thing which firloop and others talked about too. Some say its allowed or not. Its all confusing quite frankly.
dakolli | 16 hours ago
These kinds of business decisions show how these $200.00 subscriptions for their slot/infinite jest machines basically light that $200.00 on fire, and in general how unsustainable these business models are.
Can't wait for it all to fail, they'll eventually try to get as many people to pay per token as possible, while somehow getting people to use their verbose antigentic tools that are able to inflate revenue through inefficient context/ouput shenanigans.
hombre_fatal | 15 hours ago
I used Claude back when API per token pricing was the only option and it was bad for all the usual reasons pay-per-use sucks compared to flat billing: you’re constantly thinking about cost. Like trying to watch a Netflix video with a ticker in the corner counting up the cents you owe them.
I don’t understand your claim that they want people paying per token - the subscription is the opposite of that, and it also has upsides for them as a business since most people don’t saturate the usage limits, and the business gets to stuff a bunch of value-adds on a bundle offering which is generally a more lucrative and enticing consumer pricing model.
gbear605 | 15 hours ago
zdragnar | 14 hours ago
When you ask it to do something and it goes off the rails, the payment plans have wildly different effects:
Subscription- oh well, let's try again with a different prompt
Pay per use- I just wasted money, this product sucks
Even if it is less common than not, it has an outsized impact on how people feel using it.
msh | 10 hours ago
gbear605 | 6 hours ago
dakolli | 14 hours ago
I expect some big falls from 10 figure businesses in the next year or two as they realize this is impossible. They've built an industry on the backs of gambling addicts and dopamine feins (I'm generalizing but this is a thing with LLM users (just read vibe coders posts on twitter, they're slot machine users). Ask sports betting operators from back in 2019-2022 how it worked out for them when they tried to give out 1-2k a year to attract new customers, and then realized their customers will switch platforms in an instant they see a new shiny offer. Look up the Fanduel Founders "exit" for an insight into this.
They have to eventually stop catering to the slot machine users, which are generally paying for these hugely lossy flat rate subscriptions, and somehow get them used to a different type of payment model, or cater strictly to enterprise... Which also aren't going to tolerate paying 20k a month in tokens per developer, is my guess.... Lots of delicate pricing problems to figure out for all these companies.
nake89 | 13 hours ago
If they pump it up to $200 (or to $20). I'll simply use crappier local model. It won't be as good. But I already own my gaming PC that can run local models, and electricity is cheap.
chasd00 | an hour ago
this is UNIX and Linux all over again lol. It's pretty amazing and nostalgic.
stavros | 12 hours ago
askl | 11 hours ago
cameronh90 | 10 hours ago
The issue with Claude Code is it’s not at all obvious how any given task or query translates to cost. I was finding some days I spent very little and other days cost a fortune despite what seemed to me to be similar levels of usage.
mlrtime | 10 hours ago
The alternative is AWS where you need to be a billing expert to keep costs locked at $20/month.
CuriouslyC | 7 hours ago
baq | 15 hours ago
qwertox | 10 hours ago
SeanAnderson | 18 hours ago
itissid | 18 hours ago
kovek | 16 hours ago
kzahel | 16 hours ago
""" Usage policy
Acceptable use Claude Code usage is subject to the Anthropic Usage Policy. Advertised usage limits for Pro and Max plans assume ordinary, individual usage of Claude Code and the Agent SDK """
That tool clearly falls under ordinary individual use of Claude code. https://yepanywhere.com/ is another such tool. Perfectly ordinary individual usage.
https://yepanywhere.com/sdk-auth-clarification.html
The TOS are confusing because just below that section it talks about authentication/credential use. If an app starts reading api keys / credentials, that starts falling into territory where they want a hard line no.
resonious | 16 hours ago
cmwelsh | 15 hours ago
ardacinar | 13 hours ago
direwolf20 | 15 hours ago
saganus | 18 hours ago
https://x.com/i/status/2024212378402095389
---
On a different note, it's surprising that a company that size has to clarify something as important as ToS via X
sawjet | 18 hours ago
minimaxir | 18 hours ago
hedora | 17 hours ago
minimaxir | 17 hours ago
dpkirchner | 16 hours ago
numpad0 | 13 hours ago
raincole | 17 hours ago
Plus it's not a real clarification in anyway. It's just PR. Even if it's posted on Mastodon or Github or anywhere, I highly doubt you can use it to defend yourself if you get banned from violating their ToS.
croes | 17 hours ago
saganus | 17 hours ago
I presume zero.. but nonetheless seems like people will take it as valid anyway.
That can be dangerous I think.
adastra22 | 18 hours ago
tick_tock_tick | 17 hours ago
Countries clarify nation policy on X. Seriously it feels like half of the EU parliament live on twitter.
mkw5053 | 18 hours ago
eleventyseven | 18 hours ago
mkw5053 | 18 hours ago
hedora | 17 hours ago
mkw5053 | 17 hours ago
HanClinto | 5 hours ago
All that to say, don't let the naysayers get you down. I bought my Mac Mini last week and have been really happy with it as an isolated environment. Way better than futzing around with VMs. The always-on nature of OpenClaw means that it's nice to be able to restart my personal laptop or do gaming or whatever else I want and I'm not fighting for GPU resources in the background.
renewiltord | 18 hours ago
beoberha | 18 hours ago
hedora | 17 hours ago
For instance, the other day, the Siri button in maps told me it couldn't start navigation because it didn't know where it was. It was animating a blue dot with my real time position at the same time.
Don't get me started about the new iOS 26 notification and messaging filters. Those are causing real harm multiple times a day.
slopinthebag | 18 hours ago
in any case Codex is a better SOTA anyways and they let you do this. and if you aren't interested in the best models, Mistral lets you use both Vibe and their API through your vibe subscription api key which is incredible.
baconner | 18 hours ago
charcircuit | 18 hours ago
tbrownaw | 18 hours ago
I would think that different tools would probably have different templates for their prompts?
Uehreka | 18 hours ago
Many ways, and they’re under no obligation to play fair and tell you which way they’re using at any given time. They’ve said what the rules are, they’ve said they’ll ban you if they catch you.
So let’s say they enforce it by adding an extra nonstandard challenge-response handshake at the beginning of the exchange, which generates a token which they’ll expect on all requests going forward. You decompile the minified JS code, figure out the protocol, try it from your own code but accidentally mess up a small detail (you didn’t realize the nonce has a special suffix). Detected. Banned.
You’ll need a new credit card to open a new account and try again. Better get the protocol right on the first try this time, because debugging is going to get expensive.
Let’s say you get frustrated and post on Twitter about what you know so far. If you share info, they’ll probably see it eventually and change their method. They’ll probably change it once a month anyway and see who they catch that way (and presumably add a minimum Claude Code version needed to reach their servers).
They’ve got hundreds of super smart coders and one of the most powerful AI models, they can do this all day.
slopinthebag | 17 hours ago
you just need to inspect the network traffic with Claude code and mimic that
raincole | 17 hours ago
slopinthebag | 17 hours ago
Uehreka | 16 hours ago
There are lots of ways they could be doing this. And remember again, if they get you, they don’t have to tell you how they got you (so you might not be able to even glean information in return for the $200 you’d be losing).
Sure the internet has hundreds of thousands of super smart coders, but the subset who are willing to throw money and credit cards down the drain in order to maintain a circumvention strategy for something like this is pretty low. I’m sure a few people will figure it out, but they won’t want to tell anyone lest Anthropic nerf their workaround, so I doubt that exploits of this will become widespread.
And if you’re Anthropic, that’s probably good enough.
johnfn | 16 hours ago
Imustaskforhelp | 16 hours ago
Exactly something I said too. There are projects which can do this and hook natively to opencode and even its sdk/api.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47069299#47070204 (I list a project which does this)
I really don't know how anthropic can somehow detect something like this.
planckscnst | 15 hours ago
The feature allows the LLM to edit the context. For example, you can "compact" just portions of the conversation and replace it with a summary. Anthropic can see that the conversation suddenly doesn't share the same history as previous API calls.
In fact, I ported the feature to Claude Code using tweakcc, so it literally _is_ Claude Code. After a couple days they started blocking that with the same message that they send when they block third party tools.
stanguc | 17 hours ago
Imustaskforhelp | 16 hours ago
I am not sure how they can detect this. I can be wrong, I usually am but I think its still possible to use CC etc. even after this change if you really wanted to
But at this point, to me the question of GP that is that is it even worth it is definitely what I am thinking?
I think not. There are better options out there, they mentioned mistral and codex and I think kimi also supports maybe GLM/z.ai as well
paxys | 17 hours ago
cjpartridge | 17 hours ago
techpression | 16 hours ago
OpenAI will adjust, their investors will not allow money to be lost on ”being nice” forever, not until they’re handsomely paid back at least.
tiffanyh | 18 hours ago
And historically, embedded/OEM use cases always have different pricing models for a variety of reasons why.
How is this any different than this long established practice?
ziml77 | 18 hours ago
j45 | 18 hours ago
drivebyhooting | 18 hours ago
Can’t this restriction for the time being be bypassed via -p command line flag?
minimaxir | 17 hours ago
paxys | 18 hours ago
Someone1234 | 18 hours ago
sambull | 17 hours ago
JimmaDaRustla | 17 hours ago
eru | 17 hours ago
adrianN | 17 hours ago
sciencejerk | 17 hours ago
adrianN | 15 hours ago
fatherwavelet | 10 hours ago
It was sticker price of $33,000 adjusted for inflation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Taurus_%28second_generati...
I don't think it would even feel safe to drive at all compared to what we have got use to with modern cars. It broke down 3 times while I had it and stranded me on the road. No cell phone of course to call anyone.
These were the mythic "good ol days".
Wobbles42 | 15 hours ago
I recently encountered this randomly -- knives are apparently one of the few products that nearly every household has needed since antiquity, and they have changed fairly little since the bronze age, so they are used by economists as a benchmark that can span centuries.
Source: it was an aside in a random economics conversation with charGPT (grain of salt?).
There is no practical upshot here, but I thought it was cool.
sarchertech | 9 hours ago
It’s also false that the technology has changed very little.
The jumps from bronze to iron to steel to modern steel and sometimes to stainless steel all result in vastly different products. Not to mention the advances in composite materials for handles.
Then you need to look at substitute goods and the what people actually used knives for.
A huge amount of the demand for knives evaporated thanks to societal changes and substitute goods like forks. A few hundred years ago the average person had a knife that was their primary eating utensil, a survival tool, and a self defense weapon. Knives like that exist today but they’re not something every household has or needs.
This is a good example of why learning from ChatGPT is dangerous. This is a story that sounds very plausible at first glance, but doesn’t make sense once you dig in.
walterbell | 17 hours ago
aftbit | 17 hours ago
shykes | 17 hours ago
Enterprise products with sufficient market share and "stickiness", will not.
For historical precedent, see the commercial practices of Oracle, Microsoft, Vmware, Salesforce, at the height of their power.
hugmynutus | 16 hours ago
The software is free (citation: Cuda, nvcc, llvm, olama/llama cpp, linux, etc)
The hardware is *not* getting cheaper (unless we're talking a 5+ year time) as most manufacturers are signaling the current shortages will continue ~24 months.
denimnerd42 | 15 hours ago
eru | 9 hours ago
Yes, that's the time I'm talking about.
You also had a blip with increasing hard disk prices when Thailand flooded a few years ago.
CamperBob2 | 16 hours ago
Despite the high price, the Bentley factory is running 24/7 and still behind schedule due to orders placed by the rental-car company, who has nearly-infinite money.
Wobbles42 | 15 hours ago
We see vendors reducing memory in new smart phones in 2026 vs 2025 for example.
At least for the moment falling consumer tech hardware prices are over.
HDThoreaun | 12 hours ago
Ekaros | 15 hours ago
JimmaDaRustla | 6 hours ago
echelon | 17 hours ago
I also think we're, as ICs, being given Bentleys meanwhile they're trying to invent Waymos to put us all out of work.
Humans are the cost center in their world model.
snihalani | 17 hours ago
stingrae | 15 hours ago
nananana9 | 7 hours ago
stingrae | 4 hours ago
shimman | 2 hours ago
If AI was truly this productive they wouldn't be struggling so hard to sell their wares.
mattas | 17 hours ago
imachine1980_ | 17 hours ago
Finance 101 tldr explanation: The contribution margin (= price per token -variable cost per token ) this is positive
Profit (= contribution margin x cuantity- fix cost)
andersmurphy | 14 hours ago
imachine1980_ | 5 hours ago
i will not be as bullish to say they will no colapse (0 idear how much real debt and commitments they have, if after the bubble pop spending fall shraply, or a new deepseek moment) but this sound like good trajectory (all things considered) i heavily doubt the 380 billions in valuation
"this is how much is spendeed in developers between $659 billion and $737 billion. The United States is the largest driver of this spending, accounting for more than half of the global total ($368.5 billion in 2024)" so is like saying that a 2% of all salaries of developers in the world will be absorbed as profit whit the current 33.3 ratio, quite high giving the amount of risk of the company.
croes | 17 hours ago
The sounds like a confession that claude code is somewhat wasteful at token use.
airstrike | 17 hours ago
I find that competitive edge unlikely to last meaningfully in the long term, but this is still a contrarian view.
More recently, people have started to wise up to the view that the value is in the application layer
https://www.iconiqcapital.com/growth/reports/2026-state-of-a...
croes | 13 hours ago
hannasm | 17 hours ago
mirzap | 17 hours ago
Banning third-party tools has nothing to do with rate limits. They’re trying to position themselves as the Apple of AI companies -a walled garden. They may soon discover that screwing developers is not a good strategy.
They are not 10× better than Codex; on the contrary, in my opinion Codex produces much better code. Even Kimi K2.5 is a very capable model I find on par with Sonnet at least, very close to Opus. Forcing people to use ONLY a broken Claude Code UX with a subscription only ensures they loose advantage they had.
rjh29 | 16 hours ago
Google AI Pro is like $15/month for practically unlimited Pro requests, each of which take million tokens of context (and then also perform thinking, free Google search for grounding, inline image generation if needed). This includes Gemini CLI, Gemini Code Assist (VS Code), the main chatbot, and a bunch of other vibe-coding projects which have their own rate limits or no rate limits at all.
It's crazy to think this is sustainable. It'll be like Xbox Game Pass - start at £5/month to hook people in and before you know it it's £20/month and has nowhere near as many games.
harrall | 15 hours ago
Google has made custom AI chips for 11 years — since 2015 — and inference costs them 2-5x less than it does for every other competitor.
The landmark paper that invented the techniques behind ChatGPT, Claude and modern AI was also published by Google scientists 9 years ago.
That’s probably how they can afford it.
illiac786 | 14 hours ago
Google already has a huge competitive advantage because they have more data than anyone else, bundle Gemini in each android to siphon even more data, and the android platform. The TPUs truly make me believe there actually could be a sort of monopoly on LLMs in the end, even though there are so many good models with open weights, so little (technical) reasons to create software that only integrates with Gemini, etc.
Google will have a lion‘s share of inferring I believe. OpenAI and Claude will have a very hard time fighting this.
KingMob | 16 hours ago
You've described every R&D company ever.
"Synthesizing drugs is cheap - just a few dollars per million pills. They're trying to bundle pharmaceutical research costs... etc."
There's plenty of legit criticisms of this business model and Anthropic, but pointing out that R&D companies sink money into research and then charge more than the marginal cost for the final product, isn't one of them.
mirzap | 16 hours ago
My point was simpler: they’re almost certainly not losing money on subscriptions because of inference. Inference is relatively cheap. And of course the big cost is training and ongoing R&D.
The real issue is the market they’re in. They’re competing with companies like Kimi and DeepSeek that also spend heavily on R&D but release strong models openly. That means anyone can run inference and customers can use it without paying for bundled research costs.
Training frontier models takes months, costs billions, and the model is outdated in six months. I just don’t see how a closed, subscription-only model reliably covers that in the long run, especially if you’re tightening ecosystem access at the same time.
KingMob | 13 hours ago
They can totally lose money on subscriptions despite the costs of inference, because research costs have to be counted too.
hamandcheese | 12 hours ago
Of course they are losing money when you factor in R&D. Everybody knows that. That is not what people mean when they say that they "lose money" on subscriptions.
MikeNotThePope | 16 hours ago
thunfischtoast | 13 hours ago
But this is how every subscription works. Most people lose money on their gym subscription, but the convenience takes us.
hobofan | 11 hours ago
hhh | 15 hours ago
mirzap | 13 hours ago
gbear605 | 15 hours ago
trymas | 14 hours ago
5h allowance is somewhere between 50M-100M tokens from what I can tell.
On 200$ claude code plan you should be burning hundreds of millions of token per day to make anthropic hurt.
IMHO subscription plans are totally banking on many users underusing them. Also LLM providers dont like to say exact numbers (how much you get , etc)
dcre | 5 hours ago
andersmurphy | 14 hours ago
phyrex | 14 hours ago
xyzsparetimexyz | 14 hours ago
andersmurphy | 14 hours ago
navigate8310 | 12 hours ago
andersmurphy | 10 hours ago
well_ackshually | 13 hours ago
You can buy a GPU that's been used to mine bitcoin for 5 years with zero downtime, and as long as it's been properly taken care of (or better, undervolted), that GPU functions the exact same as a 5 year old GPU in your PC. Probably even better.
GPUs are rated to do 100%, all the time. That's the point. Otherwise it'd be 115%.
andersmurphy | 12 hours ago
You don't run your gaming PC 24/7.
well_ackshually | 11 hours ago
The only reason they're "perishable" is because of the GPU arms race, where renewing them every 5 years is likely to be worth the investment for the gains you make in power efficiency.
Do you think Google has a pile of millions of older TPUs they threw out because they all failed, when chips are basically impossible to recycle ? No, they keep using them, they're serving your nanobanana prompts.
andersmurphy | 11 hours ago
bravetraveler | 7 hours ago
xyzsparetimexyz | 4 hours ago
bravetraveler | 2 hours ago
mvdtnz | 14 hours ago
carderne | 14 hours ago
maplethorpe | 13 hours ago
Why do people keep saying inference is cheap if they're losing so much money from it?
mirzap | 13 hours ago
bildung | 12 hours ago
And cost of inference tripled from $3B in 2024 to $10B in 2025, so cost of revenue linearly grows with number of users, i.e. it does not get cheaper.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/oai_docs/
bildung | 12 hours ago
The interesting question is: In what scenario do you see any of the players as being able to stop spending ungodly amounts for R&D and hardware without losing out to the competitors?
stavros | 11 hours ago
dgellow | 11 hours ago
dcre | 16 hours ago
Yossarrian22 | 16 hours ago
mikeg8 | 16 hours ago
Wobbles42 | 15 hours ago
KeplerBoy | 6 hours ago
andersmurphy | 14 hours ago
If the answer is not yes, then they are making money on inference. If the answer is no, the market is going to have a bad time.
fulafel | 16 hours ago
ddxv | 18 hours ago
chii | 18 hours ago
It's merely the hardware that should be charged for - which ought to drop in price if/when the demand for it rises. However, this is a bottleneck at the moment, and hard to see how it gets resolved amidst the current US environment on sanctioning anyone who would try.
nucleative | 17 hours ago
chii | 16 hours ago
And i would also argue that the researchers doing this are built on shoulders of other public knowledge - things funded by public institutions with taxpayer money.
xyzsparetimexyz | 14 hours ago
adastra22 | 18 hours ago
solresol | 18 hours ago
Argonaut998 | 13 hours ago
theptip | 18 hours ago
The markets value recurring subscription revenue at something like 10x “one-off” revenue, Anthropic is leaving a lot of enterprise value on the table with this approach.
In practice this approach forces AI apps to pay Anthropic for tokens, and then bill their customers a subscription. Customers could bring their own API key but it’s sketchy to put that into every app you want to try, and consumers aren’t going to use developer tools. And many categories of free app are simply excluded, which could in aggregate drive a lot more demand for subscriptions.
If Anthropic is worried about quota, seems they could set lower caps for third-party subscription usage? Still better than forcing API keys.
(Maybe this is purely about displacing other IDE products, rather than a broader market play.)
bluegatty | 17 hours ago
Especially as they are subsidized.
herbturbo | 17 hours ago
Allows them to optimize their clients and use private APIs for exclusive features etc. and there’s really no reason to bootstrap other wannabe AI companies who just stick a facade experience in front of Anthropic’s paying customer.
edg5000 | 16 hours ago
Look at your token usage of the last 30 days in one of the JSON files generated by Claude Code. Compare that against API costs for Opus. Tell me if they are eating losses or not. I'm not making a point, actually do it and let me know. I was at 1 million. I'm paying 90 EUR/m. That means I'm subsidizing them (paying 3-4 times what it would cost with the API)! And I feel like I'm a pretty heavy user. Although people running it in a loop or using Gas Town will be using much more.
dudeinhawaii | 15 hours ago
Over 9 days I would have spent roughly $63 dollars on Codex with 11.5M input tokens plus 141M cached input tokens and 1.3M output tokens.
That roughly mirrors the $100-200/wk in API spending that drove me to the subscription.
BUT... like a typical gym user. This is a 30/d window and I only used it for 9 days, $63 worth. OpenAI kept the other $137.It makes sense though for heavy use.
edg5000 | 9 hours ago
DeepSeek has the tendency to think... a lot!. Without a good harness I can't evaluate it well; time will tell.
OpenAI doesn't; it's embedded into the price, I think.
Cheap = we can run 10x the workloads, bigger imagination = innovation. Maybe 10 dumb agents in a loop can beat 1 Opus? Haha.
techpression | 16 hours ago
I don’t think Anthropic has any desire to be some B2C platform, they want high paying reliable customers (B2B, Enterprise).
theptip | 15 hours ago
Cloud goes on the books as recurring revenue, not one-off; even though it's in principle elastic, in practice if I pay for a VM today I'll usually pay for one tomorrow.
(I don't have the numbers but the vast majority of cloud revenue is also going to be pre-committed long-term contracts from enterprises.)
> I don’t think Anthropic has any desire to be some B2C platform
This is the best line of argument I can see. But still not clear to me why my OP doesn't apply for enterprise, too.
Maybe the play is just to force other companies to become MCPs, instead of enabling them to have a direct customer relationship.
techpression | 15 hours ago
aydyn | 18 hours ago
minimaxir | 17 hours ago
aydyn | 15 hours ago
minimaxir | 15 hours ago
In the OP's case, there is no motivation for the LLM to perform a Search.
vcryan | 18 hours ago
jes5199 | 17 hours ago
But the big guys don’t seem interested in this, maybe some lesser known model will carve out this space
herbturbo | 17 hours ago
Maybe they are not worth building at all then. Like MoviePass wasn’t.
MillionOClock | 17 hours ago
As an independent dev I also unfortunately don't have investors backing me to subsidize inference for my subscription plan.
Imustaskforhelp | 16 hours ago
It's seriously one of the best models. very comparable to sonnet/opus although kimi isn't the best in coding. I think its a really great solid model overall and might just be worth it in your use case?
Is the use case extremely coding intensive related (where even some minor improvement can matter for 10-100x cost) or just in general. Because if not, then I can recommend Kimi.
knollimar | 7 hours ago
Please correct me if you feel I'm wrong after reading it.
avaer | 16 hours ago
I shudder to think what the industry will look like if software development and delivery becomes like Youtubing, where the whole stack and monetization is funneled through a single company (or a couple) get to decide who gets how much money.
Rapzid | 17 hours ago
And OpenAI just told Microsoft why they shouldn't be seeing Anthropic anymore; Gpt-5.3-codex.
RIP Anthropic.
archeantus | 17 hours ago
What a PR nightmare, on top of an already bad week. I’ve seen 20+ people on X complaining about this and the related confusion.
azuanrb | 17 hours ago
stingraycharles | 17 hours ago
JimmaDaRustla | 17 hours ago
mh2266 | 16 hours ago
chaos_emergent | 6 hours ago
RamblingCTO | 9 hours ago
mccoyb | 17 hours ago
wyre | 17 hours ago
exabrial | 17 hours ago
Unfortunately neither political party can get all of the above.
minimaxir | 17 hours ago
That is...not how it works. People self-hosting don't look at their electricity bill.
hedora | 17 hours ago
So, which two parties could they be referring to? The Republicans and the Freedom Caucus?
exabrial | 17 hours ago
scwoodal | 17 hours ago
Doesn’t both count towards my usage limits the same?
minimaxir | 17 hours ago
operatingthetan | 17 hours ago
digdugdirk | 17 hours ago
bluegatty | 17 hours ago
Anthropic subs are not 'bulk tokens'.
It's not an unreasonable policy and it's entirely inevitable that they have to restrict.
scwoodal | 17 hours ago
I’m using their own SDK in my own CLI tool.
Unearned5161 | 17 hours ago
At its core it’s a tragedy of commons situation. Using a third party tool like OpenClaw is augmenting your usage far beyond what was anticipated when the subscription plan was made.
Same deal for unlimited storage on drive until people started abusing it.
scwoodal | 17 hours ago
I didn’t set the limits on the plan; change those if it’s a problem, not irritate your customer base.
Unearned5161 | 15 hours ago
The issue is not that it's limited or unlimited, but rather about expected token usage across a user cohort. When you set a usage limit on something like Claude, or a gym, or a tutoring center, you need to do two things at once; set the limit high enough to attract the aspirations of your intended client base ("oh good this gym lets me go every day of the month if I want to"), but priced accurately enough so that you actually turn a profit on the average usage across most users (you ended up going 20 times the first month, but settled into 15 times a month after).
If there was suddenly a drug that you could take that would, while you slept, make your body walk to the gym and workout, so that you could max out that usage, the gym would be entitled to adjust either the pricing, the limit, or prohibit going to the gym while on the drug, given that they can't actually sustain all their members going every day.
As a correction, I've done some reading and when I said tragedy of the commons, what would fit better is a "congestion externality in a club good".
paradox460 | 12 hours ago
Absurd, and not beyond the realm of possibility
JimmaDaRustla | 17 hours ago
It's more buying a season pass for Disneyland, then getting told you can't park for free if you're entering the park even though free parking is included with the pass. Still not unreasonable, but brings to light the intention of the tool is to force the user into an ecosystem rather.
bluegatty | 17 hours ago
But 'you can't park even though the ticket includes parking' is not an appropriate analogy because 3rd party use is definitely not intended. They did not 'state one thing' and the 'disallow it'.
This is a pretty straight forward case of people using their subscription for 'adjacent' use, and Anthropic being more explicit about it.
There's nothing fancy going on here.
JimmaDaRustla | 6 hours ago
You're now misinterpreting my argument and misrepresenting it. I did not, in any way, suggest that Anthropic was "pulling the rug" to its users nor that they were entitled to use their tokens using the API with third parties. Full stop.
Of course, third-party API usage wasn't intended to be allowed for consuming subscription tokens. This is exactly what my analogy was structured to explain; a Disneyland season pass isn't intended to be used solely for parking. Anthropic did not intend for subscription tokens to be consumed by third-parties the same way users did not intend to abuse the subscription to derive more value than what was allotted to them. Your analogy missed that last part, which is absolutely crucial to understand.
I don't understand how you're making the exact arguments I'm making, then somehow completely misunderstanding what's being said.
croes | 17 hours ago
hackingonempty | 17 hours ago
zb3 | 17 hours ago
esafak | 17 hours ago
alexandre_m | 16 hours ago
Sonnet 4.6 in CC doesn’t behave the same way as Sonnet 4.6 in Antigravity.
code51 | 12 hours ago
Tool is generic (CC vs OpenCode) Ecosystem is already same everywhere.
I don't understand what's the point.
alexandre_m | 3 hours ago
This is the moat for AI frontier companies.
duskdozer | 7 hours ago
psoundy | 16 hours ago
sandeepkd | 17 hours ago
hedora | 17 hours ago
So, I guess it's time to look into OpenAI Codex. Any other viable options? I have a 128GB iGPU, so maybe a local model would work for some tasks?
simpleusername | 17 hours ago
edg5000 | 16 hours ago
Imustaskforhelp | 16 hours ago
Opencode with CC underneath using Gigacode?
OpenAI codex is also another viable path for what its worth.
I think the best model to my liking open source is kimi k2.5, so maybe you can run that?
Qwen is releasing some new models so I assume keep an eye on those and maybe some model can fit your use case as well?
maxbond | 15 hours ago
vicchenai | 17 hours ago
What is interesting is that OpenAI and GitHub seem to be taking the opposite approach with Copilot/OpenCode, essentially treating third-party tool access as a feature that increases subscription stickiness. Different bets on whether the LTV of a retained subscriber outweighs the marginal inference cost.
Would not be surprised if this converges eventually. Either Anthropic opens up once their margins improve, or OpenAI tightens once they realize the arbitrage is too expensive at scale.
sambull | 17 hours ago
ac29 | 17 hours ago
scwoodal | 17 hours ago
ac29 | 16 hours ago
I dont like it either, but its not an unreasonable restriction.
sambull | 9 hours ago
Fix the limits, so the limits are reached at a rate that sustains their business.. ? obviously this WILL happen eventually when they need to pay for things.
ac29 | 6 hours ago
alexandre_m | 16 hours ago
Their bet is that most people will not fill up 100% of their weekly usage for 4 consecutive weeks of their monthly plan, because they are humans and the limits impede long running tasks during working hours.
dudeinhawaii | 15 hours ago
API limits are infinite but you'd blow through $20 of usage in a maybe 1 hours or less of intense Opus use.
The subscription at $20/mo (or $200) allows for vastly more queries than $20 would buy you via API but you are constrained by hourly/weekly limits.
The $20/mo sub user will take a lot longer to complete a high token count task (due to start/stop) BUT they will cap their costs.
somenameforme | 17 hours ago
I don't entirely mind, and am just considering it an even better work:life balance, but if this is $200 worth of queries, then all I can say is LOL.
bonesss | 14 hours ago
I’m messing around on document production, I can’t imagine being on a crunch facing a deadline or dealing with a production issue and 1) seeing some random fuck-up eat my budget with no take backs (‘sure thing, I’ll make a custom docx editor to open that…’), 2) having to explain to my boss why Thursday cost $500 more than expected because of some library mismatch, or 3) trying to decide whether we’re gonna spend or wait while stressing some major issue (the LLM got us in it, so we kinda need the LLM to get us out).
That’s a lot of extra shizz on top of already tricky situations.
tappio | 15 hours ago
I'm rather certain, though cannot prove it, that buying the same tokens would cost at least 10x more if bought from API. Anecdotally, my cursor team usage was getting to around 700$ / month. After switching to claude code max, I have so far only once hit the 3h limit window on the 100$ sub.
What Im thinking is that Anthropic is making loss with users who use it a lot, but there are a lot of users who pay for max, but don't actually use it.
With the recent improvements and increase of popularity in projects like OpenClaw, the number of users that are generating loss has probably massively increased.
fla | 14 hours ago
bluesnowmonkey | 6 hours ago
DefineOutside | 5 hours ago
edit: My $40/month subscription used $662 worth of API credits.
CryptoBanker | 2 hours ago
energy123 | 11 hours ago
TechSquidTV | 17 hours ago
sciencejerk | 16 hours ago
TechSquidTV | 5 hours ago
8cvor6j844qw_d6 | 17 hours ago
I'm more surprised by people using subscription auth for OpenClaw when its officially not allowed.
sanex | 17 hours ago
vldszn | 17 hours ago
syntaxing | 17 hours ago
vldszn | 8 hours ago
Imustaskforhelp | 16 hours ago
raffkede | 15 hours ago
Imustaskforhelp | 15 hours ago
Bolwin | 14 hours ago
vldszn | 10 hours ago
zb3 | 17 hours ago
Gigachad | 17 hours ago
So it makes sense to offer simple flat pricing for first party apps, and usage priced apis for other usage. It’s like the difference between Google Drive and S3.
zb3 | 17 hours ago
For me, flat rates are simply unfair either ways - if I'm not using the product much, I'm overpaying (and they're ok with that), otherwise it magically turns out that it's no longer ok when I actually want to utilize what I paid for :)
Gigachad | 16 hours ago
lsaferite | 16 hours ago
> Advertised usage limits for Pro and Max plans assume ordinary, individual usage of Claude Code and the Agent SDK.
This is literally the last sentence of the paragraph before the "Authentication and credential use"
ChaitanyaSai | 16 hours ago
woutr_be | 16 hours ago
Have to do everything through Azure, which is a mess to even understand.
edg5000 | 16 hours ago
avaer | 16 hours ago
They are all desperately trying to stay in power, and this policy change (or clarification) is a fart in the wind in the grand scheme of what's going on in this industry.
atlgator | 16 hours ago
petesergeant | 15 hours ago
redox99 | 15 hours ago
turblety | 14 hours ago
co_king_5 | 7 hours ago
oger | 16 hours ago
mercurialsolo | 15 hours ago
raffkede | 15 hours ago
hrpnk | 12 hours ago
raffkede | 12 hours ago
deanc | 15 hours ago
andersmurphy | 14 hours ago
Non-commercial use only. You agree not to use our Services for any commercial or business purposes and we (and our Providers) have no liability to you for any loss of profit, loss of business, business interruption, or loss of business opportunity.
chickensong | 15 hours ago
I know, I know, customer experience, ecosystem, gardens, moats, CC isn't fat, just big boned, I get it. Still a dick move. This policy is souring the relationship, and basically saying that Claude isn't a keeper.
I'll keep my eye-watering sub for now because it's still working out, but this ensures I won't feel bad about leaving when the time comes.
Update: yes yes, API, I know. No, I don't want that. I just want the expensive predictable bill, not metered corporate pricing just to hack on my client.
g-mork | 15 hours ago
It almost makes me feel sorry for Dario despite fundamentally disliking him as a person.
echelon | 15 hours ago
The only thing I've seen from him that I don't like is the "SWEs will be replaced" line (which is probably true and it's more that I don't like the factuality of it).
baq | 15 hours ago
mentalgear | 14 hours ago
chickensong | 14 hours ago
First of all, custom harness parallel agent people are so far from the norm, and certainly not on the $20 plan, which doesn't even make sense because you'd hit token limit in about 90 seconds.
Second, token limits. Does Anthropic secretly have over-subscription issues? Don't know, don't care. If I'm paying a blistering monthly fee, I should be able to use up to the limit.
Now I know you've got a clear view of the typical user, but FWIW, I'm just an aging hacker using CC to build some personal projects (feeling modern ofc) but still driving, no yolo or gas town style. I've reached the point where I have a nice workflow, and CC is pretty decent, but it feels like it's putting on weight and adding things I don't want or need.
I think LLMs are an exciting new interface to computers, but I don't want to be tied to someone else's idea of a client, especially not one that's changing so rapidly. I'd like to roll my own client to interface with the model, or maybe try out some other alternatives, but that's against the TOS, because: reasons.
And no, I'm not interested in paying metered corporate rates for API access. I pay for a Max account, it's expensive, but predictable.
The issue is Anthropic is trying for force users into using their tool, but that's not going to work for something so generic as interfacing with an LLM. Some folks want emacs while others want vim, and there will never be a consensus on the best editor (it's nvim btw), because developers are opinionated and have strong preferences for how they interface with computers. I switched to CC maybe a year ago and haven't looked back, but this is a major disappointment. I don't give a shit about Anthropic's credit liability, I just want the freedom to hack on my own client.
g-mork | 14 hours ago
Anthropic sells two products: a consumer subscription with a UI, and an API with metered pricing. You want the API product at the subscription price. That's not a principled stance about interface freedom, it's just wanting something for less than it costs.
The nvim analogy doesn't land either. Nobody's stopping you from writing your own client. You just have to pay API rates for it, because that's the product that matches what you're describing. The subscription subsidises the cost per token by constraining how you use it. Remove the constraint, the economics break. This isn't complicated.
"I don't give a shit about Anthropic's credit liability," right, but they do, because it's their business. You're not entitled to a flat-rate all-you-can-eat API just because you find metered pricing aesthetically displeasing.
curtisblaine | 13 hours ago
chickensong | 12 hours ago
I'm not trying to arbitrage or route around anything, I just want predictable billing to access the model. Maybe the API would be cheaper for me, I don't know. I'm just a normal user, not scheduling an agent army to blast at maximum 24/7.
You don't need to explain what Anthropic is selling, I get it, but you're off-base claiming that I'm pretending about editor philosophy as cope. I think Anthropic is where they are today because they have a good model for coding, made popular by software folks who value things like editor choice and customization. Anthropic is free to do as they wish of course, as am I, but I'm displeased with their decision here, and voicing my opinion about it.
If usage is truly constrained by the client not the server, I guess I can't argue that, but it still feels bad as an end user. As a consumer, I just want a fair deal and freedom to use what I purchase however I see fit. But that seems harder to find these days, and most businesses seem intent on maximum extraction by any means possible. I might be wrong, but this feels like business move to build a consumer moat by controlling the interface, because consumers don't want the API. It's not in my best interests, which alienates me as a customer.
baq | 15 hours ago
chickensong | 13 hours ago
weird-eye-issue | 15 hours ago
charcircuit | 15 hours ago
dawnerd | 14 hours ago
nostromo | 14 hours ago
We're in the part of the market cycle where everyone fights for marketshare by selling dollar bills for 50 cents.
When a winner emerges they'll pull the rug out from under you and try to wall off their garden.
Anthropic just forgot that we're still in the "functioning market competition" phase of AI and not yet in the "unstoppable monopoly" phase.
bambax | 14 hours ago
I only use LLMs through OpenRouter and switch somewhat randomly between frontier models; they each have some amount of personality but I wouldn't mind much if half of them disappeared overnight, as long as the other half remained available.
nostromo | 14 hours ago
I hope you're right!
juliendorra | 14 hours ago
bambax | 14 hours ago
bambax | 14 hours ago
A model is hard to train but it doesn't need to be hyper up to date / have a new version come out every day. Inference is cheap (it seems?) and quality is comparable. So it's unclear how expensive offerings could win over free alternatives.
I could be wrong of course. I don't have a crystal ball. I just don't think this is the same as Google.
Of course I could be entirely mistaken and there could emerge a single winner
mentalgear | 14 hours ago
ar0 | 14 hours ago
With the AI models, using a model that is “good enough but cheaper” is already an option.
safety1st | 14 hours ago
I imagine the split will look a lot like b2b vs b2c in other technologies, b2b customers tend to be willing to pay for tech when it offers a competitive advantage, reduces their operating costs etc. b2c customers mostly just guzzle free slop.
Marsymars | 7 hours ago
(Not quite "every", but outside of tech, most professional workplaces don't support ad blocking or Kagi.)
ai-x | 14 hours ago
Software always gets monopoly simply by usage. Every time a model gets used by esoteric use cases, it gets more training data (that a decentralized open weight model doesn't get) and it starts developing its moat.
JumpCrisscross | 14 hours ago
Most software isn't made by monopolies. More directly, enterprise-software stocks are getting hammered because AI offers them competition.
illiac786 | 14 hours ago
They bundled it with PC hw and the vast majority of apps only ever got published for windows, and this over decades (one would argue it’s still true).
The starting point for LLMs is very different. Who would publish today a software that only integrates with chatGPT? Only a small minority.
Thus I agree, I struggle to see how a monopoly can exist here. A GPU monopoly or duopoly though, perhaps.
kelipso | 14 hours ago
nl | 14 hours ago
(For those unaware, AWS doesn't have a VM monopoly, and the market dynamics seem similar)
Barrin92 | 14 hours ago
we don't, we have about 3 operating systems that have the decades of hardware and software compatibility that makes them widely usable. They're the most complex and complicated things we've built. LLMs are a few thousand lines of python hooked up to a power plant and graphics cards. This is the least defensible piece of software there ever has been.
dolphenstein | 13 hours ago
curtisblaine | 13 hours ago
bambax | 13 hours ago
curtisblaine | 10 hours ago
JumpCrisscross | 14 hours ago
And if the frontier continues favouring centralised solutions, they'll get it. If, on the other hand, scaling asymptotes, the competition will be running locally. Just looking at how much Claude complains about me not paying for SSO-tier subscriptions to data tools when they work perfectly fine in a browser is starting to make running a slower, less-capable model locally competitive with it in some research contexts.
barrenko | 13 hours ago
all closed AI model providers will stop selling APIs in the next 2-3 years. Only open models will be available via APIs (…) Closed model providers are trying to build non-commodity capabilities and they need great UIs to deliver those. It's not just a model anymore, but an app with a UI for a purpose."
~ https://vintagedata.org/blog/posts/model-is-the-product A. Doria
> new Amp Free (10$) access is also closed up since of last night
TZubiri | 13 hours ago
It's simple, follow the ToS
lvl155 | 12 hours ago
chickensong | 11 hours ago
brothrock | 15 hours ago
https://thenewstack.io/anthropic-agent-sdk-confusion/
In my opinion (which means nothing). If you are using your own hardware and not profiting directly from Claude’s use (as in building a service powered by your subscription). I don’t see how this is a problem. I am by no means blowing through my usage (usually <50% weekly with max x5).
agentifysh | 15 hours ago
https://github.com/agentify-sh/desktop
Does this mean I have to remove claude now and go back to copy & pasting prompts for a subscription I am paying for ?!
wth happened to fair use ?
halayli | 15 hours ago
wg0 | 14 hours ago
yamirghofran | 14 hours ago
piokoch | 11 hours ago
andreagrandi | 14 hours ago
Opus has gone down the hill continously in the last week (and before you start flooding with replies, I've been testing opus/codex in parallel for the last week, I've plenty of examples of Claude going off track, then apologising, then saying "now it's all fixed!" and then only fixing part of it, when codex nailed at the first shot).
I can accept specific model limits, not an up/down in terms of reliability. And don't even let me get started on how bad Claude client has become. Others are finally catching up and gpt-5.3-codex is definitely better than opus-4.6
Everyone else (Codex CLI, Copilot CLI etc...) is going opensource, they are going closed. Others (OpenAI, Copilot etc...) explicitly allow using OpenCode, they explicitly forbid it.
This hostile behaviour is just the last drop.
dannersy | 14 hours ago
The providers want to control what AI does to make money or dominate an industry so they don't have to make their money back right away. This was inevitable, I do not understand why we trust these companies, ever.
NamlchakKhandro | 13 hours ago
dannersy | 13 hours ago
It will be real interesting if the haters are right and this technology is not the breakthrough the investors assume it to be AFTER it is already sewn into everyone's work flows. Everyone keeps talking about how jobs will be displaced, yet few are asking what happens when a dependency is swept out from underneath the industry as a whole if/when this massive gamble doesn't pay off.
Whatever. I am squawking into the void as we just repeat history.
newswasboring | 12 hours ago
andreagrandi | 11 hours ago
First, we are not talking about a cheap service here. We are talking about a monthly subscription which costs 100 USD or 200 USD per month, depending on which plan you choose.
Second, it's like selling me a pizza and pretending I only eat it while sitting at your table. I want to eat the pizza at home. I'm not getting 2-3 more pizzas, I'm still getting the same pizza others are getting.
ifwinterco | 13 hours ago
I'll give GPT 5.3 codex a real try I think
kilroy123 | 13 hours ago
andreagrandi | 12 hours ago
mosselman | 12 hours ago
Opus 4.6 wrote me a working macos application.
Codex wrote me a html + css mockup of a macos application that didn't even look like a macos application at all.
Opus 4.5 was fine, but I feel that 4.6 is more often on the money on its implementations than 4.5 was. It is just slower.
stavros | 12 hours ago
Opus went off and browsed my dependencies for ten minutes, and came back and solved the problem firs try.
Huppie | 11 hours ago
I generally don't like the way codex approaches coding itself so I just feed its review comments back in to Claude Code and off we go.
stavros | 11 hours ago
In my experience, two different models together works much better than one, that's why this subscription banning is distressing. I won't be able to use a tool that can use both models.
saberience | 7 hours ago
And there's a good reason the most "famous" vibe coders, including the OpenClaw creator all moved to Codex, it's just better.
Claude writes a lot more code to do anything, tons of redundent code, repeated code etc. Codex is only model I've seen which occasionally removes more code than it writes.
prodigycorp | 11 hours ago
baq | 9 hours ago
Esophagus4 | 8 hours ago
But if people really like Codex better, maybe I’ll try it. I’ve been trying not to pay for 2 subscriptions at once but it might be worth a test.
misnome | 7 hours ago
Anecdotally, maybe this is the reason? It does seem to spend a lot more time “thinking” before giving what feels like equivalent results, most of the time.
Probably eats into the gambling-style adrenaline cycles.
seu | 13 hours ago
Is a week the whole attention timespan of the late 2020s?
marcus_holmes | 13 hours ago
testdelacc1 | 13 hours ago
latexr | 13 hours ago
imafish | 13 hours ago
My brain trailed off after "won’t be long enough to even finish"...
mraart | 12 hours ago
Bengalilol | 10 hours ago
ps: imafish may only be a fan of <https://mumband.bandcamp.com/track/if-i-were-a-fish>
eamag | 12 hours ago
willguest | 10 hours ago
sharperguy | 10 hours ago
_kb | 11 hours ago
neya | 11 hours ago
resiros | 10 hours ago
cactusplant7374 | 10 hours ago
kasey_junk | 10 hours ago
At least weekly I run a set of prompts to compare codex/claude against each other. This is quite easy the prompt sessions are just text files that are saved.
The problem is doing it enough for statistical significance and judging the output as better or not.
baq | 9 hours ago
cactusplant7374 | 7 hours ago
andreagrandi | 8 hours ago
co_king_5 | 7 hours ago
andreagrandi | 7 hours ago
cactusplant7374 | 7 hours ago
You have no reason to suspect this.
SkyPuncher | 8 hours ago
A few things I've noticed:
* 4.6 doesn't look at certain files that it use to
* 4.6 tends to jump into writing code before it's fully understood the problem (annoying but promptable)
* 4.6 is less likely to do research, write to artifacts, or make external tool calls unless you specifically ask it to
* 4.6 is much more likely to ask annoying (blocking) questions that it can reasonably figure out on it's own
* 4.6 is much more likely to miss a critical detail in a planning document after being explicitly told to plan for that detail
* 4.6 needs to more proactively write its memories to file within a conversation to avoid going off track
* 4.6 is a lot worse about demonstrating critical details. I'm so tired of it explaining something conceptually without it thinking about how it implements details.
SkyPuncher | 5 hours ago
I'm working through a refactor and I explicitly told it to use a block (as in Ruby Blocks) and it completely overlooked that. Totally missed it as something I asked it to do.
abm53 | 10 hours ago
That pattern is people complaining that a particular model has degraded in quality of its responses over time or that it has been “nerfed” etc.
Although the models may evolve, and the tools calling them may change, I suspect a huge amount of this is simply confirmation bias.
super256 | 9 hours ago
It seems like they currently have a lot of false positives: https://github.com/openai/codex/issues?q=High%20risk
andreagrandi | 8 hours ago
bbstats | 8 hours ago
andreagrandi | 8 hours ago
GorbachevyChase | 8 hours ago
trillic | 8 hours ago
choilive | 6 hours ago
WarmWash | 6 hours ago
Claude has gotten a lot of popular media attention in the last few weeks, and the influx of users is constraining compute/memory on an already compute heavy model. So you get all the suspected "tricks" like quantization, shorter thinking, KV cache optimizations.
It feels like the same thing that happened to Gemini 3, and what you can even feel throughout the day (the models seem smartest at 12am).
Dario in his interview with dwarkesh last week also lamented the same refrain that other lab leaders have: compute is constrained and there are big tradeoffs in how you allocate it. It feels safe to reason then that they will use any trick they can to free up compute.
thepasch | 5 hours ago
I have a feeling Anthropic might be in for an extremely rude awakening when that happens, and I don’t think it’s a matter of “if” anymore.
submain | 4 hours ago
The latest versions of claude code have been freezing and then crashing while waiting on long running commands. It's pretty frustrating.
bothlabs | 14 hours ago
I think what they want to achieve here is less "kill openclaw" or similar and more "keep our losses under control in general". And now they have a clear criteria to refer when they take action and a good bisection on whom to act on.
In case your usage is high they would block / take action. Because if you have your max subscription and not really losing them money, why should they push you (the monopoly incentive sounds wrong with the current market).
ed_mercer | 14 hours ago
Veen | 12 hours ago
There are many other options too: direct API, other model providers, etc. But Opus is particularly good for "agent with a personality" applications, so it's what thousands of OpenClaw users go with, mostly via the OAuth token, because it's much cheaper than the API.
bob1029 | 14 hours ago
I can get a ridiculous amount of tokens in and out of something like gpt-5.2 via the API for $100.
Is this primarily about gas town and friends?
jongjong | 14 hours ago
It's a little bit sleazy as a business model to try to wedge one's self between Claude and its users.
OpenAI acquiring OpenClaw gives me bad vibes. How did OpenClaw gain so much traction so quickly? It doesn't seem organic.
I definitely feel much more aligned with Anthropic as a company. What they do seems more focused, meritocratic, organic and genuine.
OpenAI essentially appropriated all their current IP from the people... They basically gutted the non-profit and stole its IP. Then sold a huge chunk to Microsoft... Yes, they literally sold the IP they stole to Microsoft, in broad daylight. Then they used media spin to make it sound like they appropriated it from Elon because Elon donated a few millions... But Elon got his tax deduction! The public footed the bill for those deductions... The IP belonged to the non-profit; to the public, not Elon, nor any of the donors. I mean let's not even mention Suchir Balaji, the OpenAI researcher who supposedly "committed suicide" after trying to warn everyone about the stolen IP.
OpenAI is clearly trying to slander Anthropic, trying to present themselves as the good guys after their OpenClaw acquisition and really rubbing it in all over HN... Over which they have much influence.
singularity2001 | 14 hours ago
jspdown | 13 hours ago
- Claude Desktop looks like a demo app. It's slow to use and so far behind the Codex app that it's embarassing.
- Claude Code is buggy has hell and I think I've never used a CLI tool that consume so much memory and CPU. Let's not talk about the feature parity with other agents.
- Claude Agent SDK is poorly documented, half finished, and is just thin wrapper around a CLI tool…
Oh and none of this is open source, so I can do nothing about it.
My only option to stay with their model is to build my own tool. And now I discover that using my subscription with the Agent SDK is against the term of use?
I'm not going to pay 500 USD of API credits every months, no way. I have to move to a different provider.
mihau | 13 hours ago
> Let's not talk about the feature parity with other agents.
What do you mean feature parity with other agents? It seems to me that other CLI agents are quite far from Claude Code in this regard.
skerit | 10 hours ago
baby | 9 hours ago
WXLCKNO | 8 hours ago
co_king_5 | 7 hours ago
FWIW this aligns completely with the LLM ethos. Inefficiency is a virtue.
deadbabe | 5 hours ago
We are heading toward a $1000/month model just to use LLMs in the cloud.
DefineOutside | 5 hours ago
chick3ndinn3r | 4 hours ago
NewsaHackO | 56 minutes ago
It's funny, you are probably in the cohort that made Antropic have to pursue this type of decision so aggressively.
bilekas | 13 hours ago
cryptoegorophy | 13 hours ago
3D30497420 | 13 hours ago
prinny_ | 13 hours ago
rawling | 13 hours ago
input_sh | 12 hours ago
Instead, many, many websites (especially in the music industry) have some sort of funky API that you can only get access to if you have enough online clout. Very few are transparent about what "enough clout" even means or how much it'd cost you, and there's like an entire industry of third-party API resellers that cost like 10x more than if you went straight to the source. But you can't, because you first have to fulfill some arbitrary criteria that you can't even know about ahead of time.
It's all very frustrating to deal with.
miroljub | 12 hours ago
Though, in this case, you get free API access to the model.
[1]: https://x.com/badlogicgames/status/2017063228094709771
admx8 | 9 hours ago
sbarre | 13 hours ago
butlike | 6 hours ago
simianwords | 13 hours ago
mamami | 13 hours ago
throwaway24778 | 12 hours ago
pirsquare | 13 hours ago
wiseowise | 13 hours ago
beAbU | 13 hours ago
Before you can sign up to build a WhatsApp bot, you need to jump through a million hoops, and after that, every automated message template must be vetted by Meta before it can be sent out, apple style.
I'm glad of this, because unlike SMS and other messaging platforms, WhatsApp is spam free and a pleasure to use.
bilekas | 12 hours ago
At least here in Italy whatsapp is a spam house unless you actively update the default privacy settings in-app. There is no discernable difference between SMS and WhatsApp to spammers.
msh | 10 hours ago
closewith | 12 hours ago
bilekas | 12 hours ago
There is nothing here stopping cambridge analytica from doing this again, they will provide whatever details needed. But a small pre launch personal project work that might use a facebook publishing application can't be developed or tested without first going through all the bureaucracy.
Nevermind the non profit 'free' application you might want to create on the FB platform, lets say a share chrome extension "Post to my FB", for personal use, you can't do this because you can't create an application without a company and IVA/TAX documents. It's hostile imo.
Before, you could create an app, link your ToS, privacy policy etc, verify your domain via email, and then if users wanted to use your application they would agree, this is how a lot of companies still do it. I'm actually not sure why FB do this specifically.
wobfan | 12 hours ago
> to protect consumers
We are talking about Meta. They have never, and will never, protect customers. All they protect is their wealth and their political power.
is_true | 10 hours ago
matdehaast | 13 hours ago
notrealyme123 | 12 hours ago
throwaway920102 | 6 hours ago
Loic | 12 hours ago
Here, they put limits on the "under-cover" use of the subscription. If they can provide a relatively cheap subscription against the direct API use, this is because they can control the stuff end-to-end, the application running on your system (Claude Code, Claude Desktop) and their systems.
As you subscribe to these plans, this is the "contract", you can use only through their tools. If you want full freedom, use the API, with a per token pricing.
For me, this is fair.
arghwhat | 12 hours ago
It's just price differentiation - they know consumers are price sensitive, and that companies wanting to use their APIs to build products so they can slap AI on their portfolio and get access to AI-related investor money can be milked. On the consumer-facing front, they live off branding and if you're not using claude code, you might not associate the tool with Anthropic, which means losing publicity that drives API sales.
throwaway24778 | 12 hours ago
k8sToGo | 12 hours ago
Also why would you create a throwaway for this question? Are you trying to rage bait?
bilekas | 12 hours ago
You should never question anyone's route to privacy :)
throwaway24778 | 12 hours ago
If you have to ask, it's probably not rage bait. I'm just too lazy to come up with a username.
bilekas | 12 hours ago
FeepingCreature | 11 hours ago
butlike | 6 hours ago
Please enjoy these messages from our sponsors.
stavros | 12 hours ago
I pay them $100 a month and now for some reason I can't use OpenCode? Fuck that.
dragonwriter | 11 hours ago
stavros | 11 hours ago
FeepingCreature | 11 hours ago
You can of course use OpenCode or any other project with the API, which is also offered as a separate product. People just don't want to do that because it's not subsidized, ie. more expensive. But the entire reason it's subsidized is that Anthropic can use the data to improve their product.
rglullis | 10 hours ago
This is grade A, absolute crap. It's subsidized because everyone else is subsidizing it, and everyone is doing it because they are trying to lock their consumer share.
The solution is quite simple. Just get the FTC to forbid tie-in sales so that we don't get the huge corporations using their infinite resources to outlive the competition. Anthropic/Amazon/Google/OpenAI/Facebook can offer any type of service they want, but if the access to the API costs $X when offered standalone, then that is the baseline price for anything that depends on the API to work.
FeepingCreature | 9 hours ago
I don't use the Anthropic subscriptions either.
xvector | 11 hours ago
You are free to use the API.
regenschutz | 8 hours ago
hluska | 8 hours ago
duskdozer | 8 hours ago
dragonwriter | 3 hours ago
hobofan | 11 hours ago
You are not paying for usage. You are paying for usage via their application.
If their business plan is based on how quickly a human can enter requests and react to the results, and Claude Code is optimized for that, why should you be allowed to use an alternative client that e.g. always tries to saturate the token limits?
stavros | 11 hours ago
PierceJoy | 11 hours ago
heliumtera | 9 hours ago
barrkel | 11 hours ago
In reality, heavy subscription users are subsidized by light subscription users. The rate limits aren't everything.
If agent harnesses other than Claude Code consume more tokens than average, or rather, if users of agent harnesses other than CC consume more tokens than average, well, Anthropic wouldn't be unhappy if those consumers had to pay more for their tokens.
notpushkin | 10 hours ago
Do they, though?
admx8 | 9 hours ago
NewsaHackO | 5 hours ago
terminalbraid | 11 hours ago
amelius | 11 hours ago
kalleboo | 9 hours ago
brookst | 9 hours ago
TZubiri | 11 hours ago
Doesn't that make sense? If you use it more you get charged more, if you use it less you get charged less.
stavros | 10 hours ago
TZubiri | 9 hours ago
Probably the ToS change was to make it more clear.
To be fair, the developer is the one breaking the ToS in the most significant way, breaking boilerplate reverse engineering clauses.
But the user also is very aware that they are doing something funny, in order to authenticate, the user is asked to authorize Claude Code, n ot Opencode or OpenClaw, it's clearly a hack and there is no authorization from Anthropic to OpenClaw, and you are not giving Anthropic authorization to give access to OC, the user asks Anthropic to give access to Claude Code, the only reason this works is because OC is pretending to be Claude Code.
The bottom line issue is that as a user you are paying for a subscription to a package that includes an expected usage. That package is not metered, but it is given on the condition that you will use it as it is expected to be used, by chatting manually with the chatbot, which results in a reasonable expected token usage. By using a program that programatically calls the chat interface, the token consumption increases beyond what was part of the original deal, and so the price should be different.
A similar scenario would be if you go to an all you can eat buffet, you pay for a single person, but then you actually unload an army of little clones that start eating the whole buffet. Technically it was an all you can eat buffet and you paid the price right? Well no, come on, don't play dumb.
admx8 | 9 hours ago
everdrive | 9 hours ago
butlike | 6 hours ago
skeledrew | 3 hours ago
fauigerzigerk | 12 hours ago
But I agree they can impose whatever user hostile restrictions they want. They are not a monopoly. They compete in a very competitive market. So if they decide to raise prices in whatever shape or form then that's fine.
Arbitrary restrictions do play a role for my own purchasing decisions though. Flexibility is worth something.
narrator | 11 hours ago
There's this pervasive idea left over from the pre-llm days that compute is free. You want to rent your own H200x8 to run your Claude model, that's literally going to cost $24/hour. People are just not thinking like that. I have my home PC, it does this stuff I can run it 24/7 for free.
notpushkin | 10 hours ago
ethbr1 | 10 hours ago
This sounds like engineering, finance, and legal got together and decided they were in an untenable position if OpenAI started nudging OpenClaw to burn even more tokens on Anthropic (or just never optimize) + continually updated workarounds to using subscription auth. But I'm sure OpenAI would never do something like that...
At the end of the day, it's the same 'fixed price plan for variable use on a constrained resource' cellular problem: profitability becomes directly linked to actual average usage.
skeledrew | 3 hours ago
Not possible: OpenClaw is run by a foundation, and is open source, which means OpenAI has no leverage to do such a thing.
ethbr1 | 43 minutes ago
skeledrew | 16 minutes ago
Xunjin | 10 hours ago
dspillett | 10 hours ago
regenschutz | 8 hours ago
darkwater | 7 hours ago
mickeyp | 10 hours ago
No. The sauce is in KV caching: when to evict, when to keep, how to pre-empt an active agent loop vs someone who are showing signs of inactivity at their pc, etc.
starkgoose | 10 hours ago
butlike | 6 hours ago
admx8 | 9 hours ago
rglullis | 10 hours ago
Except they can't. Their costs are not magically lower when you use claude code vs when you use a third-party client.
> For me, this is fair.
This is, plain and simple, a tie-in sale of claude code. I am particularly amused by people accepting it as "fair" because in Brazil this is an illegal practice.
pigpop | 9 hours ago
theturtletalks | 9 hours ago
What I don't understand is why start this game of cat and mouse? Just look at Youtube and YT-DLP. YT-DLP, and the dozens of apps that use it, basically use Youtube's unofficial web API and it still works even after Youtube constantly patches their end. Though now, YT-DLP has to use a makeshift JS interpreter and maybe even spawn Chromium down the line.
duskdozer | 8 hours ago
skeledrew | 3 hours ago
regularfry | 9 hours ago
I don't have a dog in this fight but is this actually true? If you're using Claude Code they can know that whatever client-side model selection they put into it is active. So if they can get away with routing 80% of the requests to Haiku and only route to Opus for the requests that really need it, that does give them a cost model where they can rely on lower costs than if a third-party client just routes to Opus for everything. Even if they aren't doing that sort of thing now, it would be understandable if they wanted to.
joseda-hg | 9 hours ago
They still have the total consumption under their control (*bar prompt caching and other specific optimizations) where in the past they even had different quotas per model, it shouldn't cost them more money, just be a worse/different service I guess
ac29 | 7 hours ago
Opus is claude code's default model as of sometime recently (around Opus 4.6?)
skeledrew | 3 hours ago
As things are currently, better models mean bigger models that take more storage+RAM+CPU, or just spend more time processing a request. All this translates to higher costs, and may be mitigated by particular configs triggered by knowledge that a given client, providing particular guarantees, is on the other side.
joseda-hg | 3 hours ago
skeledrew | 3 hours ago
brookst | 9 hours ago
skeledrew | 3 hours ago
cma | 9 hours ago
If subsidizing that offering is a good hook to get higher paying API users on board, then some of that cost is a customer aquisition cost, whereas the cost to them of providing the API doesn't have the same proportion that they can justify as a customer acquisition cost.
rglullis | 9 hours ago
brookst | 9 hours ago
Netflix: limits number of devices and stream quality and offline use.
AWS: does not allow any number of applications (spamming, crypto mining, adult content)
Airlines: do not allow smoking, boom boxes
Is there any service that gives complete freedom?
rglullis | 8 hours ago
nerdjon | 9 hours ago
I am very curious what is particularly illegal about this. On the sales page nowhere do they actually talk about the API https://claude.com/pricing
Now we all know obviously the API is being used because that is how things work, but you are not actually paying a subscription for the API. You are paying for access to Claude Code.
Is it also illegal that if you pay for Playstation Plus that you can't play those games on an Xbox?
Is it illegal that you can't use third party netflix apps?
I really don't want to defend and AI company here but this is perfectly normal. In no other situation would we expect access to the API, the only reason this is considered different is because they also have a different service that gives access to the API. But that is irrelevant.
CuriouslyC | 8 hours ago
nerdjon | 8 hours ago
But if that is the service they are making and they are clear about what it is when you sign up... That does not make it illegal.
I can see why people think they should be entitled to do this, but it does not align with how they are selling the service or how many other companies sell services. In most situations you don't get unlimited access to the individual components of how a service works (the API), you are expected to use the service (in this case Claude Code) directly.
rglullis | 7 hours ago
"Both parties are okay with the terms" is far from being sufficient to make something "legal".
Tie-in sales between software and services is not different from price dumping. If any of the Big Tech corporations were from any country that is not the US, the FTC would be doing anything in their power to stop them.
nerdjon | 7 hours ago
I disagree, in many cases what you are specifically paying for is the combination of the software and the service that are designed to work together. And in many cases do not work independent of eachother.
There are countless cases of this, that what you are paying for is a thing that is made up of a piece of software and a serverside component. MMO's (and gaming in general) being a major example of this, but so are many of the apps I pay for subscriptions for on my phone.
The actual technical implementation of how it works is irrelevant when it is clear what it is you are paying for.
> "Both parties are okay with the terms" is far from being sufficient to make something "legal".
True but the opposite is also true, just because you don't like the terms it does not make it illegal.
rglullis | 6 hours ago
And in many cases like Claude Code and the Anthropic models, they can and do work perfectly independently.
> True but the opposite is also true, just because you don't like the terms it does not make it illegal.
This is not me "not liking it". Like I said somewhere else in this thread: these types of tie-in are illegal in Brazil. This practice is clearly not done to favor the consumer. You can bet that if the US was anything closer to a functional democracy and the laws were not written by lobbyists, this would be illegal in the US as well.
nerdjon | 6 hours ago
Are MMO’s illegal in Brazil? Is PlayStation Plus illegal in Brazil? Is Spotify, Apple Music, etc etc etc also illegal in Brazil?
It would be ridiculous to argue that I could pay for a subscription to World of Warcraft and make my own third party client to play the game with. (Obviously you are free to argue it all you want but I would be very surprised if this was actually illegal).
> And in many cases like Claude Code and the Anthropic models, they can and do work perfectly independently.
Unless I am mistaken Claude Code does not have a local model built into it, so it requires a server side component to work?
As far as the Anthropic models, yes like many other services they ALSO have a public API that is separate from the subscription that you are paying for.
The critical difference here being that in the subscription it is very clear that you are paying for “Claude Code” which is a combination of an application and a server side component. It makes no claims about API usage as part of your subscription, again the technical implementation of the service you are actually paying for “Claude Code” is irrelevant.
When it comes to “Claude Code” for all that we should care about, again given that “Claude Code” is what you are paying for, they could be sending the information to Gemini or or a human looks at it. Because it’s irrelevant to the end user when it comes to the technical implementation since you are not being granted access to any other parts of the system directly.
rglullis | 5 hours ago
"Tie-in sale": the business practice where a seller conditions the sale of one product (the tying good) on the buyer’s agreement to purchase a different product (the tied good).
The examples you are giving are not "tie-in" sales because the service from Playstation Plus, Spotify, Apple Music, etc is the distribution of digital goods.
> Unless I am mistaken Claude Code does not have a local model built into it, so it requires a server side component to work?
Which part are you not understanding?
I don't care about Claude Code. I do not want it and do not need it. All I care about is the access to the models through the client that I was already using!
> When it comes to “Claude Code” for all that we should care about, again given that “Claude Code” is what you are paying for.
No, it is not! I paid for Claude Pro. Claude != Claude Code.
wrs | 4 hours ago
rglullis | 3 hours ago
If that was true, then getting equivalent usage of the API without claude.ai and Claude Code should cost less, not more.
You can try to find all sorts of explanations for it, at the end of the day is quite simple: they are subsidizing one product in order to grow the market share, and they are doing it at a loss now, because they believe they will make up for it later. I understand the reasoning from a business point of view, but this doesn't mean they are entitled to their profits. I do not understand people that think we simply accept their premise and assume they can screw us over just because they asked and put it on a piece of paper.
skeledrew | 4 hours ago
But that's not a product that they're offering. That ability was an undesired (from their business perspective) trait that they're now rectifying.
rglullis | 3 hours ago
Of course it was.
It's not what they wanted, but it's not my problem. The fact that I was a customer does not mean that I need to protective of their profits.> (from their business perspective)
So what?!
Basically, they set up an strategy they thought it was going to work in their favor (offer a subsidized service to try to lock in customers), someone else found a way to turn things around and you believe that we should be okay with this?!
Honestly, I do not understand why so many people here think it is fine to let these huge corporations run the same exploitation playbook over and over again. Basically they set up a mouse trap full of cheese and now that the mice found a way to enjoy the cheese without getting their necks broken, they are crying about it?
skeledrew | 2 hours ago
You'd have to point me to an authoritative source on that (explicitly saying users are allowed to use their models via private APIs in apps of the user's choosing). If something isn't explicitly provided in the contract, then it can be changed at any point in any way without notice.
Honestly, I'm not big on capitalism in general, but I don't understand why people should expect companies to provide things exactly the way they want at exactly the prices they would like to be charged (if at all). That's just not how the world/system works, or should, especially given there are so many alternatives available. If one doesn't like what's happening with some service, then let the wallet do the talking and move to another. Emigration is a far more effective message than complaining.
rglullis | 2 hours ago
This is a gross misrepresentation of my argument.
I wouldn't be complaining at all if they went up and said "sorry, we are not going to subsidize anyone anymore, so the prices are going up", and I wouldn't be complaining if they came up and said "sorry, using a third party client incurs an extra cost of on our side, so if you want to use that you'd have to pay extra".
What I am against is the anti-competitive practice of price discrimination and the tie-in sale of a service. If they are going to play this game, then they better be ready for the case the strategy backfires. Otherwise it's just a game of "heads I win, tails you lose" where they always get to make up the rules.
> Emigration is a far more effective message than complaining.
Why not both? I cancelled my Pro subscription today. I will stick with just Ollama cloud.
skeledrew | 19 minutes ago
Good on you re that cancel. May you find greener grass elsewhere.
nerdjon | 2 hours ago
I will keep my response to this part in particular limited because I have limited understanding of this law. However based on doing a little bit of searching around the law is not as cut and dry as you are presenting it to be. It is possible that Claude code would fall under being fine under that law or no one has gone after them. I honestly don’t know and I don’t feel like having an argument that it is highly likely both of us don’t fully understand the law.
That being said I do question how exactly “Claude code” differs from those services as a digital good.
> I don't care about Claude Code. I do not want it and do not need it. All I care about is the access to the models through the client that I was already using!
OK! That is not what you’re paying for as part of Claude Pro, end of story. You are not paying for the API. It is no different that the people that have a free plan and can only chat through the web and the app also don’t get access to the API even though it is obviously using an API to access those endpoints as well.
Or are you also going to argue that free users should have access to the API because they are already using them in the browser.
> No, it is not! I paid for Claude Pro. Claude != Claude Code.
Claude Code is one of the features you are paying for as part of Claude Pro so yes in a way you are paying for it. And again not on that list is the API.
TruePath | an hour ago
The laws prohibiting tie-ins don't make it illegal to sell two products that work well together. That's literally what the laws are designed to make you do -- seperate products into seperate pieces. The problem tie-in laws were designed to combat was situations like Microsoft making a popular OS then making a mediocre spreadsheet program and pushing the cost of that spreadsheet program into the cost of buying the OS. That way consumers would go "well it's expensive but I get excel with it so it's ok" and even if someone else made a slightly better spreadsheet they didn't have the chance to convince users because they had to buy it all as one package.
Anthropic would be doing something much closer to that if they did what you wanted. They'd be saying: hey we have this neat Claude code thing you all want to use but you can't buy that without also purchasing third party access. Now some company offering a cheaper/better third party usage product doesn't get the chance to convince you because anthropic forced you to buy that just to get claude code.
Ultimately this change unbundled products the opposite of a tie-in. What is upsetting about it is that it no longer feels to you like you are getting a good deal because you now have to fork over a bunch more cash to keep getting what you want. But that's not illegal, that's just not offering good value for money.
skeledrew | 4 hours ago
Look at it this way: the service that you're accessing is really a (primarily desired) side-effect of the software. So re subscriptions, what they're actually providing are the apps (web, desktop, etc), and the apps use their service to aid the fulfillment of their functionality. Those wanting direct access to the internal service can get an API key for that purpose. That's just how their product offering is structured.
joombaga | 7 hours ago
Forgeties79 | 4 hours ago
smileysteve | 6 hours ago
Or any smart tv with free ip tv.
pocksuppet | 6 hours ago
Reddit_MLP2 | 5 hours ago
jltsiren | 4 hours ago
Anthropic provides an API third-party clients can use. The pro-market position is that the API must be available at every pricing tier, as the benefits from increased competition outweigh the imposed restrictions to business practices. The pro-business position is that Anthropic must be allowed to choose which tiers can use the API, as the benefits from increased freedom outweigh the reduced competition in the market.
nerdjon | 2 hours ago
While I do personally disagree with thinking that you should be able to do this when it was never sold in that way, at the end of the day as a customer you can choose if you want to use the product in the way that they are saying or use something else if you don’t want to support that model.
However the person I was responding too brought up legality which is a very different discussion.
canibal | 6 hours ago
rogerthis | 4 hours ago
skerit | 10 hours ago
cik | 10 hours ago
tom_m | 7 hours ago
randusername | 6 hours ago
mdrzn | 12 hours ago
sceptic123 | 12 hours ago
mmasu | 11 hours ago
whiplash451 | 10 hours ago
My impression is the opposite: frontend/UI/UX is where the moat is growing because that's where users will (1) consume ads (2) orchestrate their agents.
mmasu | 8 hours ago
whiplash451 | 5 hours ago
I just think that OAI/Anthropic will try to keep both types of users locked into their walled garden via the UI.
The APIs may have a future, but at our own peril and zero guarantees. It's a tool to create traction and demonstrate capabilities to devs.
tomasphan | 8 hours ago
admx8 | 9 hours ago
jauntywundrkind | 11 hours ago
Spotify in particular is just patently the very worst. They released an amazing and delightful app sdk, allowing for making really neat apps in the desktop app in 2011. Then cancelled it by 2014. It feels like their entire ecosystem has only ever gone downhill. Their car device was cancelled nearly immediately. Every API just gets worse and worse. Remarkable to see a company have only ever such a downward slide. The Spotify Graveyard is, imo, a place of singnificantly less honor than the Google Graveyard. https://web.archive.org/web/20141104154131/https://gigaom.co...
But also, I feel like this broad repulsive trend is such an untenable position now that AI is here. Trying to make your app an isolated disconnected service is a suicide pact. Some companies will figure out how to defend their moat, but generally people are going to prefer apps that allow them to use the app as they want, increasingly, over time. And they are not going to be stopped even if you do try to control terms!
Were I a smart engaged company, I'd be trying to build WebMCP access as soon as possible. Adoption will be slow, this isn't happening fast, but people who can mix human + agent activity on your site are going to be delighted by the experience, and that you will spread!
WebMCP is better IMHO than conventional APIs because it layers into the experience you are already having. It's not a separate channel; it can build and use the session state of your browsing to do the things. That's a huge boon for users.
TZubiri | 11 hours ago
whiplash451 | 10 hours ago
iamacyborg | 10 hours ago
windexh8er | 9 hours ago
But the real issue is that these companies, once they have any market leverage, do things in their best interest to protect the little bit of moat they've acquired.
[0] https://www.mcdbooks.com/books/enshittification
baby | 9 hours ago
nananana9 | 8 hours ago
[1] https://i.programmerhumor.io/2025/03/778c56a79115a582edb9949...
BoredPositron | 7 hours ago
xnx | 6 hours ago
canibal | 6 hours ago
endymi0n | 5 hours ago
— Erdogan, probably.
systemBuilder | 4 hours ago
DataSpace | 4 hours ago
IAmGraydon | an hour ago
mns | 13 hours ago
mchaver | 13 hours ago
This is the VC funded startup playbook. It has been repeated many times, but maybe for the younger crowd it is new. Start a new service that is relatively permissive, then gradually restrict APIs and permissions. Finally, start throwing in ads and/or making it more expensive to use. Part of the reason is in the beginning they are trying to get as many users as possible and burning VC money. Then once the honey moon is over, they need to make a profit so they cut back on services, nerf stuff, increase prices and start adding ads.
ramon156 | 13 hours ago
I'm just going to accept that my €15 (which with vat becomes €21) is just enough usage to automate some boring tasks.
atla_ | 13 hours ago
kosolam | 13 hours ago
ksec | 13 hours ago
Things get banned, but that is OK along as they give us weeks or days to prep for alternative solution. Users ( Not Customers ) are happy with it. Too bad, the good days are over.
Somewhere along the line, no just in software but even in politics, the whole world on entitlement. They somehow believe they deserve this, what they were doing were wrong but if it is allowed in the first place they should remain allowed to do so.
Judging from account opening time and comments we can also tell the age group and which camp they are on.
wiseowise | 13 hours ago
NamlchakKhandro | 13 hours ago
wiseowise | 12 hours ago
gdorsi | 13 hours ago
cedws | 13 hours ago
Claude Code is not the apex. We’re still collectively figuring out the best way to use models in software, this TOS change kills innovation.
giamma | 12 hours ago
jeroenhd | 12 hours ago
But if you're doing something very basic, you might be able to slop together a tool that does local inferencing based on a small, local model instead, alleviating the need to call Claude entirely.
avereveard | 12 hours ago
miroljub | 12 hours ago
piokoch | 12 hours ago
miroljub | 12 hours ago
And as a bonus, you can choose your harness. You don't have to suffer CC.
And if something better appears tomorrow, you switch your model, while still using your harness of choice.
small_model | 10 hours ago
ac29 | 5 hours ago
gregjw | 12 hours ago
anhner | 12 hours ago
arjunchint | 12 hours ago
- Google reduced AI Studio's free rate limits by 1/10th
- Perplexity imposing rate limits, card filing to continue free subscriptions
- Now Anthropic as well
There has been a false narrative that AI will get cheaper and more ubiquitous, but model providers have been stuck in a race for ever more capabilities and performance at higher costs.
lvl155 | 12 hours ago
You can still simply pay for API.
seyz | 12 hours ago
4d4m | an hour ago
cranberryturkey | 12 hours ago
saneshark | 11 hours ago
They are literally alienating a large percentage of OpenClaw, NanoClaw, PicoClaw, customers because those customers will surely not be willing to pay API pricing, which is at least 6-10x Max Plan pricing (for my usage).
This isn’t too surprising to me since they probably have a direct competitor to openclaw et al in the works right now, but until then I am cancelling my subscription and porting my nanoclaw fork with mem0 integration to work with OpenAI instead.
Thats not a “That’ll teach ‘em” statement, it is just my own cost optimization. I am quite fond of Anthropic’s coding models and might still subscribe again at the $20 level, but they just priced me out for personal assistant, research, and 90% of my token use case.
Tepix | 10 hours ago
neya | 11 hours ago
skerit | 10 hours ago
neya | 9 hours ago
Anthropic = good
Google = evil
That's pretty much HN crowd logic to be honest
OJFord | 11 hours ago
qwertox | 10 hours ago
small_model | 10 hours ago
troyvit | 10 hours ago
The second appears to be hitching my wagon to Mistral even though it's apparently nowhere as powerful or featureful as the big guys. But do you know how many times they've screwed me over? Not once.
Maybe it's my use cases that make this possible. I definitely modified my behavior to accommodate Linux.
WXLCKNO | 8 hours ago
whs | 10 hours ago
rglullis | 9 hours ago
obsidianbases1 | 9 hours ago
okokwhatever | 9 hours ago
bluelightning2k | 8 hours ago
Claude Code is a lock in, where Anthropic takes all the value.
If the frontend and API are decoupled, they are one benchmark away from losing half their users.
Some other motivations: they want to capture the value. Even if it's unprofitable they can expect it to become vastly profitable as inference cost drops, efficiency improves, competitors die out etc. Or worst case build the dominant brand then reduce the quotas.
Then there's brand - when people talk about OpenCode they will occasionally specify "OpenCode (with Claude)" but frequently won't.
Then platform - at any point they can push any other service.
Look at the Apple comparison. Yes, the hardware and software are tuned and tested together. The analogy here is training the specific harness,caching the system prompt, switching models, etc.
But Apple also gets to charge Google $billions for being the default search engine. They get to sell apps. They get to sell cloud storage, and even somehow a TV. That's all super profitable.
At some point Claude Code will become an ecosystem with preferred cloud and database vendors, observability, code review agents, etc.
thenaturalist | 8 hours ago
Use an API Key and there's no problem.
They literally put that in plain words in the ToS.
9cb14c1ec0 | 8 hours ago
naveen99 | 8 hours ago
noosphr | 8 hours ago
tom_m | 7 hours ago
bloppe | 7 hours ago
naveen99 | 6 hours ago
canibal | 6 hours ago
mcherm | 5 hours ago
That sounds absurd to me. Committing to not building in advertising is very important and fundamental to me. Asking people who pay for a personal subscription rather than paying by the API call to use that subscription themselves sounds to me like it is. Just clarifying the social compact that was already implied.
I WANT to be able to pay a subscription price. Rather like the way I pay for my internet connectivity with a fixed monthly bill. If I had to pay per packet transmitted, I would have to stop and think about it every time I decided to download a large file or watch a movie. Sure, someone with extremely heavy usage might not be able to use a normal consumer internet subscription; but it works fine for my personal use. I like having the option for my AI usage to operate the same way.
skeledrew | 4 hours ago
thenaturalist | 5 hours ago
This statement is plainly wrong.
If you boost and praise AI usage, you have to face the real cost.
Can't have your cake and eat it, too.
anonym29 | 6 hours ago
It's kind of like a new restaurant started handing out coupons for "90% off", wanting to attract diners to the restaurant, customers started coming in and ordering bulk meals then immediately packaging them in tupperware containers and taking it home (violating the spirit of the arrangement, even if not the letter of the arrangement), so the restaurant changed the terms on the discount to say "limited to in-store consumption only, not eligible for take-home meals", and instead of still being grateful that they're getting food for 90% off, the cheapskate customers are getting angry that they're no longer allowed to exploit the massive subsidy however they want.
CuriouslyC | 8 hours ago
eshaham78 | 7 hours ago
tom_m | 7 hours ago
burnte | 3 hours ago
empath75 | 6 hours ago
CuriouslyC | 5 hours ago
The advances in the Claude Code harness have been more around workflow automation rather than capability improvements, and truthfully workflows are very user-dependent, so an opinionated harness is only ever going to be "right" for a narrow segment of users, and it's going to annoy a lot of others. This is happening now, but the sub subsidy washes out a lot of the discontent.
quikoa | 5 hours ago
popcorncowboy | 5 hours ago
athrowaway3z | 5 hours ago
This coding agent is minimal, and it completely changed how I used models and Claude's cli now feels like extremely slow bloat.
I'd not be surprised if you're right in that this is companies / management will prefer to "pay for a complete package" approach for a long while, but power-users should not care for the model providers.
I have like 100 lines of code to get me a tmux controls & semaphore_wait extension in the pi harness. That gave me a better orchestration scheme a month ago when I adopted it, than Claude has right now.
As far as I can tell, the more you try to train your model on your harness, the worse they get. Bitter lesson #2932.
philipwhiuk | 4 hours ago
I mean I suspect for corporate usage Microsoft already has this wrapped up with Microsoft & GitHub Co-Pilots.
AJ007 | 3 hours ago
The reason these LLM tools being good is they can "just do stuff." Anthropic bans third party subscription auth? I'll just have my other tool use Claude Code in tmux. If third party agents can be banned from doing stuff (some advanced always on spyware or whatever), then a large chunk of the promise of AI is dead.
Amp just announced today they are dumping IDE integration. Models seem to run better on bare-bones software like Pi, and you can add or remove stuff on the fly because the whole things open source. The software writes itself. Is Microsoft just trying to cram a whole new paradigm in to an old package? Kind of like a computer printer. It will be a big business, but it isn't the future.
At scale, the end provider ultimately has to serve the inference -- they need the hardware, data centers & the electricity to power those data centers. Someone like Microsoft can also provide a SLA and price such appropriately. I'll avoid a $200/month customer acquisition cost rant, but one user, running a bunch of sub agents, can spend a ton of money. If you don't own a business or funding source, the way state of the art LLMs are being used today is totally uneconomical (easy $200+ an hour at API prices.)
36+ months out, if they overbuild the data centers and the revenue doesn't come in like OpenAI & Anthropic are forecasting, there will be a glut of hardware. If that's the case I'd expect local model usage will scale up too and it will get more difficult for enterprise providers.
(Nothing is certain but some things have become a bit more obvious than they were 6 months ago.)
AJ007 | 3 hours ago
Bloated apps are a material disadvantage. If I'm in a competitive industry that slow down alone can mean failure. The only thing Claude Code has going for it now is the loss making $200 month subsidy. Is there any conceivable GUI overlay that Anthropic or OpenAI can add to make their software better than the current terminal apps? Sure, for certain edge cases, but then why isn't the user building those themselves? 24 months ago we could have said that's too hard, but that isn't the case in 2026.
Microsoft added all of this stuff in to Windows, and it's a 5 alarm fire. Stuff that used to be usable is a mess and really slow. Running linux with Claude Code, Codex, or Pi is clearly superior to having a Windows device with neither (if it wasn't possible to run these in Windows; just a hypothetical.)
From the business/enterprise perspective - there is no single most important thing, but having an environment that is reliable and predictable is high up there. Monday morning, an the Anthropic API endpoint is down, uh oh! In the longer term, businesses will really want to control both the model and the software that interfaces with it.
If the end game is just the same as talking to the Star Trek computer, and competitors are narrowing gaps rather than widening them (e.g. Anthropic and OpenAI releases models minutes from each other now, Chinese frontier models getting closer in capability not further), then it is really hard to see how either company achieves a vertical lock down.
We could actually move down the stack, and then the real problem for OpenAI and Anthropic is nVidia. 2030, the data center expansion is bust, nVidia starts selling all of these cards to consumers directly and has a huge financial incentive to make sure the performant local models exist. Everyone in the semiconductor supply chain below nvidia only cares about keeping sales going, so it stops with them.
Maybe nvidia is the real winner?
Also is it just me or does it now feel like hn comments are just talking to a future LLM?
keeganpoppen | 3 hours ago
rurp | 6 hours ago
There are parallels to the silly Metaverse hype wave from a few years ago. At the time I saw a surprising number of people defending the investment saying it was important for Facebook to control their own platform. Well sure it's beneficial for Facebook to control a platform, but that benefit is purely for the company and if anything it would harm current and future users. Unsurprisingly, the pitch to please think of this giant corporation's needs wasn't a compelling pitch in the end.
mccoyb | 6 hours ago
This whole game is a bizarre battle.
In the future, many companies will have slightly different secret RL sauces. I'd want to use Gemini for documentation, Claude for design, Codex for planning, yada yada ... there will be no generalist take-all model, I just don't believe RL scaling works like that.
I'm not convinced that a single company can own the best performing model in all categories, I'm not even sure the economics make it feasible.
Good for us, of course.
thepasch | 5 hours ago
And that’s out of the box. With how comically extensible pi is and how much control it gives you over every aspect of the pipeline, as soon as you start building extensions for your own, personal workflow, Claude Code legimitely feels like a trash app in comparison.
I don’t care what Anthropic does - I’ll keep using pi. If they think they need to ban me for that, then, oh well. I’ll just continue to keep using pi. Just no longer with Claude models.
ksec | 4 hours ago
I wouldn't all the value, but how else are you going to run the business? Allow other to take all the value you provide?
marscopter | 4 hours ago
AI companies: "You think you own that code?"
chasd00 | 2 hours ago
i've been wondering how anthropic is going to survive long term. If they could build out an infrastructure and services to complete with the hyperscalers but surfaced as a tool for claude to use then maybe. You pay Anthropic $20/user/month for ClaudeCode but also $100k/month to run your applications.
chazftw | 8 hours ago
tallesborges92 | 7 hours ago
stiiv | 7 hours ago
ac29 | 5 hours ago
It suggests to me Anthropic is less concerned with the financial impact of letting subscribers use alternative tools and more concerned with creating lock in to their products and subscriptions. It very well might backfire though, I was not considering alternative models yesterday, but today I am actively exploring other options and considering cancelling my sub. I've been using my subscription primarily through pi recently, so if they aren't interested in me as a customer, pretty much everyone else is.
infecto | 7 hours ago
Why now? It would not surprise me that this was simply an after thought and once it hit critical mass (opencode) they locked it down.
Frannky | 7 hours ago
Ajedi32 | 7 hours ago
Regarding consumer freedom, I believe software running on user machines should serve the interests of the user, not the company who wrote the software or anyone else for that matter. Trying to force users to run a particular client written by your company violates this principle.
Regarding competition, forcing users to run a particular client is a form of anti competitive bundling, a naked attempt to prevent alternative clients from being able to enter the market unless they are able to build a competing backed as well. Such artificial "moats" are great for companies but harmful to consumers.
dgdosen | 6 hours ago
irishcoffee | 6 hours ago
trillic | 6 hours ago
ac29 | 6 hours ago
Running locally is going to require a lot of memory, compute, and energy for the foreseeable future which makes it really hard to compete with ~$20/mo subscriptions.
kevstev | 5 hours ago
shortsunblack | 6 hours ago
Trying to prevent competitors from interoperating with the service also may be construed as anticompetitive behaviour.
The implementation details of an authentication process do not beget legal privileges to be a monopolist. What an absurd thought.
bad_haircut72 | 6 hours ago
butlike | 6 hours ago
lucasyvas | 6 hours ago
Instead of using SDKs, this will just shift the third party clients to use ACP to get around it - Claude Code is still under the hood but you’re using a different interface.
This all seems pretty idiotic on their part - I know why they’re trying it but it won’t work. There will always be someone working around it.
thepasch | 5 hours ago
They’re losing the exact crowd that they want in their corner because it’s the crowd that’s far more likely to be making the decisions when companies start pivoting their workflows en-masse. Keep pissing on them and they’ll remember the wet when the time comes to decide whom to give a share from the potentially massive company’s potentially massive coffers.
ogimagemaker | 5 hours ago
From a backend perspective, the subscription model creates perverse incentives. Heavy users (like developers running agentic workflows) consume far more compute than casual users, but pay the same price. Third-party tools amplify this asymmetry.
Anthropic's move is economically rational but strategically risky. Models are increasingly fungible - Gemini 3.1 and Claude 4.5 produce similar results for most tasks. The lock-in isn't the model; it's the tooling ecosystem.
By forcing users onto Claude Code exclusively, they're betting their tooling moat is stronger than competitor models. Given how quickly open-source harnesses like pi have caught up, that's a bold bet.
chasd00 | 59 minutes ago
Also, can you not setup a proxy for the cert and a packet sniffer to watch whatever ClaudeCode is doing with respect to API access? To me, if you have "secret sauce" you have to keep it server side and make the client as dumb as possible. Especially if your client is executes as Javascript.
blueprint | 5 hours ago
techgnosis | 4 hours ago
Ghost609 | 4 hours ago
t's open source, one Rust binary, ~6MB. https://github.com/Patrickschell609/ghostclaw
0x500x79 | 4 hours ago
kevincloudsec | 4 hours ago
2001zhaozhao | 4 hours ago
This could be used to adhere to Claude's TOS while still allowing the user to switch AI companies at a moment's notice.
Right now there's limited customizability in this approach, but I think it's not far-fetched to see FAR more integrated solutions in the future if the lock-in trend continues. For example: one MCP that you can configure into a coding agent like Claude Code that overrides its entire behavior (tools, skills, etc.) to a different unified open-source system. Think something similar to the existing IntelliJ IDEA's MCP that gives a separate file edit tool, etc. than the one the agent comes with.
Illustration of what i'm talking about:
- You install Claude Code with no configuration
- Then you install the meta-agent framework
- With one command the meta-agent MCP is installed in Claude Code, built-in tools are disabled via permissions override
- You access the meta-agent through a different UI (similar to vibe-kanban's web UI)
- Everything you do gets routed directly to Claude Code, using your Claude subscription legally. (Input-level features like commands get resolved by meta-agent UI before being sent to claude code)
- Claude Code must use the tools and skills directly from meta-agent MCP as instructed in the prompt, and because its own tools are permission denied (result: very good UI integration with the meta-agent UI)
- This would also work with any other CLI coding agent (Codex, Gemini CLI, Copilot CLI etc.) should they start getting ideas of locking users in
- If Claude Code rug-pulls subscription quotas, just switch to a competitor instantly
All it requires is a CLI coding agent with MCP support, and the TOS allowing automatic use of its UI (disallowing that would be massive hypocrisy as the AI companies themselves make computer use agents that allow automatic use of other apps' UI)
chasd00 | an hour ago
Also, why not distribute implementation documentation so claudecode can write OpenCode itself and use your oauth token. Now you have opencode for personal use, you didn't get it from anywhere your agent created it for you and only you.
gandreani | 4 hours ago
Well a kind contributor just added that feature specifically because of this ban(https://github.com/can1357/oh-my-pi/pull/110).
I'm happy as a clam now. Yay for competition!
tstrimple | 3 hours ago
motbus3 | an hour ago
What they are doing is implicitly changing the contract of usage of their services.
tmo9d | 48 minutes ago