13 ms·

Anthropic made a mistake in cutting off third-party clients

350 points by codesparkle 9mo ago

zzzeek 9mo ago
"renowned vibe-coder Peter Steinberger" what? that's a thing ? why would a vibe coder be "renowned"? I use Claude every day but this is just too much.
- hakanderyal 9mo ago
  He is pretty popular in the AI/vibe coding niche on X and amassed a good following with his posts. Clearly the user is in the same bubble as him.
- eddyg 9mo ago
  He vibe-coded Clawdbot and lots of people are spinning up their own. https://clawd.bot/ https://clawd.bot/ https://github.com/clawdbot/clawdbot https://github.com/clawdbot/clawdbot He's also the guy behind https://github.com/steipete/oracle/ https://github.com/steipete/oracle/
AznHisoka 9mo ago
Isnt claude code more popular than codex?
cmrdporcupine 9mo ago
Yeah I think Anthropic has the "right" to do this. That's fine. But they also have shown a weakness by failing to understand why people might want to do this (use their Max membership with OpenCode etc instead). People aren't using opencode or crush with their Claude Code memberships because they're trying to exploit or overuse tokens or something. That isn't possible. They do it because Claude Code the tool itself is full of bugs and has performance issues, and OpenCode is of higher quality, has more open (surprise) development, is more responsive to bug fixes, and gives them far more knobs and dials to control how it works. I use Claude Code quite a bit and there isn't a session that goes by where I don't bump into a sharp edge of some kind. Notorious terminal rendering issues, slow memory leaks, or compaction related bugs that took them 3 months to fix... Failure to deal with quality issues and listen to customers is hardly a good sign of company culture, leading up to IPO... If they're trying to build a moat... this isn't a strong way to do it. If you want to own the market and have complete control at the tooling level, you're simply going to have to make a better product. With their mountain of cash and army of engineers at their disposal ... they absolutely could. But they're not.
- F7F7F7 9mo ago
  Meh. I’ve never used my x20 Max account in OpenCode because the Oauth solution was clearly “hacky”. But to me the appeal of OpenCode is that I can mix and match APIs and local models. I have DeepSeek R1 doing research while KLM is planning and doing code reviews and o4 mini breaking down screenshots into specs while local QWEN is doing the work. My experience with bugs has also been the exact opposite of what you described.
  - uxcolumbo 9mo ago
    KLM the airline ;) ? Or do you mean GLM? And you let local QWEN write the code for you? Is the output any good or comparable to frontier models?
pella 9mo ago
> "For me personally, I have decided I will never be an Anthropic customer, because I refuse to do business with a company that takes its customers for granted." The best pressure on companies comes from viable alternatives, not from boycotts that leave you without tools altogether.
- nicce 9mo ago
  The context is here that Anthropic tried to suppress alternatives. Boycott works here because there are alternatives, like writer addressed.
  - pella 9mo ago
    If "never" means never, you are not leverage, you are just gone.
    - nicce 9mo ago
      "Just gone" is the biggest leverage against business? Note that boycott is usually conditional. If they change things, the customer might come back.
      - pella 9mo ago
        If "never" means never ...
Mystery-Machine 9mo ago
> For me personally, I have decided I will never be an Anthropic customer, because I refuse to do business with a company that takes its customers for granted. Archaeologist.dev Made a Big Mistake If guided by this morality column, Archaeologist should immediately stop using pretty-much anything they are using in their life. There's no company today that doesn't have their hands dirty. The life is a dance between choosing the least bad option, not radically cutting off any sight of "bad".
nwienert 9mo ago
A good example of an extremely small but extremely vocal minority doing their best to punish a company for not catering to their explicitly disallowed use case for no reason other than they want it. I'd bet this has 0 negative impact on their business.
- jsumrall 9mo ago
  illegal?
  - nwienert 9mo ago
    my 3am writing tends to be less precise, updated
- joelthelion 9mo ago
  650,000 monthly active users is not "extremely small". I wonder how many total users Claude Code has?
  - nwienert 9mo ago
    I'm referring to the ones willing to cancel, especially ones who also feel the need to make a public statement about it. And I'd guess your number is high % churn, and even still CC is much higher.
- ewoodrich 9mo ago
  That seems a bit dramatic. What I learned from all this is that OpenAI is willing to offer a service compatible with my preferred workflow/method of billing and Anthropic clearly is not. That's fine but disappointing, I'm keeping my Codex subscription and letting my Claude subscription lapse but sure, it would be nice if Anthropic changed their mind to keep that option available because yes, I do want it. I'm a bit perplexed by some comments describing the situation like OpenCode users were getting something for free and stealing from CC users when the plan quota was enforced either way and were paying the same amount for it. Or why you seem to think this post pointing out that Anthropic's direct competitor endorses that method of subscription usage is somehow malicious or manipulative behavior. Commerce is a two-way street and customers giving feedback/complaining/cancelling when something changes is normal and healthy for competition. As evidenced by OpenAI immediately jumping in to support OpenCode users on Codex without needing to break their TOS.
kentonv 9mo ago
I mean... I don't like it either but this is pretty standard stuff and it's obvious why they're doing it. Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok are all more or less on par with each other, or a couple months behind at most. Chinese open models are also not far behind. There's nothing inherent to these products to make them "sticky". If your tooling is designed for it, you can trivially switch models at any time. Mid-conversation, even. And it just works. When you have basically equivalent products with no switching cost, you have perfect competition. They are all commodities. And that means: none of them can make a profit. It's a basic law of economics. If they can't make a profit, no matter how revolutionary the tech is, their valuation is not justified, and they will be in big trouble when people figure this out. So they need to make the product sticky somehow. So they: 1. Add a subscription payment model. Once you are paying a subscription fee, then the calculus on switching changes: if you only maintain one subscription, you have a strong reason to stick with it for everything. 2. Force you to use their client app, which only talks to their model, so you can't even try other models without changing your whole workflow, which most people won't bother to do. These are bog standard tactics across the tech industry and beyond for limiting competitive pressure. Everyone is mad about #2 but honestly I'm more mad about #1. The best thing for consumers would be if all these model providers strictly provided usage-based API pricing, which makes switching easy. But right now the subscription prices offer an enormous discount over API pricing, which just shows how much they are really desperate to create some sort of stickiness. The subscriptions don't even provide the "peace of mind" benefit that Spotify-like subscription models provide, where you don't have to worry about usage, because they still have enforced usage limits that people regularly hit. It's just purely a discount offered for locking yourself in. But again I can't really be that mad because of course they are doing this, not doing it would be terrible business strategy.
- cmrdporcupine 9mo ago
  I'm not "mad", I'm "sad" -- because I was very much on "Team Anthropic" a few months ago ... but the tool has failed to keep up in terms of quality. If they're going to close the sub off to other tools, they need to make very strong improvements to the tool. And I don't really see that. It's "fine" but I actually think these tools are letting developers down. They take over too much. They fail to give good insights into what's happening. They have poor stop/interrupt/correct dynamics. They don't properly incorporate a basic review cycle which is something we demand of junior developers and interns on our teams, but somehow not our AIs? They're producing mountains of sometimes-good but often unreviewable code and it isn't the "AI"'s fault, it's the heuristics in the tools. So I want to see innovation here. And I was hoping to see it from Anthropic. But I just saw the opposite.
Philpax 9mo ago
I'll be honest; I'm pretty sure this "mistake" will be completely forgotten by the next month. Their enforcing that their subscription only works with their product should not really come as a surprise to anyone, and the alt-agent users are a small enough minority that they'll get over it.
- jrsj 9mo ago
  I’m starting to think you’re right but only because software engineers don’t seem to actually value or care about open source anymore. Apparently we have collectively forgotten how bad it can be to let your tools own you instead of the other way around. Maybe another symptom of Silicon Valley hustle culture — nobody cares about the long term consequences if you can make a quick buck.
  - Philpax 9mo ago
    There's nothing stopping you from using OpenCode with any other provider, including Anthropic: you just can't get the subsidised pricing while doing so. This is irritating, yes - it certainly disincentivises me from trying out OpenCode - but it's also, like, not unexpected? In any case, the long-term solution for true openness is to be able to run open-weight models locally or through third-party inference providers.
    - jrsj 9mo ago
      Yes but why are they subsidizing the pricing and requiring to use their closed source client to benefit from it? It’s the same reason the witch in the story of Hansel and Gretel was giving out free candy.
      - motoxpro 9mo ago
        Is this a serious question? Why would they subsidize people when there is no benifet to them? Subsidization means they are LOSING money when people use it. If the customers that are using 3rd party clients are unwilling to pay a price that is profitable for them, that is a very positive, not negative, thing for Anthropic to lose them. The reason to subsidize is the exact reason you are worried about. Lock in, network effects, economies of scale, etc.
visarga 9mo ago
> they really, really want to own the entire value chain rather than being relegated to becoming just another "model provider" I remember the story used to be the other way around - "just a wrapper", "wrapper AI startups" were everywhere, nobody trusted they can make it. Maybe being "just a model provider" or "just a LLM wrapper" matter less than the context of work. What I mean is that benefits collect not at the model provider, nor at the wrapper provider, but where the usage takes place, who sets the prompts and uses the code gets the lion share of benefits from AI.
- estearum 9mo ago
  Those are two sides of the same coin. Being "just a wrapper" wouldn't be a risky position if the LLMs would be content to be "just a model." But they clearly wouldn't be, and so it wasn't.
alvsilvao 9mo ago
Just checked https://opencode.ai/ https://opencode.ai/. It looks like they need to update their FAQ: Q: Do I need extra AI subscriptions to use OpenCode? A: Not necessarily, OpenCode comes with a set of free models that you can use without creating an account. Aside from these, you can use any of the popular coding models by creating a Zen account. While we encourage users to use Zen, OpenCode also works with all popular providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI etc. You can even connect your local models.
- Philpax 9mo ago
  That's not inaccurate. You can still use all of those providers: you just need to pay API costs, instead of reusing your subscription.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- falloutx 9mo ago
  It still works with Claude Opus, just need to get a key from platform.claude.ai
kzahel 9mo ago
Can't Opencode just modify their implementation to use the anthropic claude code SDK directly? The issue is they were spoofing oauth. I tried OpenCode before this whole drama and immediately noticed the oauth spoofing and never authorized it. Doesn't opencode speak ACP? https://agentclientprotocol.com/overview/agents https://agentclientprotocol.com/overview/agents
- macinjosh 9mo ago
  The SDK bundles Claude code and uses it for its agentic work. The SDK really only lets you control the UI layer. It als doesn’t yet fully support plan mode.
  - kzahel 9mo ago
    I use the SDK in my app and it works fine with plan mode. I don't deal with auth at all. I detect if the CLI is installed and it just reuses whatever auth the user has already setup. Works fine.
    - nmfisher 9mo ago
      > I detect if the CLI is installed and it just reuses whatever auth the user has already setup. Isn't this what they just explicitly banned?
      - kzahel 9mo ago
        no, they banned use of the model without the CLI harness/SDK when using the subscription plans. Opencode was spoofing requests as if they were coming from claude code CLI, and controlling the agent loop / tool call totally internally. Anthropic wants subscription plans to use the CLI/SDK.
- dd8601fn 9mo ago
  It already does. You can use the Anthropic API in any tool, but these users wanted to use the claude code subscription.
jrsj 9mo ago
The people defending Anthropic because “muh terms of service” are completely missing the point. These are bad terms. You should not accept these terms and bet the future of your business on proprietary tooling like this. It might be a good deal right now, but they only want to lock you in so that they can screw you later.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- solumunus 9mo ago
  How exactly are they going to lock me in?
  - jrsj 9mo ago
    By only supporting their own cloud service for remote execution & slowly adding more and more proprietary integration points that are incompatible with other tools.
    - einsteinx2 9mo ago
      But switching cost to a different CLI coding tool is close to zero… I truly don’t understand the argument that using Claude Code means betting your business on that particular tool. I use Claude Code daily, but if tomorrow they massively raised prices, made the tool worse, or whatever I’d just switch to a competitor and keep working like nothing happened. To be clear, I’ve seen this sentiment across various comments not just yours, but I just don’t agree with it.
      - jrsj 9mo ago
        They wouldn’t require you to use their closed source client if they weren’t planning on using it to extract value from you later. It’s still early & a lot more capabilities are going to be coming to these tools in the coming months. Claude Code or an equivalent will be a full IDE replacement and a lot of the integration and automation mechanisms are going to be proprietary. Want to offload some of that to the cloud? Claude Code Web is your only option. Someone else drops a better model or a model that’s situationally better at certain types of tasks? You can’t use it unless you move everything off of that stack.
netdur 9mo ago
Anthropic thinks highly of its "moat", yet it is spreading FUD to kill open weights
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
tolerance 9mo ago
This reads like an overreaction. I think both OpenAI and Anthropic are soon to settle upon their target markets; that each of them are attracting separate crowds/types of coders and that the people already sold on Claude Code don’t care about this decision.
bschmidt900 9mo ago
[dead]
ojosilva 9mo ago
They did not. Anthropic is protecting its huge asset: the Claude Code value chain, which has proven itself to be a winner among devs (me included, after trying everything under the sun in 2025). If anything, Anthropic's mistake is that they are incapable of monetizing their great models in the chat market, where ChatGPT reigns: ie. Anthropic did not invest in image generation, Google did and Gemini has a shot at the market now. Apparently nobody gets the Anthropic move: they are only good at coding and that's a very thin layer. Opencode and other tools are game for collecting inputs and outputs that can later be used to train their own models - not necessarily being done now, but they could - Cursor did it. Also Opencode makes it all easily swappable, just eval something by popping another API key and let's see if Codex or GLM can replicate the CC solution. Oh, it does! So let's cancel Claude and save big bucks! Even though CC the agent supports external providers (via the ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL env var), they are working hard on making it impossible for other models to support their every increasing agent feature set (skills, teleport and remote sessions, LSP, Chrome integration, etc). The move totally makes sense, like it or not.
- jrsj 9mo ago
  It might make sense from Anthropics perspective but as a user of these tools I think it would be a huge mistake to build your workflow around Claude Code when they are pushing vendor lock in this aggressively. Making this mistake could end up being the AI equivalent of choosing Oracle over Postgres
  - solumunus 9mo ago
    I’ve done that and unless I’m missing something it seems like it would be trivial for me to switch to an alternative.
    - jrsj 9mo ago
      If you’ve only got a CLAUDE.md and sub agent definitions in markdown it is pretty easy to do at the moment, although more of their feature set is moving in a direction that doesn’t have 1:1 equivalents in other tools. The client is closed source for a reason and they issued DMCA takedowns against people who published sourcemaps for a reason.
nerdjon 9mo ago
I am sure the company is going to get very upset at people no longer paying who were using their product in a way that they did not intend. Just going to be heartbroken. I will never understand the people that make a big deal about "I will never support this business again because of x" when X not something the company ever officially said they cared about. In all seriousness, I really don't think it should be a controversial opinion that if you are using a companies servers for something that they have a right to dictate how and the terms. It is up to the user to determine if that is acceptable or not. Particularly when there is a subscription involved. You are very clearly paying for "Claude Code" which is very clearly a piece of software connected to an online component. You are not paying for API access or anything along those lines. Especially when they are not blocking the ability to use the normal API with these tools. I really don't want to defend any of these AI companies but if I remove the AI part of this and just focus on it being a tool, this seems perfectly fine what they are doing.
- Palmik 9mo ago
  To me it's very easy to understand why people would be upset and post about it online. 1. The company did something the customers did not like. 2. The company's reputation has value. 3. Therefore highlighting the unpopular move online, and throwing shade at the company so to speak, is (alongside with "speaking with your wallet") one of the few levers customers have to push companies to do what they want them to do.
  - nerdjon 9mo ago
    Sure, it is perfectly valid to complain all you want. But it is also important to remember the context here. I could write an article and complain about Taco Bell not selling burgers and that is perfectly within my right but that is something they are clearly not interested in doing. So me saying I am not going to give them money until they start selling burgers is a meaningless too them. Everything I have seen about how they have marketed Claude Code makes it clear that what you are paying for is a tool that is a combination of a client-side app made by them and the server component. Considering the need to tell the agent that the tool you are using is something it isn't, it is clear that this ever working was not the intention.
msxT 9mo ago
Anthropic doesn’t want you to use a tool that makes it easy to switch to a competitor’s model when you reach a cap. They want to nudge you toward upgrading - Pro -> Max -> Max 20× -> extra usage - rather than switching to Codex. They can afford to make moves like this as long as they stay on top. OpenAI isn’t the good guy here - it’s just an opportunity for them to bite off a bit more of the cake.
- F7F7F7 9mo ago
  I’d say the vast majority of people on OpenCode aren’t using CC in combination with Codex. It’s CC with Qwen and KLM and other OSS and/or local models.
- theshrike79 9mo ago
  Why would I "switch" when I can pay the $20 for both? More than enough for any personal projects I have time for. And if I was making any money, the Max tiers would be pennies in the bucket.
reilly3000 9mo ago
I just cancelled, citing this as the reason. I’m actually not all that torn up about it. I mostly want to see how Anthropic responds to the community about this issue.
mohsen1 9mo ago
I was paying for Max but after trying GLM 4.7 I am a convert. Hardly hit the limit but even if I do it is cheaper to get two accounts from Z.ai than one Max from Anthropic
dmezzetti 9mo ago
It's too bad that Anthropic is so hostile to open source. It's a big missed opportunity for them.
jsumrall 9mo ago
Honestly very confused by the people happy or agreeing with Anthropic here. You can use their API on a pay-per-use basis, or (as I interpreted the agreement) you can prepay as a subscription and use their service with hourly & weekly session limits. What's changed is that I thought I was subscribing to use their API services, claude code as a service. They are now pushing it more as using only their specific CLI tool. As a user, I am surprised, because why should it matter to them whether I open my terminal and start up using `claude code`, `opencode`, `pi`, or any other local client I want to send bits to their server. Now, having done some work with other clients, I can kind of see the point of this change (to play devils' advocate): their subscription limits likely assume aggregate usage among all users doing X amount of coding, which when used with their own cli tool for coding works especially well with client side and service caching and tool-calls log filtering— something 3rd party clients also do to varying effectivness. So I can imagine a reason why they might make this change, but again, I thought I was subscribing to a prepaid account where I can use their service within certain session limits, and I see no reason why the cli tool on my laptop would matter then.
- F7F7F7 9mo ago
  This is like asking why you can use ChatGPT in the Claude desktop app. “They are both Electron apps. What’s the problem?”
- awestroke 9mo ago
  Because they get no telemetry or usage data if you use a third party tool. Just pay per token if you want to use third party tools. Stop feeling entitled to other people's stuff.
fathermarz 9mo ago
After reading this opinion ten times today. Can someone explain to me why OpenCode is a “better harness”? Or is it just because it’s open source that people support it?
- cadamsdotcom 9mo ago
  All these harnesses are free and grateful for any use they get. It might be worthwhile to try it and see.
  - fathermarz 9mo ago
    Good call. Will test it out today
- hakanderyal 9mo ago
  It's mostly based on feelings/"vibes", and hugely dependent on the workflow you use. I'm so happy with Claude Code, Opus and plan mode that I don't feel any need to check the others.
- vorpalhex 9mo ago
  OpenCode has some more advanced features and plays nicely in more advanced setups. ClaudeCode isn't bad at all, but OpenCode has some tricks up it's sleeve.
  - dionian 9mo ago
    e.g. ?
    - gempir 9mo ago
      - ships also as a desktop app - ships with web server that has a UI you can open in your browser, even access remotely with tailscale or so - the server has an API to do almost all things allowing you to build on top of it, the people at ramp build a very advanced internal agent on top of OpenCode https://builders.ramp.com/post/why-we-built-our-background-agent https://builders.ramp.com/post/why-we-built-our-background-a...
orwin 9mo ago
> they really, really want to own the entire value chain rather than being relegated to becoming just another "model provider" This is really the salient point for everything. The models are expensive to train but ultimately worthless if paying customers aren't captive and can switch at will. The issue it that a lot of the recent gains are in the prefill inference, and in the model's RAG, which aren't truly a most (except maybe for Google, if their RAG include Google scholar). That's where the bubble will pop.
m0llusk 9mo ago
I'm supposed to adopt these wonderful new tools, but no one can figure out exactly what they are, how they should work, how much they cost, or other basics. This is worse than the early days of the cloud. Hopefully most of this goes the way of SOAP.
lemontheme 9mo ago
Before this drama started, OpenCode was just another item on a long list of tools I've been meaning to test. I was 100% content with CC (still am, mostly). But it was nice to know that there were alternatives, and that I could try them, maybe even switch to them, without having to base my decision on token pricing. The idea of there being escape hatch made me less concerned about vendor lock-in and encouraged me to a) get my entire team onto CC and b) invest time into building CC's flavor of agents, skills, commands, hooks, etc., as well as setting up a marketplace to distribute them internally. While Anthropic was within their right to enforce their ToS, the move has changed my perspective. In the language of moats and lock-ins, it all makes sense, sure, but as a potential sign of the shape of things to come, it has hurt my trust in CC as something I want to build on top of. Yesterday, I finally installed OpenCode and tried it. It feels genuinely more polished, and the results were satisfactory. So while this is all very anecdotal, here's what Anthropic accomplished: 1) I no longer feel like evangelizing for their tool 2) I installed a competitor and validated it's as good as others are claiming. Perhaps I'm overly dramatic, but I can't imagine I'm the only one who has responded this way.
- gpm 9mo ago
  I responded in a similar way. More than that I preemptively canceled my claude subscription (which just cancels auto-renewal) to make sure it was an affirmative choice to continue with it next month, after I have some time to try out the alternative they are so worried about and see if I should switch to it instead.
- falloutx 9mo ago
  Claude already played their card, from threatening that 90% of the code will be written by Ai then cutting off their most enthusiastic followers. Opencode and others haven't threatened the industry and generally have better standing with most devs. I do not see how Claude can ever be profitable at this point, they don't have any stickyness and they actively propose cutting their own market.
- zestyOrange67 9mo ago
  [dead]
TylerJewell 9mo ago
Note - we primarily make use of Gemini CLI, which is very promising, but have made pretty extensive trials as Claude Code. Anthropic hasn't changed their licensing, just enforcing what the licensing always required by closing a loophole. Business models aside - what is interesting is whether the agent :: model relationship requires a proprietary context and language such that without that mutual interaction, will the coding accuracy and safety be somehow degraded? Or, will it be possible for agentic frameworks to plug and play with models that will generate similar outcomes. So far, we tend to see the former is needed --- that there are improvements that can be had when the agentic framework and model language understanding are optimized to their unique properties. Not sure how long this distinction will matter, though.
ChrisArchitect 9mo ago
Discussion: Anthropic blocks third-party use of Claude Code subscriptions https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46549823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46549823
itsdrewmiller 9mo ago
@dang any way to fix the clickbait headline here?
- dang 9mo ago
  I've taken a crack at it. Is it accurate? (@dang often doesn't work, I just happened to see this. If you want guaranteed message delivery it's best to email hn@ycombinator.com)
ChicagoDave 9mo ago
Anyone that sees the value in Claude Code will never leave. This will be completely forgotten in like a week. And if you leave because of this, more support for those that abide by the TOS and stay. This is akin to someone selling/operating a cloud platform named Blazure and it’s just a front for Azure. My view to everyone is to stop trying to control the ecosystem and just build shit. Fast.
verdverm 9mo ago
I want to like Anthropic, they have such a great knowledge sharing culture and their content is bar none, but then they keep pulling stuff like this... I just can't bring myself to trust their leadership's values or ethics. that and they "stole" my money
- buppermint 9mo ago
  I would disagree on the knowledge sharing. They're the only major AI company that's released zero open weight models. Nor do they share any research regarding safety training, even though that's supposedly the whole reason for their existence.
  - verdverm 9mo ago
    I agree with you on your examples, but would point out there are some places they have contributed excellent content. In building my custom replacement for Copilot in VS Code, Anthropic's knowledge sharing on what they are doing to make Claude Code better has been invaluable
MaintenanceMode 9mo ago
While I respect the author's opinion (and it's interesting that Vibe Coding, the term is less than a year old), I am more than happy to be an Anthropic customer, and actually happy that they've opened more capacity for their paying customers. What I'm achieving with Claude is spectacular and for now, it's the best system I've found to meet my goals.
- redhale 9mo ago
  Not sure what you mean by "paying customers" as a distinction. Everyone on the Max plans is a paying customer, it's just a question of what agent harness they are able to use.
skybrian 9mo ago
Technically, isn't the API they want third-party software to use better anyway? This is really about pricing. The price difference between the regular API and the Oauth API is too large.
pizlonator 9mo ago
It seems that Anthropic's thesis is that vertical integration wins. It's too soon to tell if that's true or not. One of the features of vertical integration is that there will be folks complaining about it. Like the way folks would complain that it's impossible or hard to install macOS on anything other than a Mac, and impossible or hard to install anything other than macOS on a Mac. Yet, despite those complains, the Mac and macOS are successful. So: the fact that folks are complaining about Anthropic's vertical integration play does not mean that it won't be successful for them. It also doesn't mean that they are clueless
- bloppe 9mo ago
  I, personally, will churn once my CC pro subscription is up. They're harshing my vibe. They're probably losing money on each pro subscription so they probably won't miss me!
  - pizlonator 9mo ago
    > They're probably losing money on each pro subscription so they probably won't miss me! looool Maybe the LLM thing will be profitable some day?
- anon84873628 9mo ago
  Interestingly, another front page article today is about Apple choosing to use Gemini for Siri. A lot of the comments revolve around how much they will be locked in and how much the base models are commoditized. Google is pretty clearly ok with being an infrastructure/service provider for all comers. Same is true for Open AI (especially via Azure?) I guess Anthropic does not want to compete like that.
  - mcintyre1994 9mo ago
    Anthropic offer their API, including for tools like Opencode. It’s more expensive than Claude Code, but I don’t think it’s priced significantly differently to competitors. Obviously Apple aren’t paying API prices, and Google have a lot more to offer them, but I don’t think Anthropic would turn down that deal if they could have it. They have their models in AWS Bedrock too, and that is an option to auth with Claude Code. I think they do see vertical integration opportunities on product, but they definitely want to compete to power everything else too.
4b11b4 9mo ago
Anthropic has been doing this from the start and they are justified in it (the plan has different pricing rates than API). People have been making workarounds and they are justified in that as well - those people understand their workarounds are fragile when they made them.
ProofHouse 9mo ago
Huge mistake. That’s what they specialize in though
cat-whisperer 9mo ago
I don't think I agree with this claim. Also, they didn't cut-off anyone. You can still use their API as you wish. It's out there for anyone who wants it. They simply stopped people from abusing a accessibility feature that they created for their own product.
- gpm 9mo ago
  I'm not seeing how "subsidized pricing for their own product" is accessibility related.
  - cat-whisperer 9mo ago
    if you make something - you want people to use it right?
- taytus 9mo ago
  >they didn't cut-off anyone They did banned a lot people. Later, they "unbanned" them, but your comment isn't truthful.
mooktakim 9mo ago
Anthropic should find a way to work with third parties. They still get all the data. There wouldn't be a difference.
isoprophlex 9mo ago
I want them to cut off these electron wrappers. If there's no tokens going to these third parties, the more they can keep subsidizing my claude code usage.
- bloppe 9mo ago
  But more revenue growth will help them raise more billions to keep subsidizing us longer!
- blumenkraft 9mo ago
  Please stop with this 'subsidising' nonsense. It is nobody's business whether anybody is subsidizing anything. I couldn't care less what the internal financial mechanics of Anthropic is. Even if they are losing money on every single paying user, I DO NOT CARE, it's their problem, not mine.
PeterStuer 9mo ago
"they utterly failed to consider the second-order effects of this business decision" Or maybe they did consider but were capital/ inference capacity constrained to keep serving at this pricepoint. Pretty sure without any constraints they would eagerly go for 100% market share. CC users give them the reigns to the agentic process. Non CC users take (mostly indirect) control themselves. So if you are forced to slow growth, where do you push the break (by charging defacto more per (api) token)?
renewiltord 9mo ago
I think they’re smart enough to know that they’re not making a mistake here. I’m fine with it. The API costs are not outrageous. I don’t mind paying per token prices and I don’t mind getting a discounted all-inclusive plan.
deleted 9mo ago
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rCube22 9mo ago
You are just taking advantage of their CC subscription business model, which they are subsidizing because you are using CC. Why should they do this when you don't use their product? Also You can still use OpenCode with API access...so no they didn't lock anything down. Basically the people just don't want to pay what is fair and is whining about it.
arjie 9mo ago
As a Claude Code user (on the Max $200 plan), I think this is fine. Already I frequently receive: API Error: 529 {"type":"error","error":{"type":"overloaded_error","message":"Overloade d"},"request_id":"req_011CX42ZX2u If they want to prioritize direct Anthropic users like me, that's fine. Availability is a feature to me.
- shepherdjerred 9mo ago
  I use Claude Code quite a bit and have never seen this
a-dub 9mo ago
my guess is that they are probably drowning in traffic since claude code really took off over the break and are now doing everything they can to reduce traffic and keep things up.
BrenBarn 9mo ago
> they really, really want to own the entire value chain That is it. That is the problem. Everyone wants vertical integration and to corner the market, from Standard Oil on down. And everyone who wants that should be smacked down.
gausswho 9mo ago
When the only winning move is corner-the-market, the only way for the customer to win is not to play the game. I'll take my token-money elsewhere. That said, the author is deluding themselves if they think OpenAI is supporting OpenCode in earnest. Unlike Anthropic, they don't have explicit usage limits. It's a 'we'll let you use our service as long as we want' kind of subscription. I got a paid plan with GPT 5.2 and after a day of usage was just told 'try again in a week'. Then in a week I hit it again and didn't even get a time estimate. I wasn't even doing anything heavy or high reasoning. It's not a dependable service.
AstroBen 9mo ago
The way to vote against this is to test the alternatives. They're really good!
charcircuit 9mo ago
>go to war with their paying customers over a trivial ToS violation It's a trivial violation until it isn't. Competitors need to be fought off early else they become much harder to fight in the future.
Havoc 9mo ago
I would think the mistake here is offering the same two tokens at wildly different price points & hoping a flimsy ToS clause will make that stick.
dpark 9mo ago
Have any of these sorts of proclamations ever actually come true? I recall when Reddit effectively cut off all the clients from their API, there were similar loud proclamations that they had ruined their business and everyone would defect. I remember something similar with Twitter. These businesses both have their problems, but blocking third-party apps doesn’t seem to be one of them. I think Anthropic took a look at the market, realized they had a strong position with Claude Code, and decided to capitalize on that rather than joining the race to the bottom and becoming just another option for OpenCode. OpenAI looked at the market and decided the opposite, because they don’t have strong market share with Codex and they would rather undercut Claude, which is a legitimate strategy. Don’t know who wins. I feel like Anthropic is probably making the right choice here. What do they have to gain by helping competitors undercut them? I don’t think Anthropic wants to be just another model that you could use. They want to be the ecosystem you use to code. Probably better to try to win a profitable market than to try to compete to be the cheapest commodity model.
- ethbr1 9mo ago
  Anthropic thinking they're Reddit ~2023 feels pretty arrogant. And if they've made a business decision to do this, rolling it out without announcement is even worse. Did they think no one would notice?
  - dpark 9mo ago
    Anthropic has like 4x Reddit’s revenue and 8x the valuation. I don’t understand the arrogance. Plus I’m the one who compared them to Reddit. They certainly didn’t issue a statement that said “well it worked for Reddit”.
    - ethbr1 9mo ago
      Reddit had a first move and scale advantage by then that Anthropic could only dream of. Plus its product utility scaled with user count. To the upthread/sibling conversations about substitutability of LLMs (and therefore pricing power).
8note 9mo ago
this feels anti-trust-y to me. when i signed up for a subscription it was with the understanding that id be able to use those tokens on which ever agent i wanted to play with, and that as i got to something i want to have persistently running, id switch that to be an api client. i quickly figured out that claude code was the current best coding agent for the model, but seeing other folks calling opus now im not actually sure thats true, in which case that subsidized token might be more expensive to both me and anthropic, because its not the most token efficient route over their model. i dislike that now i wont be able to feed them training data using many different starting points and paths, which i think over time will have a bad impact on their models making them worse over time
Animats 9mo ago
Not unexpected. - Google cutting off using search from other than their home page code. (At one time there was an official SOAP API for Google Search.) - Apple cutting off non-Apple hardware in the Power PC era. ("We lost our license for speeding", from a third party seller of faster hardware.) - Twitter cutting off external clients. (The end of TweetDeck.)
- mfkp 9mo ago
  - Reddit cutting off API access for third party clients
  - theshrike79 9mo ago
    They didn't "cut off", they just set completely bonkers prices for API use making it effectively unaffordable.
gaigalas 9mo ago
Both Claude Code and OpenCode users are too loud. It makes sense for them to fight. These are boutique tools, and there can be only one boutique tool. I have a gut feeling that the real top dog harness (profitability, sticky users, growth) is VSCode + Copilot.
matchagaucho 9mo ago
Credit to the early AI coding startups. They masterfully forked Microsoft VS Code and integrated frontier LLMs into a familiar IDE. Instant audience. But it was only a matter of time before: a) Microsoft reclaimed its IDE b) Frontier model providers reclaimed their models Sage advice: don’t fill potholes in another company’s roadmap.
- daveguy 9mo ago
  Re: a) how can Microsoft "reclaim" their IDE when it was forked from a fork-able open source license? Re: b) "frontier" models can reclaim all they want; bring it. that's not a moat.
luxuryballs 9mo ago
could it also be a short term thing to lessen the server load since now we see they just released a new set of tools for non-code work?
projektfu 9mo ago
Dec 7, 2025 (A day that will live in infamy?) Linked from TFA: > > > one word: repositories view > > what do you mean? > It's possible, and the solution is so silly that I laughed when I finally figured it out. I'm not sure if I should just post it plainly here since Anthropic might block it which would affect opencode as well, but here's a hint. After you exhaust every option and you're sure the requests you're sending are identical to CC's, check the one thing that probably still isn't identical yet (hint: it comes AFTER the headers). I guess Anthropic noticed.
deleted 9mo ago
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squidster 9mo ago
I'm paying for the $200 a month plan. If blocking out alternative harnesses reduces server load and bugs and makes the claude code experience better then I'm pro-anthropic on this one.
lacoolj 9mo ago
Does/will this include blocking Github Copilot from using their models?
- theshrike79 9mo ago
  They use the API directly. Opencode was spoofing itself as the official Claude Code CLI to get access to the subscription tier.
smoyer 9mo ago
I agree that this probably isn't in their own interests but "because I refuse to do business with a company that takes its customers for granted" should be heavily qualified. My power company is taking advantage of me but so far I haven't had the nerve to fire them.
elzbardico 9mo ago
Anthropic is not cutting off third-party clients. It is blocking the usage of subsidized subscriptions that are intended to be used with Claude Code, with third party tools. Those thirdy party tools can still use claude's api, but paying API rates, which are not subsidized or at least are a lot less subsidized.
ickelbawd 9mo ago
Why embed links in your article to your own tweets which say the same things your article already says?
milkey_mouse 9mo ago
Live by the sword, die by the sword
theturtletalks 9mo ago
I don’t get the outrage, this is same as when Twitter and Reddit cut off 3rd party clients to push people to use their official client. The lesson is that don’t build a product that depends on unofficial APIs. Opencode got huge adoption because they baked in being able to use Claude’s max plan so people could switch with no switching costs. Why would you think Anthropic would be ok with this? On top of that, I read Anthropic cache’s the system prompt for Claude code for every user and this helps their costs. The truth is Opencode didn’t have to bake this in. People who can will proxy Claude’s API anyways through other means.
- Gander5739 9mo ago
  3rd party reddit clients used the official api. They changed it from free to paid.
  - theturtletalks 9mo ago
    This is true, Twitter and Reddit clients were using official APIs that got their price increased. The point still stands though, don't build a service dependent on another service and especially if you're using an unofficial API. It works if you're under the radar but Opencode is not anymore. Honestly, it seems like this played out in Opencode's favor. They are getting press for this and people who are used to Opencode now and can't use their Claude plan might use GLM 4.7 or Minimax M2, models they offer for free.
    - theshrike79 9mo ago
      The Reddit API price was completely bonkers, a power-user would have had to pay tens of dollars a month for it.
dbbk 9mo ago
You are free to use API keys just like every other model provider. This is a non-story.
motbus3 9mo ago
They stole books, audio, image and tried to settle discussions with threats and closed party negotiations when they are caught. What people expect from them?
andai 9mo ago
I forgot what Malcolm Gladwell called them but I imagine the small minority of users affected here have disproportionate influence over their peers. Power users? Any such users in the thread? I used third-party clients for a little while but I did not see the benefit. (I was more likely to do the opposite, and run Claude Code with a proxy which allows me to use it with other models. Though after much experimentation I ended up back on Claude.)
blumenkraft 9mo ago
Yep. That was definitely a major mistake. They could have secured an epic W by letting Claude Code hang as a consumable endpoint. Trying to protect it behind their own, Anthropic-based tools, is asinine and serves absolutely no-one.
theahura 9mo ago
I wrote a response here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46602206 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46602206) but TLDR, no they didn't. These third-party clients are competitors and capitalists. They raised money from institutional investors, and are trying to get Anthropic to subsidize their growth, which Anthropic is not at all obligated to do. One could maybe argue that this was an honest mistake, but then you probably shouldn’t have a file called ‘anthropic_spoof.txt’ in your repo with the line “You are Claude Code, Anthropic’s official CLI for Claude”, which you then use to bypass oauth. I think these third party clients put their customers at risk. Most of them likely did not realize that the tools were doing something that violated ToS. Using these tools put many of those users at risk of account bans and risk Anthropic pulling the plug entirely and raising prices, which would be bad for everyone
tom_m 9mo ago
Totally agree. It's like shooting yourself in the foot to remove distribution channels. They need to hire someone for growth over there.
tom_m 9mo ago
Here's one thing I'm a little nervous about, because it doesn't make sense to cut off distribution channels. Anthropic should be profitable from the inference alone. That's their product...but they (like others) aren't. This makes some sense now why they want to control usage/distribution. I bet they have a very good chunk of subscribers to Claude Code who aren't using their credits. So they probably don't have any chance at being profitable without this. Not a great place to be.

350 points by codesparkle 9mo ago

"renowned vibe-coder Peter Steinberger" what? that's a thing ? why would a vibe coder be "renowned"? I use Claude every day but this is just too much.

hakanderyal 9mo ago
He is pretty popular in the AI/vibe coding niche on X and amassed a good following with his posts. Clearly the user is in the same bubble as him.
eddyg 9mo ago
He vibe-coded Clawdbot and lots of people are spinning up their own. https://clawd.bot/ https://clawd.bot/ https://github.com/clawdbot/clawdbot https://github.com/clawdbot/clawdbot He's also the guy behind https://github.com/steipete/oracle/ https://github.com/steipete/oracle/

AznHisoka 9mo ago

Isnt claude code more popular than codex?

cmrdporcupine 9mo ago

Yeah I think Anthropic has the "right" to do this. That's fine. But they also have shown a weakness by failing to understand why people might want to do this (use their Max membership with OpenCode etc instead). People aren't using opencode or crush with their Claude Code memberships because they're trying to exploit or overuse tokens or something. That isn't possible. They do it because Claude Code the tool itself is full of bugs and has performance issues, and OpenCode is of higher quality, has more open (surprise) development, is more responsive to bug fixes, and gives them far more knobs and dials to control how it works. I use Claude Code quite a bit and there isn't a session that goes by where I don't bump into a sharp edge of some kind. Notorious terminal rendering issues, slow memory leaks, or compaction related bugs that took them 3 months to fix... Failure to deal with quality issues and listen to customers is hardly a good sign of company culture, leading up to IPO... If they're trying to build a moat... this isn't a strong way to do it. If you want to own the market and have complete control at the tooling level, you're simply going to have to make a better product. With their mountain of cash and army of engineers at their disposal ... they absolutely could. But they're not.

F7F7F7 9mo ago
Meh. I’ve never used my x20 Max account in OpenCode because the Oauth solution was clearly “hacky”. But to me the appeal of OpenCode is that I can mix and match APIs and local models. I have DeepSeek R1 doing research while KLM is planning and doing code reviews and o4 mini breaking down screenshots into specs while local QWEN is doing the work. My experience with bugs has also been the exact opposite of what you described.
- uxcolumbo 9mo ago
  KLM the airline ;) ? Or do you mean GLM? And you let local QWEN write the code for you? Is the output any good or comparable to frontier models?

pella 9mo ago

> "For me personally, I have decided I will never be an Anthropic customer, because I refuse to do business with a company that takes its customers for granted." The best pressure on companies comes from viable alternatives, not from boycotts that leave you without tools altogether.

nicce 9mo ago
The context is here that Anthropic tried to suppress alternatives. Boycott works here because there are alternatives, like writer addressed.
- pella 9mo ago
  If "never" means never, you are not leverage, you are just gone.
  - nicce 9mo ago
    "Just gone" is the biggest leverage against business? Note that boycott is usually conditional. If they change things, the customer might come back.
    - pella 9mo ago
      If "never" means never ...

Mystery-Machine 9mo ago

> For me personally, I have decided I will never be an Anthropic customer, because I refuse to do business with a company that takes its customers for granted. Archaeologist.dev Made a Big Mistake If guided by this morality column, Archaeologist should immediately stop using pretty-much anything they are using in their life. There's no company today that doesn't have their hands dirty. The life is a dance between choosing the least bad option, not radically cutting off any sight of "bad".

nwienert 9mo ago

A good example of an extremely small but extremely vocal minority doing their best to punish a company for not catering to their explicitly disallowed use case for no reason other than they want it. I'd bet this has 0 negative impact on their business.

jsumrall 9mo ago
illegal?
- nwienert 9mo ago
  my 3am writing tends to be less precise, updated
joelthelion 9mo ago
650,000 monthly active users is not "extremely small". I wonder how many total users Claude Code has?
- nwienert 9mo ago
  I'm referring to the ones willing to cancel, especially ones who also feel the need to make a public statement about it. And I'd guess your number is high % churn, and even still CC is much higher.
ewoodrich 9mo ago
That seems a bit dramatic. What I learned from all this is that OpenAI is willing to offer a service compatible with my preferred workflow/method of billing and Anthropic clearly is not. That's fine but disappointing, I'm keeping my Codex subscription and letting my Claude subscription lapse but sure, it would be nice if Anthropic changed their mind to keep that option available because yes, I do want it. I'm a bit perplexed by some comments describing the situation like OpenCode users were getting something for free and stealing from CC users when the plan quota was enforced either way and were paying the same amount for it. Or why you seem to think this post pointing out that Anthropic's direct competitor endorses that method of subscription usage is somehow malicious or manipulative behavior. Commerce is a two-way street and customers giving feedback/complaining/cancelling when something changes is normal and healthy for competition. As evidenced by OpenAI immediately jumping in to support OpenCode users on Codex without needing to break their TOS.

kentonv 9mo ago

I mean... I don't like it either but this is pretty standard stuff and it's obvious why they're doing it. Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok are all more or less on par with each other, or a couple months behind at most. Chinese open models are also not far behind. There's nothing inherent to these products to make them "sticky". If your tooling is designed for it, you can trivially switch models at any time. Mid-conversation, even. And it just works. When you have basically equivalent products with no switching cost, you have perfect competition. They are all commodities. And that means: none of them can make a profit. It's a basic law of economics. If they can't make a profit, no matter how revolutionary the tech is, their valuation is not justified, and they will be in big trouble when people figure this out. So they need to make the product sticky somehow. So they: 1. Add a subscription payment model. Once you are paying a subscription fee, then the calculus on switching changes: if you only maintain one subscription, you have a strong reason to stick with it for everything. 2. Force you to use their client app, which only talks to their model, so you can't even try other models without changing your whole workflow, which most people won't bother to do. These are bog standard tactics across the tech industry and beyond for limiting competitive pressure. Everyone is mad about #2 but honestly I'm more mad about #1. The best thing for consumers would be if all these model providers strictly provided usage-based API pricing, which makes switching easy. But right now the subscription prices offer an enormous discount over API pricing, which just shows how much they are really desperate to create some sort of stickiness. The subscriptions don't even provide the "peace of mind" benefit that Spotify-like subscription models provide, where you don't have to worry about usage, because they still have enforced usage limits that people regularly hit. It's just purely a discount offered for locking yourself in. But again I can't really be that mad because of course they are doing this, not doing it would be terrible business strategy.

cmrdporcupine 9mo ago
I'm not "mad", I'm "sad" -- because I was very much on "Team Anthropic" a few months ago ... but the tool has failed to keep up in terms of quality. If they're going to close the sub off to other tools, they need to make very strong improvements to the tool. And I don't really see that. It's "fine" but I actually think these tools are letting developers down. They take over too much. They fail to give good insights into what's happening. They have poor stop/interrupt/correct dynamics. They don't properly incorporate a basic review cycle which is something we demand of junior developers and interns on our teams, but somehow not our AIs? They're producing mountains of sometimes-good but often unreviewable code and it isn't the "AI"'s fault, it's the heuristics in the tools. So I want to see innovation here. And I was hoping to see it from Anthropic. But I just saw the opposite.

Philpax 9mo ago

I'll be honest; I'm pretty sure this "mistake" will be completely forgotten by the next month. Their enforcing that their subscription only works with their product should not really come as a surprise to anyone, and the alt-agent users are a small enough minority that they'll get over it.

jrsj 9mo ago
I’m starting to think you’re right but only because software engineers don’t seem to actually value or care about open source anymore. Apparently we have collectively forgotten how bad it can be to let your tools own you instead of the other way around. Maybe another symptom of Silicon Valley hustle culture — nobody cares about the long term consequences if you can make a quick buck.
- Philpax 9mo ago
  There's nothing stopping you from using OpenCode with any other provider, including Anthropic: you just can't get the subsidised pricing while doing so. This is irritating, yes - it certainly disincentivises me from trying out OpenCode - but it's also, like, not unexpected? In any case, the long-term solution for true openness is to be able to run open-weight models locally or through third-party inference providers.
  - jrsj 9mo ago
    Yes but why are they subsidizing the pricing and requiring to use their closed source client to benefit from it? It’s the same reason the witch in the story of Hansel and Gretel was giving out free candy.
    - motoxpro 9mo ago
      Is this a serious question? Why would they subsidize people when there is no benifet to them? Subsidization means they are LOSING money when people use it. If the customers that are using 3rd party clients are unwilling to pay a price that is profitable for them, that is a very positive, not negative, thing for Anthropic to lose them. The reason to subsidize is the exact reason you are worried about. Lock in, network effects, economies of scale, etc.

visarga 9mo ago

> they really, really want to own the entire value chain rather than being relegated to becoming just another "model provider" I remember the story used to be the other way around - "just a wrapper", "wrapper AI startups" were everywhere, nobody trusted they can make it. Maybe being "just a model provider" or "just a LLM wrapper" matter less than the context of work. What I mean is that benefits collect not at the model provider, nor at the wrapper provider, but where the usage takes place, who sets the prompts and uses the code gets the lion share of benefits from AI.

estearum 9mo ago
Those are two sides of the same coin. Being "just a wrapper" wouldn't be a risky position if the LLMs would be content to be "just a model." But they clearly wouldn't be, and so it wasn't.

alvsilvao 9mo ago

Just checked https://opencode.ai/ https://opencode.ai/. It looks like they need to update their FAQ: Q: Do I need extra AI subscriptions to use OpenCode? A: Not necessarily, OpenCode comes with a set of free models that you can use without creating an account. Aside from these, you can use any of the popular coding models by creating a Zen account. While we encourage users to use Zen, OpenCode also works with all popular providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI etc. You can even connect your local models.

Philpax 9mo ago
That's not inaccurate. You can still use all of those providers: you just need to pay API costs, instead of reusing your subscription.
deleted 9mo ago
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falloutx 9mo ago
It still works with Claude Opus, just need to get a key from platform.claude.ai

kzahel 9mo ago

Can't Opencode just modify their implementation to use the anthropic claude code SDK directly? The issue is they were spoofing oauth. I tried OpenCode before this whole drama and immediately noticed the oauth spoofing and never authorized it. Doesn't opencode speak ACP? https://agentclientprotocol.com/overview/agents https://agentclientprotocol.com/overview/agents

macinjosh 9mo ago
The SDK bundles Claude code and uses it for its agentic work. The SDK really only lets you control the UI layer. It als doesn’t yet fully support plan mode.
- kzahel 9mo ago
  I use the SDK in my app and it works fine with plan mode. I don't deal with auth at all. I detect if the CLI is installed and it just reuses whatever auth the user has already setup. Works fine.
  - nmfisher 9mo ago
    > I detect if the CLI is installed and it just reuses whatever auth the user has already setup. Isn't this what they just explicitly banned?
    - kzahel 9mo ago
      no, they banned use of the model without the CLI harness/SDK when using the subscription plans. Opencode was spoofing requests as if they were coming from claude code CLI, and controlling the agent loop / tool call totally internally. Anthropic wants subscription plans to use the CLI/SDK.
dd8601fn 9mo ago
It already does. You can use the Anthropic API in any tool, but these users wanted to use the claude code subscription.

jrsj 9mo ago

The people defending Anthropic because “muh terms of service” are completely missing the point. These are bad terms. You should not accept these terms and bet the future of your business on proprietary tooling like this. It might be a good deal right now, but they only want to lock you in so that they can screw you later.

deleted 9mo ago
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solumunus 9mo ago
How exactly are they going to lock me in?
- jrsj 9mo ago
  By only supporting their own cloud service for remote execution & slowly adding more and more proprietary integration points that are incompatible with other tools.
  - einsteinx2 9mo ago
    But switching cost to a different CLI coding tool is close to zero… I truly don’t understand the argument that using Claude Code means betting your business on that particular tool. I use Claude Code daily, but if tomorrow they massively raised prices, made the tool worse, or whatever I’d just switch to a competitor and keep working like nothing happened. To be clear, I’ve seen this sentiment across various comments not just yours, but I just don’t agree with it.
    - jrsj 9mo ago
      They wouldn’t require you to use their closed source client if they weren’t planning on using it to extract value from you later. It’s still early & a lot more capabilities are going to be coming to these tools in the coming months. Claude Code or an equivalent will be a full IDE replacement and a lot of the integration and automation mechanisms are going to be proprietary. Want to offload some of that to the cloud? Claude Code Web is your only option. Someone else drops a better model or a model that’s situationally better at certain types of tasks? You can’t use it unless you move everything off of that stack.

netdur 9mo ago

Anthropic thinks highly of its "moat", yet it is spreading FUD to kill open weights

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

tolerance 9mo ago

This reads like an overreaction. I think both OpenAI and Anthropic are soon to settle upon their target markets; that each of them are attracting separate crowds/types of coders and that the people already sold on Claude Code don’t care about this decision.

bschmidt900 9mo ago

[dead]

ojosilva 9mo ago

They did not. Anthropic is protecting its huge asset: the Claude Code value chain, which has proven itself to be a winner among devs (me included, after trying everything under the sun in 2025). If anything, Anthropic's mistake is that they are incapable of monetizing their great models in the chat market, where ChatGPT reigns: ie. Anthropic did not invest in image generation, Google did and Gemini has a shot at the market now. Apparently nobody gets the Anthropic move: they are only good at coding and that's a very thin layer. Opencode and other tools are game for collecting inputs and outputs that can later be used to train their own models - not necessarily being done now, but they could - Cursor did it. Also Opencode makes it all easily swappable, just eval something by popping another API key and let's see if Codex or GLM can replicate the CC solution. Oh, it does! So let's cancel Claude and save big bucks! Even though CC the agent supports external providers (via the ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL env var), they are working hard on making it impossible for other models to support their every increasing agent feature set (skills, teleport and remote sessions, LSP, Chrome integration, etc). The move totally makes sense, like it or not.

jrsj 9mo ago
It might make sense from Anthropics perspective but as a user of these tools I think it would be a huge mistake to build your workflow around Claude Code when they are pushing vendor lock in this aggressively. Making this mistake could end up being the AI equivalent of choosing Oracle over Postgres
- solumunus 9mo ago
  I’ve done that and unless I’m missing something it seems like it would be trivial for me to switch to an alternative.
  - jrsj 9mo ago
    If you’ve only got a CLAUDE.md and sub agent definitions in markdown it is pretty easy to do at the moment, although more of their feature set is moving in a direction that doesn’t have 1:1 equivalents in other tools. The client is closed source for a reason and they issued DMCA takedowns against people who published sourcemaps for a reason.

nerdjon 9mo ago

I am sure the company is going to get very upset at people no longer paying who were using their product in a way that they did not intend. Just going to be heartbroken. I will never understand the people that make a big deal about "I will never support this business again because of x" when X not something the company ever officially said they cared about. In all seriousness, I really don't think it should be a controversial opinion that if you are using a companies servers for something that they have a right to dictate how and the terms. It is up to the user to determine if that is acceptable or not. Particularly when there is a subscription involved. You are very clearly paying for "Claude Code" which is very clearly a piece of software connected to an online component. You are not paying for API access or anything along those lines. Especially when they are not blocking the ability to use the normal API with these tools. I really don't want to defend any of these AI companies but if I remove the AI part of this and just focus on it being a tool, this seems perfectly fine what they are doing.

Palmik 9mo ago
To me it's very easy to understand why people would be upset and post about it online. 1. The company did something the customers did not like. 2. The company's reputation has value. 3. Therefore highlighting the unpopular move online, and throwing shade at the company so to speak, is (alongside with "speaking with your wallet") one of the few levers customers have to push companies to do what they want them to do.
- nerdjon 9mo ago
  Sure, it is perfectly valid to complain all you want. But it is also important to remember the context here. I could write an article and complain about Taco Bell not selling burgers and that is perfectly within my right but that is something they are clearly not interested in doing. So me saying I am not going to give them money until they start selling burgers is a meaningless too them. Everything I have seen about how they have marketed Claude Code makes it clear that what you are paying for is a tool that is a combination of a client-side app made by them and the server component. Considering the need to tell the agent that the tool you are using is something it isn't, it is clear that this ever working was not the intention.

msxT 9mo ago

Anthropic doesn’t want you to use a tool that makes it easy to switch to a competitor’s model when you reach a cap. They want to nudge you toward upgrading - Pro -> Max -> Max 20× -> extra usage - rather than switching to Codex. They can afford to make moves like this as long as they stay on top. OpenAI isn’t the good guy here - it’s just an opportunity for them to bite off a bit more of the cake.

F7F7F7 9mo ago
I’d say the vast majority of people on OpenCode aren’t using CC in combination with Codex. It’s CC with Qwen and KLM and other OSS and/or local models.
theshrike79 9mo ago
Why would I "switch" when I can pay the $20 for both? More than enough for any personal projects I have time for. And if I was making any money, the Max tiers would be pennies in the bucket.

reilly3000 9mo ago

I just cancelled, citing this as the reason. I’m actually not all that torn up about it. I mostly want to see how Anthropic responds to the community about this issue.

mohsen1 9mo ago

I was paying for Max but after trying GLM 4.7 I am a convert. Hardly hit the limit but even if I do it is cheaper to get two accounts from Z.ai than one Max from Anthropic

dmezzetti 9mo ago

It's too bad that Anthropic is so hostile to open source. It's a big missed opportunity for them.

jsumrall 9mo ago

Honestly very confused by the people happy or agreeing with Anthropic here. You can use their API on a pay-per-use basis, or (as I interpreted the agreement) you can prepay as a subscription and use their service with hourly & weekly session limits. What's changed is that I thought I was subscribing to use their API services, claude code as a service. They are now pushing it more as using only their specific CLI tool. As a user, I am surprised, because why should it matter to them whether I open my terminal and start up using `claude code`, `opencode`, `pi`, or any other local client I want to send bits to their server. Now, having done some work with other clients, I can kind of see the point of this change (to play devils' advocate): their subscription limits likely assume aggregate usage among all users doing X amount of coding, which when used with their own cli tool for coding works especially well with client side and service caching and tool-calls log filtering— something 3rd party clients also do to varying effectivness. So I can imagine a reason why they might make this change, but again, I thought I was subscribing to a prepaid account where I can use their service within certain session limits, and I see no reason why the cli tool on my laptop would matter then.

F7F7F7 9mo ago
This is like asking why you can use ChatGPT in the Claude desktop app. “They are both Electron apps. What’s the problem?”
awestroke 9mo ago
Because they get no telemetry or usage data if you use a third party tool. Just pay per token if you want to use third party tools. Stop feeling entitled to other people's stuff.

fathermarz 9mo ago

After reading this opinion ten times today. Can someone explain to me why OpenCode is a “better harness”? Or is it just because it’s open source that people support it?

cadamsdotcom 9mo ago
All these harnesses are free and grateful for any use they get. It might be worthwhile to try it and see.
- fathermarz 9mo ago
  Good call. Will test it out today
hakanderyal 9mo ago
It's mostly based on feelings/"vibes", and hugely dependent on the workflow you use. I'm so happy with Claude Code, Opus and plan mode that I don't feel any need to check the others.
vorpalhex 9mo ago
OpenCode has some more advanced features and plays nicely in more advanced setups. ClaudeCode isn't bad at all, but OpenCode has some tricks up it's sleeve.
- dionian 9mo ago
  e.g. ?
  - gempir 9mo ago
    - ships also as a desktop app - ships with web server that has a UI you can open in your browser, even access remotely with tailscale or so - the server has an API to do almost all things allowing you to build on top of it, the people at ramp build a very advanced internal agent on top of OpenCode https://builders.ramp.com/post/why-we-built-our-background-agent https://builders.ramp.com/post/why-we-built-our-background-a...

orwin 9mo ago

> they really, really want to own the entire value chain rather than being relegated to becoming just another "model provider" This is really the salient point for everything. The models are expensive to train but ultimately worthless if paying customers aren't captive and can switch at will. The issue it that a lot of the recent gains are in the prefill inference, and in the model's RAG, which aren't truly a most (except maybe for Google, if their RAG include Google scholar). That's where the bubble will pop.

m0llusk 9mo ago

I'm supposed to adopt these wonderful new tools, but no one can figure out exactly what they are, how they should work, how much they cost, or other basics. This is worse than the early days of the cloud. Hopefully most of this goes the way of SOAP.

lemontheme 9mo ago

Before this drama started, OpenCode was just another item on a long list of tools I've been meaning to test. I was 100% content with CC (still am, mostly). But it was nice to know that there were alternatives, and that I could try them, maybe even switch to them, without having to base my decision on token pricing. The idea of there being escape hatch made me less concerned about vendor lock-in and encouraged me to a) get my entire team onto CC and b) invest time into building CC's flavor of agents, skills, commands, hooks, etc., as well as setting up a marketplace to distribute them internally. While Anthropic was within their right to enforce their ToS, the move has changed my perspective. In the language of moats and lock-ins, it all makes sense, sure, but as a potential sign of the shape of things to come, it has hurt my trust in CC as something I want to build on top of. Yesterday, I finally installed OpenCode and tried it. It feels genuinely more polished, and the results were satisfactory. So while this is all very anecdotal, here's what Anthropic accomplished: 1) I no longer feel like evangelizing for their tool 2) I installed a competitor and validated it's as good as others are claiming. Perhaps I'm overly dramatic, but I can't imagine I'm the only one who has responded this way.

gpm 9mo ago
I responded in a similar way. More than that I preemptively canceled my claude subscription (which just cancels auto-renewal) to make sure it was an affirmative choice to continue with it next month, after I have some time to try out the alternative they are so worried about and see if I should switch to it instead.
falloutx 9mo ago
Claude already played their card, from threatening that 90% of the code will be written by Ai then cutting off their most enthusiastic followers. Opencode and others haven't threatened the industry and generally have better standing with most devs. I do not see how Claude can ever be profitable at this point, they don't have any stickyness and they actively propose cutting their own market.
zestyOrange67 9mo ago
[dead]

TylerJewell 9mo ago

Note - we primarily make use of Gemini CLI, which is very promising, but have made pretty extensive trials as Claude Code. Anthropic hasn't changed their licensing, just enforcing what the licensing always required by closing a loophole. Business models aside - what is interesting is whether the agent :: model relationship requires a proprietary context and language such that without that mutual interaction, will the coding accuracy and safety be somehow degraded? Or, will it be possible for agentic frameworks to plug and play with models that will generate similar outcomes. So far, we tend to see the former is needed --- that there are improvements that can be had when the agentic framework and model language understanding are optimized to their unique properties. Not sure how long this distinction will matter, though.

ChrisArchitect 9mo ago

Discussion: Anthropic blocks third-party use of Claude Code subscriptions https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46549823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46549823

itsdrewmiller 9mo ago

@dang any way to fix the clickbait headline here?

dang 9mo ago
I've taken a crack at it. Is it accurate? (@dang often doesn't work, I just happened to see this. If you want guaranteed message delivery it's best to email hn@ycombinator.com)

ChicagoDave 9mo ago

Anyone that sees the value in Claude Code will never leave. This will be completely forgotten in like a week. And if you leave because of this, more support for those that abide by the TOS and stay. This is akin to someone selling/operating a cloud platform named Blazure and it’s just a front for Azure. My view to everyone is to stop trying to control the ecosystem and just build shit. Fast.

verdverm 9mo ago

I want to like Anthropic, they have such a great knowledge sharing culture and their content is bar none, but then they keep pulling stuff like this... I just can't bring myself to trust their leadership's values or ethics. that and they "stole" my money

buppermint 9mo ago
I would disagree on the knowledge sharing. They're the only major AI company that's released zero open weight models. Nor do they share any research regarding safety training, even though that's supposedly the whole reason for their existence.
- verdverm 9mo ago
  I agree with you on your examples, but would point out there are some places they have contributed excellent content. In building my custom replacement for Copilot in VS Code, Anthropic's knowledge sharing on what they are doing to make Claude Code better has been invaluable

MaintenanceMode 9mo ago

While I respect the author's opinion (and it's interesting that Vibe Coding, the term is less than a year old), I am more than happy to be an Anthropic customer, and actually happy that they've opened more capacity for their paying customers. What I'm achieving with Claude is spectacular and for now, it's the best system I've found to meet my goals.

redhale 9mo ago
Not sure what you mean by "paying customers" as a distinction. Everyone on the Max plans is a paying customer, it's just a question of what agent harness they are able to use.

skybrian 9mo ago

Technically, isn't the API they want third-party software to use better anyway? This is really about pricing. The price difference between the regular API and the Oauth API is too large.

pizlonator 9mo ago

It seems that Anthropic's thesis is that vertical integration wins. It's too soon to tell if that's true or not. One of the features of vertical integration is that there will be folks complaining about it. Like the way folks would complain that it's impossible or hard to install macOS on anything other than a Mac, and impossible or hard to install anything other than macOS on a Mac. Yet, despite those complains, the Mac and macOS are successful. So: the fact that folks are complaining about Anthropic's vertical integration play does not mean that it won't be successful for them. It also doesn't mean that they are clueless

bloppe 9mo ago
I, personally, will churn once my CC pro subscription is up. They're harshing my vibe. They're probably losing money on each pro subscription so they probably won't miss me!
- pizlonator 9mo ago
  > They're probably losing money on each pro subscription so they probably won't miss me! looool Maybe the LLM thing will be profitable some day?
anon84873628 9mo ago
Interestingly, another front page article today is about Apple choosing to use Gemini for Siri. A lot of the comments revolve around how much they will be locked in and how much the base models are commoditized. Google is pretty clearly ok with being an infrastructure/service provider for all comers. Same is true for Open AI (especially via Azure?) I guess Anthropic does not want to compete like that.
- mcintyre1994 9mo ago
  Anthropic offer their API, including for tools like Opencode. It’s more expensive than Claude Code, but I don’t think it’s priced significantly differently to competitors. Obviously Apple aren’t paying API prices, and Google have a lot more to offer them, but I don’t think Anthropic would turn down that deal if they could have it. They have their models in AWS Bedrock too, and that is an option to auth with Claude Code. I think they do see vertical integration opportunities on product, but they definitely want to compete to power everything else too.

4b11b4 9mo ago

Anthropic has been doing this from the start and they are justified in it (the plan has different pricing rates than API). People have been making workarounds and they are justified in that as well - those people understand their workarounds are fragile when they made them.

ProofHouse 9mo ago

Huge mistake. That’s what they specialize in though

cat-whisperer 9mo ago

I don't think I agree with this claim. Also, they didn't cut-off anyone. You can still use their API as you wish. It's out there for anyone who wants it. They simply stopped people from abusing a accessibility feature that they created for their own product.

gpm 9mo ago
I'm not seeing how "subsidized pricing for their own product" is accessibility related.
- cat-whisperer 9mo ago
  if you make something - you want people to use it right?
taytus 9mo ago
>they didn't cut-off anyone They did banned a lot people. Later, they "unbanned" them, but your comment isn't truthful.

mooktakim 9mo ago

Anthropic should find a way to work with third parties. They still get all the data. There wouldn't be a difference.

isoprophlex 9mo ago

I want them to cut off these electron wrappers. If there's no tokens going to these third parties, the more they can keep subsidizing my claude code usage.

bloppe 9mo ago
But more revenue growth will help them raise more billions to keep subsidizing us longer!
blumenkraft 9mo ago
Please stop with this 'subsidising' nonsense. It is nobody's business whether anybody is subsidizing anything. I couldn't care less what the internal financial mechanics of Anthropic is. Even if they are losing money on every single paying user, I DO NOT CARE, it's their problem, not mine.

PeterStuer 9mo ago

"they utterly failed to consider the second-order effects of this business decision" Or maybe they did consider but were capital/ inference capacity constrained to keep serving at this pricepoint. Pretty sure without any constraints they would eagerly go for 100% market share. CC users give them the reigns to the agentic process. Non CC users take (mostly indirect) control themselves. So if you are forced to slow growth, where do you push the break (by charging defacto more per (api) token)?

renewiltord 9mo ago

I think they’re smart enough to know that they’re not making a mistake here. I’m fine with it. The API costs are not outrageous. I don’t mind paying per token prices and I don’t mind getting a discounted all-inclusive plan.

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

rCube22 9mo ago

You are just taking advantage of their CC subscription business model, which they are subsidizing because you are using CC. Why should they do this when you don't use their product? Also You can still use OpenCode with API access...so no they didn't lock anything down. Basically the people just don't want to pay what is fair and is whining about it.

arjie 9mo ago

As a Claude Code user (on the Max $200 plan), I think this is fine. Already I frequently receive: API Error: 529 {"type":"error","error":{"type":"overloaded_error","message":"Overloade d"},"request_id":"req_011CX42ZX2u If they want to prioritize direct Anthropic users like me, that's fine. Availability is a feature to me.

shepherdjerred 9mo ago
I use Claude Code quite a bit and have never seen this

a-dub 9mo ago

my guess is that they are probably drowning in traffic since claude code really took off over the break and are now doing everything they can to reduce traffic and keep things up.

BrenBarn 9mo ago

> they really, really want to own the entire value chain That is it. That is the problem. Everyone wants vertical integration and to corner the market, from Standard Oil on down. And everyone who wants that should be smacked down.

gausswho 9mo ago

When the only winning move is corner-the-market, the only way for the customer to win is not to play the game. I'll take my token-money elsewhere. That said, the author is deluding themselves if they think OpenAI is supporting OpenCode in earnest. Unlike Anthropic, they don't have explicit usage limits. It's a 'we'll let you use our service as long as we want' kind of subscription. I got a paid plan with GPT 5.2 and after a day of usage was just told 'try again in a week'. Then in a week I hit it again and didn't even get a time estimate. I wasn't even doing anything heavy or high reasoning. It's not a dependable service.

AstroBen 9mo ago

The way to vote against this is to test the alternatives. They're really good!

charcircuit 9mo ago

>go to war with their paying customers over a trivial ToS violation It's a trivial violation until it isn't. Competitors need to be fought off early else they become much harder to fight in the future.

Havoc 9mo ago

I would think the mistake here is offering the same two tokens at wildly different price points & hoping a flimsy ToS clause will make that stick.

dpark 9mo ago

Have any of these sorts of proclamations ever actually come true? I recall when Reddit effectively cut off all the clients from their API, there were similar loud proclamations that they had ruined their business and everyone would defect. I remember something similar with Twitter. These businesses both have their problems, but blocking third-party apps doesn’t seem to be one of them. I think Anthropic took a look at the market, realized they had a strong position with Claude Code, and decided to capitalize on that rather than joining the race to the bottom and becoming just another option for OpenCode. OpenAI looked at the market and decided the opposite, because they don’t have strong market share with Codex and they would rather undercut Claude, which is a legitimate strategy. Don’t know who wins. I feel like Anthropic is probably making the right choice here. What do they have to gain by helping competitors undercut them? I don’t think Anthropic wants to be just another model that you could use. They want to be the ecosystem you use to code. Probably better to try to win a profitable market than to try to compete to be the cheapest commodity model.

ethbr1 9mo ago
Anthropic thinking they're Reddit ~2023 feels pretty arrogant. And if they've made a business decision to do this, rolling it out without announcement is even worse. Did they think no one would notice?
- dpark 9mo ago
  Anthropic has like 4x Reddit’s revenue and 8x the valuation. I don’t understand the arrogance. Plus I’m the one who compared them to Reddit. They certainly didn’t issue a statement that said “well it worked for Reddit”.
  - ethbr1 9mo ago
    Reddit had a first move and scale advantage by then that Anthropic could only dream of. Plus its product utility scaled with user count. To the upthread/sibling conversations about substitutability of LLMs (and therefore pricing power).

8note 9mo ago

this feels anti-trust-y to me. when i signed up for a subscription it was with the understanding that id be able to use those tokens on which ever agent i wanted to play with, and that as i got to something i want to have persistently running, id switch that to be an api client. i quickly figured out that claude code was the current best coding agent for the model, but seeing other folks calling opus now im not actually sure thats true, in which case that subsidized token might be more expensive to both me and anthropic, because its not the most token efficient route over their model. i dislike that now i wont be able to feed them training data using many different starting points and paths, which i think over time will have a bad impact on their models making them worse over time

Animats 9mo ago

Not unexpected. - Google cutting off using search from other than their home page code. (At one time there was an official SOAP API for Google Search.) - Apple cutting off non-Apple hardware in the Power PC era. ("We lost our license for speeding", from a third party seller of faster hardware.) - Twitter cutting off external clients. (The end of TweetDeck.)

mfkp 9mo ago
- Reddit cutting off API access for third party clients
- theshrike79 9mo ago
  They didn't "cut off", they just set completely bonkers prices for API use making it effectively unaffordable.

gaigalas 9mo ago

Both Claude Code and OpenCode users are too loud. It makes sense for them to fight. These are boutique tools, and there can be only one boutique tool. I have a gut feeling that the real top dog harness (profitability, sticky users, growth) is VSCode + Copilot.

matchagaucho 9mo ago

Credit to the early AI coding startups. They masterfully forked Microsoft VS Code and integrated frontier LLMs into a familiar IDE. Instant audience. But it was only a matter of time before: a) Microsoft reclaimed its IDE b) Frontier model providers reclaimed their models Sage advice: don’t fill potholes in another company’s roadmap.

daveguy 9mo ago
Re: a) how can Microsoft "reclaim" their IDE when it was forked from a fork-able open source license? Re: b) "frontier" models can reclaim all they want; bring it. that's not a moat.

luxuryballs 9mo ago

could it also be a short term thing to lessen the server load since now we see they just released a new set of tools for non-code work?

projektfu 9mo ago

Dec 7, 2025 (A day that will live in infamy?) Linked from TFA: > > > one word: repositories view > > what do you mean? > It's possible, and the solution is so silly that I laughed when I finally figured it out. I'm not sure if I should just post it plainly here since Anthropic might block it which would affect opencode as well, but here's a hint. After you exhaust every option and you're sure the requests you're sending are identical to CC's, check the one thing that probably still isn't identical yet (hint: it comes AFTER the headers). I guess Anthropic noticed.

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

squidster 9mo ago

I'm paying for the $200 a month plan. If blocking out alternative harnesses reduces server load and bugs and makes the claude code experience better then I'm pro-anthropic on this one.

lacoolj 9mo ago

Does/will this include blocking Github Copilot from using their models?

theshrike79 9mo ago
They use the API directly. Opencode was spoofing itself as the official Claude Code CLI to get access to the subscription tier.

smoyer 9mo ago

I agree that this probably isn't in their own interests but "because I refuse to do business with a company that takes its customers for granted" should be heavily qualified. My power company is taking advantage of me but so far I haven't had the nerve to fire them.

elzbardico 9mo ago

Anthropic is not cutting off third-party clients. It is blocking the usage of subsidized subscriptions that are intended to be used with Claude Code, with third party tools. Those thirdy party tools can still use claude's api, but paying API rates, which are not subsidized or at least are a lot less subsidized.

ickelbawd 9mo ago

Why embed links in your article to your own tweets which say the same things your article already says?

milkey_mouse 9mo ago

Live by the sword, die by the sword

theturtletalks 9mo ago

I don’t get the outrage, this is same as when Twitter and Reddit cut off 3rd party clients to push people to use their official client. The lesson is that don’t build a product that depends on unofficial APIs. Opencode got huge adoption because they baked in being able to use Claude’s max plan so people could switch with no switching costs. Why would you think Anthropic would be ok with this? On top of that, I read Anthropic cache’s the system prompt for Claude code for every user and this helps their costs. The truth is Opencode didn’t have to bake this in. People who can will proxy Claude’s API anyways through other means.

Gander5739 9mo ago
3rd party reddit clients used the official api. They changed it from free to paid.
- theturtletalks 9mo ago
  This is true, Twitter and Reddit clients were using official APIs that got their price increased. The point still stands though, don't build a service dependent on another service and especially if you're using an unofficial API. It works if you're under the radar but Opencode is not anymore. Honestly, it seems like this played out in Opencode's favor. They are getting press for this and people who are used to Opencode now and can't use their Claude plan might use GLM 4.7 or Minimax M2, models they offer for free.
  - theshrike79 9mo ago
    The Reddit API price was completely bonkers, a power-user would have had to pay tens of dollars a month for it.

dbbk 9mo ago

You are free to use API keys just like every other model provider. This is a non-story.

motbus3 9mo ago

They stole books, audio, image and tried to settle discussions with threats and closed party negotiations when they are caught. What people expect from them?

andai 9mo ago

I forgot what Malcolm Gladwell called them but I imagine the small minority of users affected here have disproportionate influence over their peers. Power users? Any such users in the thread? I used third-party clients for a little while but I did not see the benefit. (I was more likely to do the opposite, and run Claude Code with a proxy which allows me to use it with other models. Though after much experimentation I ended up back on Claude.)

blumenkraft 9mo ago

Yep. That was definitely a major mistake. They could have secured an epic W by letting Claude Code hang as a consumable endpoint. Trying to protect it behind their own, Anthropic-based tools, is asinine and serves absolutely no-one.

theahura 9mo ago

I wrote a response here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46602206 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46602206) but TLDR, no they didn't. These third-party clients are competitors and capitalists. They raised money from institutional investors, and are trying to get Anthropic to subsidize their growth, which Anthropic is not at all obligated to do. One could maybe argue that this was an honest mistake, but then you probably shouldn’t have a file called ‘anthropic_spoof.txt’ in your repo with the line “You are Claude Code, Anthropic’s official CLI for Claude”, which you then use to bypass oauth. I think these third party clients put their customers at risk. Most of them likely did not realize that the tools were doing something that violated ToS. Using these tools put many of those users at risk of account bans and risk Anthropic pulling the plug entirely and raising prices, which would be bad for everyone

tom_m 9mo ago

Totally agree. It's like shooting yourself in the foot to remove distribution channels. They need to hire someone for growth over there.

tom_m 9mo ago

Here's one thing I'm a little nervous about, because it doesn't make sense to cut off distribution channels. Anthropic should be profitable from the inference alone. That's their product...but they (like others) aren't. This makes some sense now why they want to control usage/distribution. I bet they have a very good chunk of subscribers to Claude Code who aren't using their credits. So they probably don't have any chance at being profitable without this. Not a great place to be.