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Anthropic blocks third-party use of Claude Code subscriptions

• minimaxir 10mo ago
  This appears to be a part of a crackdown on third-party clients using Claude Code's credentials/subscriptions but not through Claude Code. Not surprising as this type of credential reuse is always a gray area, but weird Anthropic deployed it on a Thursday night without any warning as the inevitable shitstorm would be very predictable.
  • immibis 10mo ago
    They're losing money on every inference, so of course they want as many banned users as they can get away with.
    • deleted 10mo ago
      [deleted]
  • metadat 10mo ago
    Yes, it appears they've been cracking down elsewhere as well: https://github.com/charmbracelet/crush/pull/1783 https://github.com/charmbracelet/crush/pull/1783 Are they really that strapped already? It took Netflix like 20 years before they began nickel and diming us.. with Anthro it's starting after less than 20 months in the spotlight. I suspect it's really about control and the culture of Anthropic, rather than only finances. The message is: no more funtime, use Claude CLI, pay a lot for API tokens, or get your account banned.
    • __loam 10mo ago
      All of these companies are losing money in the billions every quarter. Look at how frequent the raises are.
      • metadat 10mo ago
        It isn't that simple, demand is growing and they're investing in that growth. With the exception of ElGoog the providers are all private entities, so we don't really know. Edit: TMTD, hi! That makes sense, yeah.
        • toomuchtodo 10mo ago
          Unit profitability is out of reach, the demand curve exceeds the profitability curve. Edit: hello, good to chat again!
  • cma 10mo ago
    They've added this change at the same time they added random trick prompts to try and get you hit enter on the training opt in from late last year. I've gotten three popups inside claude code today at random times trying to trick me into having it train my data with a different selection defaulted than I've already chosen. (edit 4 times now just today)
    • skeptic_ai 10mo ago
      Last time I mentioned they are sketchy I got a ton of downvotes. I’m happy to see more support.
    • transcriptase 10mo ago
      More evidence the EU solved the wrong problem. Instead of mandating cookie banners, mandate a single global “fuck off” switch: one-click, automatic opt-out from any feature/setting/telemetry/tracking/training that isn’t strictly required or clearly beneficial to the user as an individual. If it’s mainly there for data collection, ads, attribution, “product improvement”, or monetization, it should be off by default and remain that way so long as the “fuck off” option is toggled. Burden of proof on the provider. Fines exceeding what it takes to get growth teams and KPI hounds to have legal coach them on what “fuck off” means and why they need to.
      • croes 10mo ago
        Remember what happened do the DNT flag in the browser? They just ignored until it was gone. If you don’t give them a way to trick and annoy you into accept tracking they ignore completely what you want
        • adastra22 10mo ago
          DNT wasn't actually legally mandated.
        • memoriuaysj 10mo ago
          remember how all of HN and tech people were saying that DNT is a Micro$oft scam designed to break privacy because it was enabled by default without requiring user action? to the point that Apache web server developers added a custom rule in the default httpd.conf to strip away incoming DNT headers !!! https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/09/apache-webserver-updated-to-ignore-do-not-track-settings-in-ie-10/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/09/apach...
  • B480FA8D 10mo ago
    The "crackdown" is really mild though. To be fair to Anthropic, I don't think they have been committed to banning third-party tools. github:anomalyco/opencode?rev=5e0125b78c8da0917173d4bcd00f7a0050590c55 (a trivial patch that works for now)
• commanderkeen08 10mo ago
  No. Do you realize how much of a joke Claude code is? Under the hood. How they implemented client auth? Well let me tell you https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/blob/dev/packages/opencode/src/session/prompt/anthropic_spoof.txt https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/blob/dev/packages/open... You literally send your first message “you are Claude code” The fact that this ever worked was insane. Headline is more like anthropic vibes a bug and finally catches it.
  • koakuma-chan 10mo ago
    There is no way to prevent people from using a custom client.
    • skeptic_ai 10mo ago
      So now you just need to remove the “read” tool to authenticate?
      • _flux 10mo ago
        Or call the tool "Read" and it works, according to an issue comment. But actually the solution is checking out how the official client does it and then doing the same steps, though if people start doing this then Anthropic will probably start making it more difficult to monitor and reverse engineer. It might not matter, as some people have a lot of expertice in this, but people might still get the message and move away to alternatives.
        • realharo 10mo ago
          The endgame is a small background agent that runs Claude Code every once in a while, inspects its traffic, and adjusts on the fly.
          • _flux 10mo ago
            Then they'd start pinning certs and hiding keys inside the obfuscated binary to make traffic inspection harder? And if an open source tool would start to use those keys, their CI could just detect this automatically and change the keys and the obfuscation method. Probably quite doable with LLMs..
• mcast 10mo ago
  I’m not surprised they closed the loophole, it always felt a little hacky using an Anthropic monthly sub as an API with a spoofed prompt (“You are Claude Code, Anthropic's official CLI for Claude”) with OpenCode. Google will probably close off their Antigravity models to 3P tools as well.
• deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
• wahnfrieden 10mo ago
  Meanwhile, OpenAI co-signs https://github.com/steipete/oracle https://github.com/steipete/oracle which lets you use your ChatGPT subscription to gain programmatic/agentic access to 5.2 Pro via automating browser access to the web frontend. Karpathy and other leaders have praised this feature on X. If that is indeed so welcome, imagine what else you could script via their website to get around Codex rate limits or other such things. After all what coud be so different about this than what browsers like Atlas do already
  • sams99 10mo ago
    Codex requires stuffing a very specific system prompt otherwise the custom endpoint will reject you
    • wahnfrieden 10mo ago
      Seems trivial: https://x.com/badlogicgames/status/2009811506578207029 https://x.com/badlogicgames/status/2009811506578207029
• behnamoh 10mo ago
  Anthro is having its Apple moment: too many customers means the company is always on the news, for better or worse. When iPhones receive negative reviews it's not like only Apple screwed up; others did too, but they sell so much less than Apple that no one hears about them: "Apple violated my privacy a tiny bit" makes the news; "Xiaomi sold my fingerprint info to 3rd party vendors" doesn't. Similarly, Anthropic is under heavy fire recently because frankly, Claude Code is the best coding agent out there, and it's not even close.
  • NamlchakKhandro 10mo ago
    Lmao? seriously. Claude Code is epic levels terrible compared to opencode.
    • deleted 10mo ago
      [deleted]
    • dkdcio 10mo ago
      how so?
    • throwaway7783 10mo ago
      Can you elaborate?
      • phito 10mo ago
        There's been a lot of very bad bugs for a long time and they don't seem to care about fixing them. Eg the screen flicker: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/3648 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/3648
  • sfmike 10mo ago
    find codex better by far in some cases
  • deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
• dboon 10mo ago
  This is an unusual L for Anthropic. The unfortunate truth is that the engineering in opencode is so far ahead of Claude Code. Obviously, CC is a great tool, but that's more about the magic of the model than the engineering of the CLI. The opencode team[^1][^2] built an entire custom TUI backend that supports a good subset of HTML/CSS and the TypeScript ecosystem (i.e. not tied to Opencode, a generic TUI renderer). Then, they built the product as a client/server, so you can use the agent part of it for whatever you want, separate from the TUI. And THEN, since they implemented the TUI as a generic client, they could also build a web view and desktop view over the same server. It also doesn't flicker at 30 FPS whenever it spawns a subagent. That's just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many QoL features in opencode that put CC to shame. Again, CC is a magical tool, but the actual nuts and bolts engineering of it is pretty damning for "LLMs will write all of our code soon". I'm sorry, but I'm a decent-systems-programmer-but-terminal-moron and I cranked out a raymarched 3D renderer in the terminal for a Claude Wrapped[^] in a weekend that...doesn't flicker. I don't mean that in a look-at-me way. I mean that in a "a mid-tier systems programmer isn't making these mistakes" kind of way. Anyway, this is embarrassing for Anthropic. I get that opencode shouldn't have been authenticating this way. I'm not saying what they are doing is a rug pull, or immoral. But there's a reason people use this tool instead of your first party one. Maybe let those world class systems designers who created the runtime that powers opencode get their hands on your TUI before nicking something that is an objectively better product. [^1] https://github.com/anomalyco/opentui https://github.com/anomalyco/opentui [^2] From my loose following of the development, not a monolith, and the person mostly responsible for the TUI framework is https://x.com/kmdrfx https://x.com/kmdrfx [^3] https://spader.zone/wrapped/ https://spader.zone/wrapped/
  • createaccount99 10mo ago
    > unusual L for Anthropic Not unusual, not for Anthropic.
  • IgorPartola 10mo ago
    My favorite is running CC in a screen session. There if I type out a prompt and then just start holding down the backspace key to delete a bunch of characters, at some point they key press refresh rate outruns CC’s brains and it just starts acting like it moved the cursor but didn’t delete anything. It is an embarrassing bug, but one that I suspect wouldn’t be found in automated testing.
• honeyspoon 10mo ago
  end of an era
• galsjel 10mo ago
  Just open source Claude Code and maybe it gets supported by fostering a community... Oh wait, no lock in? Sorry there's no stakeholder value in that.
• weird-eye-issue 10mo ago
  The API is not banned only using the Claude Code subscription is I actually tried this several months back to do a regular API request using the CC subscription token and it gave the same error message So this software must have been pretending to be Claude Code in order to get around that A Claude Code subscription should not work with other software, I think this is totally fair
  • deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  • prydt 10mo ago
    Came here to say this. Using opencode with the API works fine.
    • ashishgupta2209 10mo ago
      Same
  • hsbauauvhabzb 10mo ago
    Yeah, you shouldn’t infringe the copywrite of a tool written by a company which is built off of copywrite infringement.
    • weird-eye-issue 10mo ago
      First of all you mean "copyright". Second of all this has literally nothing to do with copyright
  • creativeSlumber 10mo ago
    > A Claude Code subscription should not work with other software. why not though? aren't you paying for the model usage regardless of the client you use?
    • weird-eye-issue 10mo ago
      That's not up to you or me. I think it's pretty clear by the phrase "Claude Code subscription" that it's meant for only "Claude Code". Why are you confused? This could be so easily abused by companies who spend thousands of dollars per month for API costs you could just reverse engineer it and use the subscription tokens to get that down to a few hundred
• planckscnst 10mo ago
  I've been (adding an OpenCode feature that allows the LLM to edit its own context)[1] and trying to debug an issue with the Anthropic API because I'm calling it with missing fields that it expects. I hope my multiple erronious API calls aren't what triggered this decision [1]: https://github.com/Vibecodelicious/opencode/tree/surgical_compaction?tab=readme-ov-file#this-is-the-smart-compaction-fork-of-the-official-opencode-repository https://github.com/Vibecodelicious/opencode/tree/surgical_co...
• brainless 10mo ago
  I know this will sound strange, but SOTA model companies will eventually allow subscription based usage through third-party tools. For any usage whatsoever. Models are pretty much democratized. I use Claude Code and opencode and I get more work done these days with GLM or Grok Code (using opencode). Z.ai (GLM) subscription is so worth it. Also, mixing models, small and large ones, is the way to go. Different models from different providers. This is not like cloud infra where you need to plan the infra use. Models are pretty much text in, text out (let's say for text only models). The minor differences in API are easy to work with.
  • substackreader 10mo ago
    They already do it’s called the API
  • MeetingsBrowser 10mo ago
    Wouldn't this mean SOTA model companies are incentivized not to allow subscriptions through third parties? If all the models are interchangeable at the API layer, wouldn't they be incentivized to add value at the next level up and lock people in there to prevent customers from moving to competitors on a whim.
    • brainless 10mo ago
      I do not know what that next level is to be honest. Web search, crawler, code execution, etc. can all be easily added on the agent side. And some of the small models are so good when the context is small that being locked into one provider makes no sense. I would rather build a heavy multi-agent solution, using Gemini, GLM, Sonnet, Haiku, GPT, and even use BERT, GlinER and other models for specific tasks. Low cost, no lock-in, still get high quality output.
    • Majromax 10mo ago
      > If all the models are interchangeable at the API layer, wouldn't they be incentivized to add value at the next level up Just the other day, a 2016 article was reposted here [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46514816 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46514816] on the 'stack fallacy', where companies who are experts in their domain repeatedly try and fail to 'move up the value chain' by offering higher-level products or services. The fallacy is that these companies underestimate the essential compexities of the higher-level and approach the problem with arrogance. That would seem to apply here. Why should a model-building company have any unique skill at building higher-level integration? If their edge comes from having the best model, they should commoditize the complement and make it as easy as possible for everyone to use (and pay for) their model. The standard API allows them to do just this, offering 'free' benefits from community integrations and multi-domain tasks. If their edge does not come from the model – if the models are interchangeable in performance and not just API – then the company will have deeper problems justifying its existing investments and securing more funding. A moat of high-level features might help plug a few leaks, but this entire field is too new to have the kind of legacy clients that keep old firms like IBM around.
• planet_1649c 10mo ago
  Damn :((
• sergiotapia 10mo ago
  Switched to the z.ai coding plan, and used the GLM 4.7 model for a few complex changes since posting this, and it works really well. I don't think I will renew Anthropic, the open models have reached an inflection point.
• casparvitch 10mo ago
  Maybe Anthropic saw Yegge's gas town concept and got scared off?
  • striking 10mo ago
    I believe Gas Town uses Claude Code under the hood, still? Just with some really wild hooks
    • casparvitch 10mo ago
      Oh you mean literally claude code, not some hack like opencode? I guess that makes sense yeah, given the tmux interface.
      • RamtinJ95 10mo ago
        I get calling opencode a hack, but actually looking at the product claude code is the hack compared to opencode for real
• jiangplus 10mo ago
  This reminds me of when Anthropic cut first-party access to Claude models in Windsurf as they were about to be acquired by Google. https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPTCoding/comments/1l2y2kh/anthropic_cuts_first_party_access_to_claude/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPTCoding/comments/1l2y2kh/anth...
  • TiredOfLife 10mo ago
    They cut access because OpenAI was about to buy Windsurf. The moment that deal was cancelled access was returned.
• outlier99 10mo ago
  they didn't even ban non claude code clients they just banned certain tool names that opencode uses... https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/issues/7410#issuecomment-3727051181 https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/issues/7410#issuecomme...
• planet_1649c 10mo ago
  Cancelled my claude subscription over it. Opencode is miles ahead of any coding tools. Will stick to using it rather than claude. Other models / other ways to access claude exists.
  • Mave83 10mo ago
    same here, will cancle the subscription and move away from this nonsense. I want to use their LLM, not their CLI.
• deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
• ewoodrich 10mo ago
  Ugh, well at least this was the nudge I needed to cancel my Claude Pro subscription... I've already had a bad taste in my mouth watching the rate limits on the plan get worse and worse since I first subscribed and I have a few other subscriptions to fall back on while I've been evaluating different options. I literally never use the regular Claude Chat web UI either, that's pretty much 100% Gemini since I get it via my Google One plan. OpenCode makes me feel a lot better knowing that my workflow isn't completely dependent on single vendor lock-in, and I generally prefer the UX to Claude Code anyway.
• lemming 10mo ago
  This will piss a lot of people off, and seems like a strange move. I get that this was always a hack and against the ToS. But I've been paying Anthropic money every month to do exactly what I would have done with Claude Code, but in another harness that I like better. All they've achieved here is that I am no longer giving them money. Their per-token pricing is really expensive compared to OpenAI, and I like the results from the OpenAI models better too, they're just very slow. Here's a good benchmark from the brokk team showing the performance per dollar, GPT-5.1 is around half the price of Opus 4.5 for the same performance, it just takes twice as long. https://brokk.ai/power-ranking?dataset=openround&models=flash3%2Cgp3%2Cgpt5-codex%2Cgpt5-high%2Cgpt5-mini-high%2Cgpt5.1%2Chaiku4.5%2Copus4.5%2Csonnet4.5%2Csonnet4.5-high https://brokk.ai/power-ranking?dataset=openround&models=flas... So as of today, my money is going to OpenAI instead of Anthropic. They probably don't care though, I suspect that not many users are sufficiently keen on alternative harnesses to make a difference to their finances. But by the same token (ha ha), why enforce this? I don't understand why it's so important to them that I'm using Claude Code instead of something else.
  • gbear605 10mo ago
    Presumably Claude Code is a loss leader to try to lock you into their ecosystem or at least get you to exclusive associate “AI” with “Claude”. So if it’s not achieving those goals, they’d prefer if you use OpenAI instead.
    • wiether 10mo ago
      That's my understanding and that's what I see happening at some places. People got a CC sub, invest on the whole tooling around CC (skills and whatnot) and once they're a few weeks/months in, they'll need a lot of convincing to even try something else. And given how often CC itself changes and they need to keep up with it, that's even worse. It's not just not wanting to get out of your confort zone, it's just trying to keep up with your current tools. Now if you also have to try a new tool every other day, the 10x productivity improvements claimed won't be enough to cover the lack of actual working hours you'll be left with in a week.
• casparvitch 10mo ago
  Unsure of the other competition, but I can vouch for synthetic.new's subscription for GLM (+ other open models). Note quite as accurate as Anthropic's models but good enough for basically everything I do.
• viraptor 10mo ago
  And it already has a workaround. https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/issues/7410#issuecomment-3727177435 https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/issues/7410#issuecomme... I really don't understand why they thought this is a good idea. I mean I know why they wish to do this, but it's obviously not going to last.
  • szundi 10mo ago
    [dead]
• articunoJones 10mo ago
  fork OC and use anthropics agent SDK that allows you to build on top of your subscription The Agent SDK can piggyback on your existing Claude Code authentication https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/agent-sdk/quickstart https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/agent-sdk/quickstart
• oldhead 10mo ago
  This headline is misleading. EDIT: Or rather was, at it has now been edited to be accurate. You can still bring your own Anthropic API key and use Claude in OpenCode. What you can no longer do is reverse engineer undocumented Anthropic APIs and spoof being a Claude Code client to use an OAuth token from a subscription-based Anthropic account. This really sucks for people who want a thriving competitive market of open source harnesses since BYOK API tokens mean paying a substantial premium to use anything but Anthropic's official clients. But it's hard to say it's surprising or a scandal, or anything terribly different from what tons of other companies have done in the past. I'd personally advise people to expect everything about using frontier coding models becoming much more pay-to-play.
  • planckscnst 10mo ago
    The API key is not a subscription. The title says subscriptions are blocked from using third-party tools. Or am I misunderstanding?
    • oldhead 10mo ago
      Headline's been edited since my post. It previously said something along the lines of "Anthropic bans API use in OpenCode CLI"
  • barnabee 10mo ago
    The ideal endgame is that AI lets us build tools that make it impossible to tell what application or device is using their APIs and everything becomes open to third party clients whether they like it or not.
• deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
• StarterPro 10mo ago
  Why don't you just ask Claude Code to write you a workaround? I'm sure if you say "fix plz" enough times, it'll work eventually.
• pat_erichsen 10mo ago
  This situation feels like a +1 for Agent Client Protocol (ACP) [1]. In ACP, you auth directly to the underlying agent (eg Claude Code SDK) rather than a third-party tool (eg OpenCode) that then calls an inference endpoint on your behalf. If you're logged into Claude Code, you're already logged into Claude Code through any ACP client. [1] https://agentclientprotocol.com/overview/agents https://agentclientprotocol.com/overview/agents
  • articunoJones 10mo ago
    It works like that for the agent SDK, you could connect open code to that
• ares623 10mo ago
  A rare glimpse into the enshittification that is to come to these tools. It’s only a matter of time.
• Sewer56 10mo ago
  Here's how to get a refund on the website (all automated): 1. Profile Icon -> Get Help 2. Send us a Message 3. Click 'Refund' Big corpos only talk money, so it's the best you could do in this situation. If you can't refund, and need to wait till sub runs out after cancelling, go to the OpenCode repo and rename your tools so they start with capital letters. That'll work around it. They just match on lowercase tool names of standard tools.
  • tyfon 10mo ago
    That actually worked since I subscribed a few days ago specifically to try open code. "Your subscription has been canceled and your refund is on the way. Please allow 5-10 business days for the funds to appear in your account."
  • everfrustrated 10mo ago
    Really useful thanks! I signed up thinking Claude Code was an IDE and really disappointed with it. Their plugin for vscode is complete trash. Way over hyped. Their models are good but I can get that through other ways.
    • JoshGlazebrook 10mo ago
      So did you just not read anything at all on the claude code marketing website?
• dfabulich 10mo ago
  For folks not following the drama: Anthropic's $200/month subscription for Claude Code is much cheaper than Anthropic's pay-as-you-go API. In a month of Claude Code, it's easy to use so many LLM tokens that it would have cost you more than $1,000 if you'd paid via the API. Why is Anthropic offering such favorable pricing to subscribers? I dunno. But they really want you to use the Claude Code™ CLI with that subscription, not the open-source OpenCode CLI. They want OpenCode users to pay API prices, which could be 5x or more. So, of course, OpenCode has implemented a workaround, so that folks paying "only" $200/month can use their preferred OpenCode CLI at Anthropic's all-you-can-eat token buffet. https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/issues/7410#issuecomment-3727177435 https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/issues/7410#issuecomme... Everything about this is ridiculous, and it's all Anthropic's fault. Anthropic shouldn't have an all-you-can-eat plan for $200 when their pay-as-you-go plan would cost more than $1,000+ for comparable usage. Their subscription plans should just sell you API credits at, like, 20% off. More importantly, Anthropic should have open sourced their Claude Code CLI a year ago. (They can and should just open source it now.)
  • weird-eye-issue 10mo ago
    By this logic ChatGPT shouldn't exist either and should be charged by API pricing
  • casparvitch 10mo ago
    I guess one issue is that you pay $200/month whether you use it or not. Potentially this could be better for Anthropic. What was not necessarily foreseeable (ok maybe it was) back when that started was that users have invented all kinds of ways to supervise their agents to be as efficient as possible. If they control the client, you can't do that.
    • isolli 10mo ago
      Why is supervising one's agents to be as efficient as possible a problem for Anthropic?
      • 10mo ago
• ehsanu1 10mo ago
  I understand them not wanting to allow non-coding agents to use the subscription, but why specifically block another coding agent? Is the value Anthropic gets from users specifically using claude code that high? Is it about the training data opt-ins?
• ChaseRensberger 10mo ago
  Wow, i sat down to do a little bit of late night coding and ended up running into this nightmare. Just canceled my anthropic subscription and started paying for opencode zen. Unfortunately opencode is enough of a better product i will indeed pay 10 times the price to use it.
• ChaseRensberger 10mo ago
  seems to be an easy fix already up: https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode-anthropic-auth/pull/10 https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode-anthropic-auth/pull/10
• macinjosh 10mo ago
  OpenCode has a workaround already: https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode-anthropic-auth/pull/11 https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode-anthropic-auth/pull/11
• muppetman 10mo ago
  I feel like I'm the only person on this site that doesn't use AI for coding. I guess there's probably a lot of other people that haven't commented on this story who don't use it either. But when I read about how much hype and all that sort of stuff there is in the AI industry, and then I see the amount of posts and commentary and deep technical discussion about how this feature has affected people, I'm not so sure. Everyone I know hates AI and how it's been shoved into every corner of our lives, but I look here and it's insanely popular. Anyway, sorry this was a very off topic comment. It's just very interesting to me that the hype isn't all just hype.
  • mgfist 10mo ago
    I hate how AI is being shoved in most things, but I do love AI in a few of those places (ai coding and google search replacement)
    • iamkonstantin 10mo ago
      Have you noticed how Google search summaries have taken the shape of those annoying blogposts that take you through several “What is a computer program” explainers before answering the question?
  • luckilydiscrete 10mo ago
    AI is indeed just hype in a lot of cases, but also has revolutionary value in a other cases. Trying it is the only way you'll be able to differentiate the latter from the former.
  • isodev 10mo ago
    I also don’t use AI for coding. I tried, I explored, I learned how it works. At the end, “maybe-sometimes works” and “sends a copy of all your code to some server in the US” are just incompatible with the kind of software I create. Regarding the post, I think it’s telling that Anthropic is trying to force people into using their per-usage billing more than the subscription. My take is that the subscription offers a lot as a way of hooking developers into it and is not sustainable for Anthropic if people end up actually maxing their usage. Given how much money is wasted into the LLM craze, I can imagine there will be more “tightening of the belt” from the AI corps going forward. For the five coders out there, maybe it’s time to use your tokens to get back control of your codebases … you may have to “meat code” them soon.
• dboon 10mo ago
  For anyone coming looking for a solution; I peeked around the OC repository, and a few PRs got merged in. Add this to $HOME/.config/opencode/opencode.json: plugin = ["opencode-anthropic-auth"] That is, if that's not pulled in to latest OC by the time I post this. Not sure what the release cycle is for builtin plugins like that, but by force specifying it it definitely pulls master which has a fix. https://opencode.ai/docs/plugins/ https://opencode.ai/docs/plugins/
• casparvitch 10mo ago
  It appears [0] there is now a fix/workaround (?) [0] https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode-anthropic-auth/pull/11 https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode-anthropic-auth/pull/11
• Garlef 10mo ago
  Maybe a subscription based payment model would also work for in general? Similar to a gym membership where only a small part of the paying users actually show up.
• deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
• misternugget 10mo ago
  Engineer working on Amp here. I'm very surprised that it took them this long to crack down on it. It's been against the terms of service from the start. When I asked them back in March last year whether individuals can use the higher rate limits that come with the Claude Code subscription in other applications, that was also a no. Question is: what changed? New founding round coming up, end of fiscal year, planning for IPO? Do they have to cut losses? Because the other surprise here is that apparently most people don't know the true cost of tokens and how much money Anthropic is losing with power users of Claude Code.
  • cmdtab 10mo ago
    Yeah. If my claude code usage was on API directly, it would be in thousands. I know this because I have addon credits on top of the max plan because I run into weekly limits often
  • llmslave2 10mo ago
    [flagged]
    • cheeze 10mo ago
      Can you share more on this?
    • deleted 10mo ago
      [deleted]
  • ramoz 10mo ago
    You think anthropic is losing money now with the weekly limits? And while hitting the gas on mass market?
  • Esophagus4 10mo ago
    I thought inference was relatively cheap - no?
• baq 10mo ago
  Meanwhile gpt codex 5.2 was never available outside of codex and nobody made a fuss out of it.
  • meeq 10mo ago
    It is available in Opencode, you just have to install this plugin: https://github.com/numman-ali/opencode-openai-codex-auth https://github.com/numman-ali/opencode-openai-codex-auth Been using my ChatGPT sub with Opencode for a couple of weeks now. Only wish I‘d found out sooner. Could have saved a decent chunk of money.
• Szpadel 10mo ago
  inference costs nothing in comparison to training (you have so many requests in parallel at their scale), for inference they should be profitable even when you drain whole weekly quota every week but of course they have to pay for training too. this looks like short sighted money grab (do they need it?), that trade short term profit for trust and customer base (again) as people will cancel their unusable subscriptions. changing model family when you have instructions tuned for for one of them is tricky and takes long time so people will stick to one of them for some time, but with API pricing you quickly start looking for alternatives and openai gpt-5 family is also fine for coding when you spend some time tuning it. another pain is switching your agent software, moving from CC to codex is more painful than just picking different model in things like OC, this is plausible argument why they are doing this.
  • everfrustrated 10mo ago
    >inference costs nothing Clearly not true. Just look at OpenRouter model providers. Costs are very very real.
• mrdw 10mo ago
  just use free antigravity subscription with Opus 4.5 and reverse engineered API, and bunch of cheap google accounts
• deveworld 10mo ago
  The fix has been merged in https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode-anthropic-auth/pull/11 https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode-anthropic-auth/pull/11, and PR https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/pull/7432 https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/pull/7432 is open to bump the version. Until it's released, here's a workaround: 1. git clone https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode-anthropic-auth.git https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode-anthropic-auth.git 2. Add to ~/.config/opencode/opencode.json: "plugin": ["file:///path/to/opencode-anthropic-auth/index.mjs"] 3. Run: OPENCODE_DISABLE_DEFAULT_PLUGINS=true opencode
  • meeq 10mo ago
    Anthropic shot themselves in the foot with this decision. It‘s a PR nightmare and at the same time the open source community will always find a way. They just wasted everyone‘s time and likely lost a bunch of users while doing so. Thank you for sharing this!
    • mike_hearn 10mo ago
      The open source community won't always find a way. Remote attestation isn't a new concept (it doesn't have to be hardware backed, the concept is general). The industry has enough experience with this by now to know how it goes, and open source projects are always the first to drop out of the race. The time taken to keep up becomes much too high to justify doing on a voluntary basis or giving away the results, so as the difficulty of bypassing checks goes up the only people who can do it become SaaS providers. BluRay BD+ was a good example of that back in the day. AACS was breakable by open source players. Once BD+ came along the open source doom9 crowd were immediately wiped out. For a long time the only breaks came from a company in Antigua that sold a commercial ripper, which was protected from US law enforcement by a WTO decision specific to that island. You also see this with stuff like Google YouTube/SERP scraping. There currently aren't any open source solutions that don't get rapidly blocked server side, AFAIK. Companies that know how to beat it keep their solutions secret and sell bypasses as a service.
      • codesparkle 10mo ago
• ozlikethewizard 10mo ago
  I know this is somewhat unreasonable but watching "devs" unable to work because "faceless corp 1007" cut their access definitely has a level of schadenfreude to it.
  • RamtinJ95 10mo ago
    who said they are unable to work? This meme is so old and overused.
    • wiseowise 10mo ago
      They laugh about LLMs hallucinating, but themselves hallucinate the facts that don’t exist all the time.
      • ozlikethewizard 10mo ago
        Me thinks the lady doth protest too much
• cloudking 10mo ago
  Why is OpenCode better than Claude Code?
  • nake89 10mo ago
    Works with several providers (e.g. Github copilot or bring your own key). They offer a server and an sdk, so you can build all kinds of personal tools. It's amazing.
    • chrisvalleybay 10mo ago
      Very interesting! What do you mean by personal tools? Do you have any examples of something you've built with this?
    • paradite 10mo ago
      Claude Code also has Claude Agent SDK (basically a wrapper around Claude Code) with a million downloads in the past week. https://www.npmjs.com/package/@anthropic-ai/claude-agent-sdk https://www.npmjs.com/package/@anthropic-ai/claude-agent-sdk
  • azuanrb 10mo ago
    I wouldn’t say it’s better, but it does have some nice features. Opencode has a web UI, so I can open it on my laptop and then resume the same session on the web from my phone through Tailscale. It’s pretty handy from time to time and takes almost zero effort from me.
  • wiseowise 10mo ago
    It is open source, to start with, and works with a lot of LLMs providers instead of being vendor locked into one.
• CoolCold 10mo ago
  Genuine question, as someone who never used Claude Code, but used OpenCode/Aider/GeminiCli - as many here say Opencode is better, mind sharing why (from end user perspective)? I was thinking to try Claude Code later and may reconsider doing so.
  • aserafini 10mo ago
    I experimented with Claude Code but returned to the familiar Aider which existed before all of these tools AFAIK. You’ll notice people in Aider GitHub issues being concerned about its rather conservative pace of change, lack of plug-in ecosystem. But I actually started to appreciate these constraints as a way to really familiarise myself with the core “edit files in a loop with an end goal” that is the essence of all agent coding. Anytime I feel a snazzy feature is lacking from Aider I think about it and realise I can already solve it in Aider by changing the problem to editing a file in a loop.
    • CoolCold 10mo ago
      Well, there is Aider-CE aka Cecli, which moves, updates almost every day (I'm tried to try it but much). Opencode is totally different beast comparing to Aider and I mostly stopped using Aider for 2 months or so - it just iterate simpler and faster with OpenCode for me.
• nake89 10mo ago
  Hopefully this doesn't happen with GitHub Copilot. OpenCode is fantastic. They offer a server and an SDK. This means I build amazing personal tools. GitHub Copilots low price + OpenCode is just amazing.
  • archb 10mo ago
    Good news - it looks like the GitHub Copilot team is actually working with the OpenCode team to support subscription authentication [1] [1] https://x.com/jaredpalmer/status/2009844004221833625 https://x.com/jaredpalmer/status/2009844004221833625
• willvarfar 10mo ago
  Presumably there will soon be banner ads in Claude Code then? </s>
• ankushkun_ 10mo ago
  Woke up and everything is on Fire, I thought opencode had some bug coz it updated itself this morning, but realised its claude who blocked third party clients :( L for Anthropic indeed, opencode had wayyy better experience than claude code.
• azuanrb 10mo ago
  I’m curious whether this is related to the recent update. When I opened Claude Code, I was greeted with a “Help improve Claude” message that changes the retention policy from 30 days to 5 long years. They can’t apply these changes or update parts of the flow for the non-Claude CLI, which explains their latest move.
• bazhand 10mo ago
  FWIW this isn’t new, using a Claude/Max subscription auth token as a general-purpose “API key” has been known (and blocked) for ages. OpenCode basically had to impersonate the official Claude Code client to make that work, and it always felt like a loophole that would get patched eventually. This is exactly why (when OpenCode and Charm/Crush started diverging) Charm chose not to support “use your Claude subscription” auth and went in a different direction (BYOK / multi-provider / etc). They didn’t want to build a product on top of a fragile, unofficial auth path. And I think there’s a privacy/policy reason tightening this now too: the recent Claude Code update (2.1-ish) pops a “Help improve Claude” prompt in the terminal. If you turn that ON, retention jumps from 30 days to up to 5 years for new/resumed chats/coding sessions (and data can be used for model improvement). If you keep it OFF, you stay on the default 30-day retention. You can also delete data anytime in settings. That consent + retention toggle is hard to enforce cleanly if you’re not in an official client flow, so it makes sense they’re drawing a harder line.
  • artdigital 10mo ago
    Yea exactly, I’m surprised people are calling this “drama”. It was from the beginning against the ToS, all the stuff supporting it just reverse engineered what Claude Code is doing and spoof being a client. I tried something similar few months back and Claude already has restrictions against this in place. You had to very specifically pretend to be real Claude Code (through copying system prompts etc) to get around it, not just a header.
    • Max-Limelihood 9mo ago
      It’s bad that this is against the TOS in the first place, and reeks of anticompetitive behavior. Why does Anthropic care what frontend I use as long as I pay for their model?
• imdsm 10mo ago
  Anthropic should buy OpenCode and merge with CC
  • bkolobara 10mo ago
    Please no. I have recently switched to opencode and the product quality is so much higher.
• bionhoward 10mo ago
  Why act like it’s a mystery when the Claude Code repo clearly explains: > When you use Claude Code, we collect feedback, which includes usage data (such as code acceptance or rejections), associated conversation data, and user feedback submitted via the /bug command. They subsidize Claude Code because it gives them your codebase and chat history
  • ksynwa 10mo ago
    They should be getting most of it from third party clients too. At least the chat and the files are being sent to or from Anthropic's own servers.
• paolomainardi 10mo ago
  Not strictly related, but since Copilot could be the next to violate the TOS, I've asked for an official response here: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/183809 https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/183809. If someone can help raise this question, it's more than welcome.
  • everfrustrated 10mo ago
    GitHub doesn't offer any unlimited style AI model plans so I don't think they'll care. Their pricing is fairly aligned with their costs. This only affects Claude as they try to market their plan as unlimited with various usage rate limits but its clearly costing them a lot more than what they sell it for.
    • realharo 10mo ago
      Copilot plan limits are however "per prompt", and prompts that ask the agent to do a lot of stuff with a large context are obviously going to be more expensive to run than prompts that don't.
  • whs 10mo ago
    Copilot in VSCode is integrated with VSCode's LLM provider API. Which means that any plugins that needs LLM capabilities can submit request to Copilot. Roo Code support that as an option. And of course, there's a plugin that start an OpenAI/Anthropic-compatible web server inside VSCode that just calls to the LLM provider API. It seems that if you use unlimited models (like GPT-4.1) you probably get unlimited API calls. However, those model doesn't seems to be very agentic when used in Claude Code.
• krater23 10mo ago
  Hold on tight, the wild journey to enshittification has begun.
  • llmslave2 10mo ago
    ensloppification
• B480FA8D 10mo ago
  The TOS, which is a contract of adhesion for consumer-facing products, does not really matter that much in my opinion since "we have to lock you in to our specific interface on our public offering" is not a cognizable interest. SCOTUS is also very clear in requiring actual damages (in incremental harms) to establish a CFAA violation. At any rate, opencode is essentially providing equitable estoppel as a service by being open and popular - cannot go after me without first dealing with the "unionized" project (last words)! I don't think they get to conflate the issues of alternative interface dispute and their intentional pricing strategy losing money on heavy users. Of course, they are banning for financial economic interests, not nominal alleged contractual violations, so Anthropic is not sympathetic. // NOT LEGAL ADVICE Obviously, I think it can make sense to Anthropic since opencode users likely disproportionately cost them money with little lock-in - you can switch the moment a comparable model is available elsewhere. It does not (necessarily) mean there are any legal or ethical issues barring us from continuously using the built-in opencode OAuth though.
• noobcoder 10mo ago
  Well totally within Anthropic’s rights, but still a bad look.
• selectnull 10mo ago
  I'm willing to cancel my Claude subscription because of this.
• B480FA8D 10mo ago
  A crucial context is that this "block" is resolved (for now) via bumping version numbers. It is almost as if Anthropic deployed this to test the water on community reaction... Right now it is trivial to fingerprint opencode users without deep inspection into the conversations (privacy conerns), but Anthropic is not doing that. https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/commit/5e0125b78c8da0917173d4bcd00f7a0050590c55 https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/commit/5e0125b78c8da09...
  • artdigital 10mo ago
    See https://github.com/charmbracelet/crush/pull/1783 https://github.com/charmbracelet/crush/pull/1783 I wouldn’t be surprised if Anthropic filed a similar request against OpenCode, and follows it up with a takedown eventually
• kirubakaran 10mo ago
  So is this the Bezos play of depressing the acquisition price? iirc Bezos froze the Amazon referral program of GoodReads.com to force them to take a lower price. If so, shame on them!
• pmihaylov 10mo ago
  I have a background agents app I'm running - https://claudecontrol.com https://claudecontrol.com and it seems I am not impacted by this change. My anthropic sub still works fine. I believe this is because I am using claude code as a CLI for SDK purposes vs using it as a typescript library. Quite a fortunate choice at the time!
• titaniumrain 10mo ago
  Anthropic has a bunch of weirdos making decisions.
• kalamazooo 10mo ago
  OpenCode brought this on themselves and their users. Plugging Claude Max subscriptions into other agents has been against the terms of service basically since the start and I imagine Anthropic must have issued plenty of warnings here that were ignored. They wouldn’t do this unless they really had to. If folks are mad about being rugged, blame OpenCode for misleading their users when they’ve long known this day was coming. Brilliant cynical strategy though to exploit soft enforcement for growth and lay the blame at the company that provided them cheap tokens.
  • monooso 10mo ago
    That's a lot of supposition leading to a shaky conclusion. Your speculation may be correct, of course, but I have yet to see any mention of Anthropic issuing "plenty of warnings", or only taking this action because they "really had to."
    • aamoscodes 10mo ago
      I haven’t checked with other third parties, but Crush got a warning https://github.com/charmbracelet/crush/pull/1783 https://github.com/charmbracelet/crush/pull/1783
• d4rkp4ttern 10mo ago
  Curious about portability of CC -> OpenCode. I wonder how much of my CC setup (skills, commands, agents, hooks etc) will work if I were to switch to OpenCode.
• msten 10mo ago
  This makes total sense to me. Limiting the usage to their tooling means they can place reasonable limits on usage by controlling how the client interacts with the LLM and making those calls as efficient as possible. The current state of things didn't really feel sustainable.
  • tempaccount420 10mo ago
    They can and already place limits on the server side.
• Draiken 10mo ago
  Funnily enough, I didn't know about opencode and will now test it out and likely use it instead. Improve your client so people prefer it? Nah. Try to force people to use your client by subsidizing it? Now that's what I'm talking about. As others said, why not just run a bunch of agents on Claude Code to surpass Opencode? I'm sure that's easy with their unlimited tokens!
  • carlgreene 10mo ago
    Lol this is my exact thought as well. Just downloaded it now and taking it for a spin...pretty good so far!
• dmezzetti 10mo ago
  Two words: Open Source.
• kburman 10mo ago
  It’s the standard enshittification lifecycle: subsidize usage to get adoption, then lock down the API to force users into a controlled environment where you can squeeze them. Like Reddit, they realized they can't show ads (or control the user journey) if everyone is using a third-party client. The $200 subscription isn't a pricing tier. It's a customer acquisition cost for their proprietary platform. Third-party clients defeat that purpose.
  • burnt-resistor 9mo ago
    Rug pull for mo' money, mo' money, mo' money.
• vldszn 10mo ago
  At this point, Anthropic should acquihire OpenCode.
• gaigalas 10mo ago
  So, models are officially a commodity now. The battle is for the harness layer. And it's quickly going the commodity way as well. What's left for boutique-style AI companies?
• rvcdbn 10mo ago
  couldn't opencode just switch to agent sdk?
  • kzahel 10mo ago
    I'm not 100% sure but I think OpenCode wants to control the harness and persistence, tool call flows etc. If they just used the Claude SDK then it would diverge architecturally from all the other providers, persist jsonl to ~/.claude, etc.
• tbliu 10mo ago
  btw, Amp just announced Opus 4.5 is now supported in their free tier: https://ampcode.com/news/amp-free-frontier https://ampcode.com/news/amp-free-frontier. I've been using it a ton and it's a super nice cli. It has ads, but they are fairly non-intrusive
• hakanderyal 10mo ago
  If this helps to keep the $200 around longer, I’m happy. The thing I most fear is them banning multiple accounts. That would be very expensive for a lot of folks.
• nomadygnt 10mo ago
  Honestly with how good OpenCode is, this really just makes GitHub copilot the best subscription for the average user. It’s the cheapest. It’s free for students. You get access to all of OpenAI models AND Anthropic models AND Gemini models and you still have a pretty dang good CLI/TUI (OC, not Copilot CLI). And the limits are pretty reasonable. I’ve never hit the limits in a month though admittedly I am not a “five agents at once” kind of vibe coder.
• zeroDivisible 10mo ago
  It doesn't mean much but I cancelled my 5x Max subscription to Claude. Only way how I can tell them what I think about this change.
• kachapopopow 10mo ago
  as much as I love opus I hate this company (not for the reasons you'd think thought). I just have a proxy that exposes an unauthenticated endpoint and bypasses all their attempts at banning for opencode usage since I was already on like my 5th claude account trying to get around random bans.
• bilalbayram 10mo ago
  its just sad
• TiredOfLife 10mo ago
  Reminder that Anthropic owns Bun.
• pietz 10mo ago
  Honest question: Why would I use Claude with OpenCode if I have a Claude Max subscription? Why not Claude Code?
• hooverd 10mo ago
  Cynically, I think they're in a Gmail 2008 era right now.
• JimmaDaRustla 10mo ago
  Lots of arguing about semantics of what the subscription is actually intended for. Claude Code, as a coding assistant, isn't even mediocre, it's kind of crap. The reason it's at all good is because of the model underneath - there's tons of free and open agent tools that are far better than Claude Code. Regardless of what they say you're paying the subscription for, the truth is the only thing of value to developers is the underlying AI and API. I can only think of few reasons why they'd do this: 1. Their Claude Code tool is not simply an agent assistant - perhaps it's feeding data for model training purposes, or something of the sorts where they gain value from it. 2. They don't want developers to use competitor models in any capacity. 3. They're offloading processing or doing local context work to drive down the API usage locally, making the usage minimal. This is very unlikely. I currently use Opus 4.5 for architecting, which then feeds into Gemini 3 Flash with medium reasoning for coding. It's only a matter of time before Google competes with Opus 4.5, and when they do, I won't have any loyalty to Anthropic.
  • jacquesm 10mo ago
    For AI companies the access to the interaction is very valuable, that explains the price difference. It is data that the competition does not have access to. Of course they are storing that data for model training purposes, that's the whole reason this exists in the first place. They are subsidizing until they get their quality up to the point that the addiction is so strong you won't be able to get through your workday without it. And then surprise the per month access fee will start to rise.
  • ramoz 10mo ago
    The other harnesses would arguably give them even richer data and product insights.
• novoreorx 10mo ago
  Claude Code subscription is called for a reason, it's not Anthropic API subscription… And Claude Code Pro is also similar to ChatGPT Pro, being used in a TUI does not mean it is equivalent to an API.
• udntwanthesmok 10mo ago
  Ive the workaround its not that complex; yall, its a REPL on your machine fellas, do you really think you can stop anyone from proxying whatever we damn want through it?
• ankit219 10mo ago
  This was always against the terms of service. Took too long to crack down on it. There seems to be a lot of FUD on how anthropic prices it. but i think many devs and harness builders are intentionally misrespresenting things to build pressure. API capacity has specific SLAs and the infra is for peak capacity expectation. API demand is notoriously spiky, especially when you don't know who is going to be using it via the third party. At any given time you would have 20%-30% utilization, given the api is mostly used by tools like Cursor who have a system of routing by themselves. For subs, they can use the unused capacity (with high priority to API requests). The marginal cost of a query is not as high especially given kv cache and continuous batching (and with new parallelism techniques). With subs, the number is expected, the concurrency can be modelled, and hence the price per token is lower. With third party APIs reverse engineering that, it breaks the whole thing in two ways - one more pressure via subs. Claude code rarely parallelizes requests while Cline does it every time (for example). It also cancels out the peak capacity estimation. In a way you could argue that same users doing it via subs woudl have been doing it via api too, but given the pricing differences, not the same. This ends up affecting people legitimately using the subscription.