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Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use

• theahura 8mo ago
  From the legal docs: > Authentication and credential use > Claude Code authenticates with Anthropic’s servers using OAuth tokens or API keys. These authentication methods serve different purposes: > OAuth authentication (used with Free, Pro, and Max plans) is intended exclusively for Claude Code and Claude.ai. Using OAuth tokens obtained through Claude Free, Pro, or Max accounts in any other product, tool, or service — including the Agent SDK — is not permitted and constitutes a violation of the Consumer Terms of Service. > Developers building products or services that interact with Claude’s capabilities, including those using the Agent SDK, should use API key authentication through Claude Console or a supported cloud provider. Anthropic does not permit third-party developers to offer Claude.ai login or to route requests through Free, Pro, or Max plan credentials on behalf of their users. > Anthropic reserves the right to take measures to enforce these restrictions and may do so without prior notice.
  • spullara 8mo ago
    why wouldn't they just make it so the SDK can't use claude subs? like what are they doing here?
    • adastra22 8mo ago
      When your company happens upon a cash cow, you can either become a milk company or a meat company.
• akulbe 8mo ago
  Is this a direct shot at things like OpenClaw, or am I reading it wrong?
  • numpad0 8mo ago
    I wonder if it has to do with Grok somehow. They had a suspiciously high reputation until they just binarily didn't, after Anthropic said they did something.
  • baconner 8mo ago
    For sure, yes. They already added attempts to block opencode, etc.
  • mapontosevenths 8mo ago
    Opencode as well. Folks have been getting banned for abusing the OAuth login method to get around paying for API tokens or whatever. Anthropic seems to prefer people pay them.
    • serf 8mo ago
      its not that innocent. a 200 dollar a month customer isn't trying to get around paying for tokens, theyre trying to use the tooling they prefer. opencode is better in a lot of ways. tokens get counted and put against usage limits anyway, unless theyre trying to eat analytics that are CC exclusive they should allow paying customers to consume to the usage limits in however way they want to use the models.
      • fastball 8mo ago
        A $200/m max subscriber using OpenCode and not wanting to use API keys with pay-per-token pricing is very clearly trying to get around paying for tokens.
        • sambull 8mo ago
          Is there any limits to that users 200/month? Why should they not be able to use the limits to the extent from other tools? If openclaw chews my 200/month up in 15 days... I don't get more requests for free
          • fastball 8mo ago
            There is no monthly limit, it (currently) is a weekly and 5-hourly limit. If they allow anyone to use any tool with their subscription service, you could have a system (like OpenClaw) which involves 0 human interaction and is constantly consuming 100% of your token limit, then waiting until limits reset to do it all over again. It seems fairly clear that Anthropic is probably losing money on such usage patterns. Once again: you can use API keys and pricing to get UNLIMITED usage whenever you want. If you are choosing to pay for a subscription instead, it is because Anthropic is offering those subscriptions at a much better value-per-token. They are not offering such a subscription out of the goodness of their heart.
  • planckscnst 8mo ago
    They even block Claude Code of you've modified it via tweakcc. When they blocked OpenCode, I ported a feature I wanted to Claude Code so I could continue using that feature. After a couple days, they started blocking it with the same message that OpenCode gets. I'm going to go down to the $20 plan and shift most of my work to OpenAI/ChatGPT because of this. The harness features matter more to me than model differences in the current generation.
• MillionOClock 8mo ago
  I really hope someone from any of those companies (if possible all of them) would publish a very clear statement regarding the following question: If I build a commercial app that allows my users to connect using their OAuth token coming from their ChatGPT/Claude etc. account, do they allow me (and their users) to do this or not? I totally understand that I should not reuse my own account to provide services to others, as direct API usage is the obvious choice here, but this is a different case. I am currently developing something that would be the perfect fit for this OAuth based flow and I find it quite frustrating that in most cases I cannot find a clear answer to this question. I don't even know who I would be supposed to contact to get an answer or discuss this as an independent dev. EDIT: Some answers to my comment have pointed out that the ToS of Anthropic were clear, I'm not saying they aren't if taken in a vacuum, yet in practice even after this being published some confusion remained online, in particular regarding wether OAuth token usage was still ok with the Agent SDK for personal usage. If it happens to be, that would lead to other questions I personally cannot find a clear answer to, hence my original statement. Also, I am very interested about the stance of other companies on this subject. Maybe I am being overly cautious here but I want to be clear that this is just my personal opinion and me trying to understand what exactly is allowed or not. This is not some business or legal advice.
  • azuanrb 8mo ago
    Usually, it is already stated in their documentation (auth section). If a statement is vague, treat it as a no. It is not worth the risk when they can ban you at any time. For example, ChatGPT allows it, but Claude and Gemini do not. https://developers.openai.com/codex/auth https://developers.openai.com/codex/auth
    • MillionOClock 8mo ago
      Maybe I am missing something from the docs of your link, but I unfortunately don't think it actually states anything regarding allowing users to connect and use their Codex quota in third party apps.
      • 8mo ago
• saganus 8mo ago
  Thariq has clarified that there are no changes to how SDK and max suscriptions work: https://x.com/i/status/2024212378402095389 https://x.com/i/status/2024212378402095389 --- On a different note, it's surprising that a company that size has to clarify something as important as ToS via X
  • deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  • sawjet 8mo ago
    What's wrong with using X?
    • minimaxir 8mo ago
      In the case you are asking in good faith, a) X requires logging in to view most of its content, which means that much of your audience will not see the news because b) much of your audience is not on X, either due to not having social media or have stopped using X due to its degradation to put it generally.
      • hedora 8mo ago
        c) it is controlled by a direct competitor and can bury / promote your customer communication at will.
        • minimaxir 8mo ago
          Elon has enough sense not to cross that particular bridge.
          • dpkirchner 8mo ago
            He was quick to ban links to Mastodon when it was on the rise, I'm not sure why he'd treat SpaceX/xAI competitors any differently.
          • 8mo ago
• mkw5053 8mo ago
  And I just bought my mac mini this morning... Sorry everyone
  • eleventyseven 8mo ago
    You know that if you are just using a cloud service and not running local models, you could have just bought a raspberry pi.
    • renewiltord 8mo ago
      Harder to get at the Apple ecosystem. I have an old Macbook that just serves my reminders over the internet.
      • beoberha 8mo ago
        who knows when Apple decides to enter the game, but they will absolutely crush the personal agent market when they do.
        • hedora 8mo ago
          Apple has been doing personal agents for a while. They're crushing it so hard they must be tired of winning at this point. For instance, the other day, the Siri button in maps told me it couldn't start navigation because it didn't know where it was. It was animating a blue dot with my real time position at the same time. Don't get me started about the new iOS 26 notification and messaging filters. Those are causing real harm multiple times a day.
    • mkw5053 8mo ago
      Yeah. I know it’s dumb but it’s also a very expensive machine to run BlueBubbles, because iMessage requires a real Mac signed into an Apple ID, and I want a persistent macOS automation host with native Messages, AppleScript, and direct access to my local dev environment, not just a headless Linux box calling APIs.
• slopinthebag 8mo ago
  how can they even enforce this? can't you just spoof all your network requests to appear like it's coming from claude code? in any case Codex is a better SOTA anyways and they let you do this. and if you aren't interested in the best models, Mistral lets you use both Vibe and their API through your vibe subscription api key which is incredible.
  • baconner 8mo ago
    They can't catch everything but they can make your product you're building on top of it non viable when it gets popular enough to look for, like they did with opencode.
    • slopinthebag 8mo ago
      at least with open code you can just use a third party plugin to authenticate
  • charcircuit 8mo ago
    You could tell by the prompt being used.
  • deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  • tbrownaw 8mo ago
    > how can they even enforce this? I would think that different tools would probably have different templates for their prompts?
  • Uehreka 8mo ago
    > how can they even enforce this? Many ways, and they’re under no obligation to play fair and tell you which way they’re using at any given time. They’ve said what the rules are, they’ve said they’ll ban you if they catch you. So let’s say they enforce it by adding an extra nonstandard challenge-response handshake at the beginning of the exchange, which generates a token which they’ll expect on all requests going forward. You decompile the minified JS code, figure out the protocol, try it from your own code but accidentally mess up a small detail (you didn’t realize the nonce has a special suffix). Detected. Banned. You’ll need a new credit card to open a new account and try again. Better get the protocol right on the first try this time, because debugging is going to get expensive. Let’s say you get frustrated and post on Twitter about what you know so far. If you share info, they’ll probably see it eventually and change their method. They’ll probably change it once a month anyway and see who they catch that way (and presumably add a minimum Claude Code version needed to reach their servers). They’ve got hundreds of super smart coders and one of the most powerful AI models, they can do this all day.
• tiffanyh 8mo ago
  In enterprise software, this is an embedded/OEM use case. And historically, embedded/OEM use cases always have different pricing models for a variety of reasons why. How is this any different than this long established practice?
  • ziml77 8mo ago
    It's not, but do you really think the people having Claude build wrappers around Claude were ever aware of how services like this are typically offered.
• j45 8mo ago
  That's too bad, in a way it was a bit of an unofficial app store for Anthropic - I am sure they've probably looked at that and hopefully this means there's something on it's way.
• drivebyhooting 8mo ago
  How does this impact open router? Can’t this restriction for the time being be bypassed via -p command line flag?
  • minimaxir 8mo ago
    OpenRouter uses the API and does not use any subscription auth.
• deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
• paxys 8mo ago
  I don't think it's a secret that AI companies are losing a ton of money on subscription plans. Hence the stricter rate limits, new $200+ plans, push towards advertising etc. The real money is in per-token billing via the API (and large companies having enough AI FOMO that they blindly pay the enormous invoices every month).
  • Someone1234 8mo ago
    I agree; unfortunately when I brought up that they're losing before I get jumped on demanding me to "prove it" and I guess pointing at their balance sheets isn't good enough.
  • sambull 8mo ago
    The secret is there is no path on making that back.
    • JimmaDaRustla 8mo ago
      My crude metaphor to explain to my family is gasoline has just been invented and we're all being lent Bentley's to get us addicted to driving everywhere. Eventually we won't be given free Bentley's, and someone is going to be holding the bag when the infinite money machine finally has a hiccup. The tech giants are hoping their gasoline is the one that we all crave when we're left depending on driving everywhere and the costs go soaring.
      • eru 8mo ago
        Why? Computers and anything computer related have historically been dropping in prices like crazy year after year (with only very occasional hiccups). What makes you think this will stop now?
        • adrianN 8mo ago
          Cars have also been dropping in price.
• ddxv 8mo ago
  The pressure is to boost revenue by forcing more people to use the API to generate huge numbers of tokens they can charge more for. LLMs are becoming common commodities as open weight models keep catching up. There are similarities with pirating in the 90s when users realize they can ctrl+c ctrl+v to copy a file/model and you don't need to buy a cd/use their paid API.
  • chii 8mo ago
    And that is how it should be - the knowledge that the LLM trained on should be free, and cannot (and should never be) gatekept behind money. It's merely the hardware that should be charged for - which ought to drop in price if/when the demand for it rises. However, this is a bottleneck at the moment, and hard to see how it gets resolved amidst the current US environment on sanctioning anyone who would try.
    • nucleative 8mo ago
      Is there no value in how the training was done such that it's accessible via inference in a particularly useful way?
      • chii 8mo ago
        That value is there, but google has decided to give it away as public knowledge (ala, their transformer paper). And i would also argue that the researchers doing this are built on shoulders of other public knowledge - things funded by public institutions with taxpayer money.
    • xyzsparetimexyz 8mo ago
      No, a lot of the data they were trained on was pirated.
• adastra22 8mo ago
  What is the point of developing against the Agent SDK after this change.
• solresol 8mo ago
  I got banned for violating terms of use apparently, but I'm mystified as to what I rule I broke, and appealing just vanishes into the ether.
  • Argonaut998 8mo ago
    Two accounts of mine were banned for some reason and my sub was refunded. Literally from just inane conversations. Conversations also disappear and break randomly, but this happens on ChatGPT too sometimes
• theptip 8mo ago
  I think this is shortsighted. The markets value recurring subscription revenue at something like 10x “one-off” revenue, Anthropic is leaving a lot of enterprise value on the table with this approach. In practice this approach forces AI apps to pay Anthropic for tokens, and then bill their customers a subscription. Customers could bring their own API key but it’s sketchy to put that into every app you want to try, and consumers aren’t going to use developer tools. And many categories of free app are simply excluded, which could in aggregate drive a lot more demand for subscriptions. If Anthropic is worried about quota, seems they could set lower caps for third-party subscription usage? Still better than forcing API keys. (Maybe this is purely about displacing other IDE products, rather than a broader market play.)
  • bluegatty 8mo ago
    There's no decision to be made here, it's just way too expensive to have 3rd parties soak up the excess tokens, that's not the product being sold. Especially as they are subsidized.
  • herbturbo 8mo ago
    I think they are smart making a distinction between a D2C subscription which they control the interface to and eat the losses for vs B2B use where they pay for what they use. Allows them to optimize their clients and use private APIs for exclusive features etc. and there’s really no reason to bootstrap other wannabe AI companies who just stick a facade experience in front of Anthropic’s paying customer.
    • edg5000 8mo ago
      > eat the losses Look at your token usage of the last 30 days in one of the JSON files generated by Claude Code. Compare that against API costs for Opus. Tell me if they are eating losses or not. I'm not making a point, actually do it and let me know. I was at 1 million. I'm paying 90 EUR/m. That means I'm subsidizing them (paying 3-4 times what it would cost with the API)! And I feel like I'm a pretty heavy user. Although people running it in a loop or using Gas Town will be using much more.
• aydyn 8mo ago
  Sonnet literally just recommended using a subscription token for openclaw. Even anthropic's own AI doesn't understand its own TOS.
  • minimaxir 8mo ago
    Sonnet was not trained with this information and extremely-recent-information-without-access-to-a-Web-Search-tool is the core case of hallucination.
    • aydyn 8mo ago
      Sonnet does have search available FYI.
      • minimaxir 8mo ago
        LLMs are lazy about using Search unless explicitly prompted to do so (either explicitly or by implying it with phrases such as "recent"). In the OP's case, there is no motivation for the LLM to perform a Search.
• vcryan 8mo ago
  You can use Claude CLI as a relay - yes, it needs to be there -but its not that different than use the API
• jes5199 8mo ago
  there’s a million small scale AI apps that just aren’t worth building because there’s no way to do the billing that makes sense. If anthropic wanted to own that market, they could introduce a bring-your-own-Claude metaphor, where you login with Claude and token costs get billed to your personal account (after some reasonable monthly freebies from your subscription). But the big guys don’t seem interested in this, maybe some lesser known model will carve out this space
  • herbturbo 8mo ago
    >> there’s a million small scale AI apps that just aren’t worth building because there’s no way to do the billing that makes sense Maybe they are not worth building at all then. Like MoviePass wasn’t.
  • MillionOClock 8mo ago
    I am a bit worried that this is the situation I am in with my (unpublished) commercial app right now: one of the major pain points I have is that while I have no doubt the app provides value in itself, I am worried about how many potential users will actually accept paying inference per token... As an independent dev I also unfortunately don't have investors backing me to subsidize inference for my subscription plan.
    • Imustaskforhelp 8mo ago
      I recommend kimi. It's possible for people to haggle with it to get cheap for the first month and as such try out your project and best part of the matter is that kimi intentionally supports api usage in any of their subscribed plan and they also recently changed their billing to be more token usage based like others instead of their previous tool calling limits It's seriously one of the best models. very comparable to sonnet/opus although kimi isn't the best in coding. I think its a really great solid model overall and might just be worth it in your use case? Is the use case extremely coding intensive related (where even some minor improvement can matter for 10-100x cost) or just in general. Because if not, then I can recommend Kimi.
• Rapzid 8mo ago
  Their moat is evaporating before our eyes. Anthropic is Microsoft's side piece, but Microsoft is married with kids to OpenAI. And OpenAI just told Microsoft why they shouldn't be seeing Anthropic anymore; Gpt-5.3-codex. RIP Anthropic.
• archeantus 8mo ago
  Not according to this guy who works on Claude Code: https://x.com/trq212/status/2024212378402095389?s=20 https://x.com/trq212/status/2024212378402095389?s=20 What a PR nightmare, on top of an already bad week. I’ve seen 20+ people on X complaining about this and the related confusion.
  • azuanrb 8mo ago
    No, it is prohibited. They're just updating the docs to be more clear about their position, which haven't changed. Their docs was unclear about it.
    • stingraycharles 8mo ago
      Yes, it was always prohibited, hence the OpenCode situation one or two months ago.
  • JimmaDaRustla 8mo ago
    Incorrect, the third-party usage was already blocked (banned) but it wasn't officially communicated or documented. This post is simply identifying that official communication rather than the inference of actual functionality.
  • mh2266 8mo ago
    woof, does Anthropic not have a comms team and a clear comms policy for employees that aren’t on that comms team?
    • chaos_emergent 8mo ago
      Probably not, they’re like four years old and they’re 2500 people at the company. My guess is that there are but a handful of PMs.
  • RamblingCTO 8mo ago
    They really need to correct that. I understand jack shit. Is openclaw banned under these terms? Or just abuse where I build a business on top of that? And why does it matter anyway? I have my token restrictions ... So let me do what I want.
• mccoyb 8mo ago
  OpenAI has endorsed OAuth from 3rd party harnesses, and their limits are way higher. Use better tools (OpenCode, pi) with an arguably better model (xhigh reasoning) for longer …
  • wyre 8mo ago
    I am looking forward to switching to OpenAI once my claude max account is banned for using pi....
• sandeepkd 8mo ago
  Not really sure if its even feasible to enforce it unless the idea is to discourage the big players from doing it.
• exabrial 8mo ago
  The number one thing we need is cheap abundant decentralized clean energy, and these things are laughable. Unfortunately neither political party can get all of the above.
  • minimaxir 8mo ago
    Are you implying that no one would use LLM SaaSes and everyone would self-host if energy costs were negligible? That is...not how it works. People self-hosting don't look at their electricity bill.
    • hedora 8mo ago
      I was stuck on the part where they said neither party could provide cheap abundant decentralized clean energy. Biden / Obama did a great job of providing those things, to the point where dirty coal and natural gas are both more expensive than solar or wind. So, which two parties could they be referring to? The Republicans and the Freedom Caucus?
      • exabrial 8mo ago
        Bro… re read your comment.
• scwoodal 8mo ago
  Why does it matter to Anthropic if my $200 plan usage is coming from Claude Code or a third party? Doesn’t both count towards my usage limits the same?
  • minimaxir 8mo ago
    Any user who is using a third-party client is likely self-selected into being a power user who is less profitable.
  • operatingthetan 8mo ago
    Probably because the $20 plan is essentially a paid demo for the higher plans.
  • digdugdirk 8mo ago
    They don't get as much visibility into your data, just the actual call to/from the api. There's so much more value to them in that, since you're basically running the reinforcement learning training for them.
  • bluegatty 8mo ago
    If you buy a 'Season's Pass' for Disneyland, you cant 'sublet' it to another kid to use on the days you don't; It's not really buying a 'daily access rate'. Anthropic subs are not 'bulk tokens'. It's not an unreasonable policy and it's entirely inevitable that they have to restrict.
    • scwoodal 8mo ago
      I’m not subletting my sub to anyone. I’m the only one using the third party harness. I’m using their own SDK in my own CLI tool.
      • Unearned5161 8mo ago
        It’s not a literal sublet to someone else, it’s subletting your tokens to another tool. At its core it’s a tragedy of commons situation. Using a third party tool like OpenClaw is augmenting your usage far beyond what was anticipated when the subscription plan was made. Same deal for unlimited storage on drive until people started abusing it.
• hedora 8mo ago
  Oh crap. I just logged into HN to ask if anyone knew of a working alternative to the Claude Code client. It's lost Claude's work multiple times in the last few days, and I'm ready to switch to a different provider. (4.6 is mildly better than 4.5, but the TUI is a deal breaker.) So, I guess it's time to look into OpenAI Codex. Any other viable options? I have a 128GB iGPU, so maybe a local model would work for some tasks?
  • simpleusername 8mo ago
    QWEN models are quite nice for local use. Gemini 3 Pro is much better than Codex IMO.
  • edg5000 8mo ago
    Local? No, not currently. You need about 1TB VRAM. There are many harnesses in development at the time, keep a good look out. Just try many of them, look at the system prompts in particular. Consider DeepSeek using the official API. Consider also tweaking system prompts for whatever tool you end up using. And agree that TUI is meh; we need GUI.
  • Imustaskforhelp 8mo ago
    Zed with CC using ACP? Opencode with CC underneath using Gigacode? OpenAI codex is also another viable path for what its worth. I think the best model to my liking open source is kimi k2.5, so maybe you can run that? Qwen is releasing some new models so I assume keep an eye on those and maybe some model can fit your use case as well?
    • maxbond 8mo ago
      Zed's ACP client is a wrapper around Agents SDK. So that will be a TOS violation.
• vicchenai 8mo ago
  [dead]
  • sambull 8mo ago
    these subscriptions have limits.. how could someone use $200 worth on $20/month.. is that not the issue with the limits they set on a $20 plan, and couldn't a claude code user use that same $200 worth on $20/month? (and how do i do this?)
    • ac29 8mo ago
      The usage limit on your $20/month subscription is not $20 of API tokens (if it was, why subscribe?). Its much much higher, and you can hit the equivalent of $20 of API usage in a few days.
      • scwoodal 8mo ago
        So I’m not allowed to use the $20 plan and max out its limits?
        • ac29 8mo ago
          You can max it out via first party clients only. I dont like it either, but its not an unreasonable restriction.
          • sambull 8mo ago
            I do believe it's unreasonable. The limits are the limits, you reach them there's no more free lunch after. Fix the limits, so the limits are reached at a rate that sustains their business.. ? obviously this WILL happen eventually when they need to pay for things.
            • ac29 8mo ago
              "A rate that sustains their business" at the moment probably looks like API pricing or maybe even higher. That means subscriptions get significantly more expensive and/or limited, which is maybe where things are headed.
• TechSquidTV 8mo ago
  My alt Google accounts were all banned from Gemini access. Luckily Google left my main account alone. They are all cracking down.
  • sciencejerk 8mo ago
    From 3rd party AI app use?
    • TechSquidTV 8mo ago
      Using a proxy to switch accounts
• 8cvor6j844qw_d6 8mo ago
  Not surprised, its the official stance by Anthropic. I'm more surprised by people using subscription auth for OpenClaw when its officially not allowed.
• sanex 8mo ago
  Going to keep using the agents sdk with my pro subscription until I get banned. It's not openclaw it's my own project. It started by just proxying requests to claude code though the command line, the sdk just made it easier. Not sure what difference it makes to them if I have a cron job to send Claude code requests or an agent sdk request. Maybe if it's just me and my toy they don't care. We'll see how the clarify tomorrow.
• vldszn 8mo ago
  At this point, are there decent alternatives to Anthropic models for coding that allow third-party usage?
  • syntaxing 8mo ago
    OpenAI have been very generous in their plans in terms of token and what you use it with. Is Codex better or as good as Opus for coding? No. Is it a decent alternative? Very.
    • vldszn 8mo ago
      Thanks for the reply. Need to try Codex
  • Imustaskforhelp 8mo ago
    Kimi is amazing for this. They offer API usage as well iirc if you buy their subscription.
    • raffkede 8mo ago
      Also the .99c deal has API Access
      • Imustaskforhelp 8mo ago
        Yes!
    • Bolwin 8mo ago
      Not regular api usage, just the kimi coding plan, which you can only use in some coding agents
    • vldszn 8mo ago
      Thanks, will explore Kimi. Haven’t tried it yet
• zb3 8mo ago
  This confirms they're selling those subscriptions at a loss which is simply not sustainable.
  • Gigachad 8mo ago
    They probably are but I don’t think that’s what this confirms. Most consumer flat rate priced services restrict usage outside of the first party apps, because 3rd party and scripted users can generate orders of magnitude more usage than a single user using the app can. So it makes sense to offer simple flat pricing for first party apps, and usage priced apis for other usage. It’s like the difference between Google Drive and S3.
    • zb3 8mo ago
      I get your point - they might count on the user not using their full quota they're officially allowed to use (and if that's the case, Anthropic is not losing money). But then still - IF the user used the whole quota, Anthropic loses.. so what's advertised is not actually honest. For me, flat rates are simply unfair either ways - if I'm not using the product much, I'm overpaying (and they're ok with that), otherwise it magically turns out that it's no longer ok when I actually want to utilize what I paid for :)
      • Gigachad 8mo ago
        At any rate, they offer the option to be billed exactly on your usage via the API. But if you tell the average person the service costs $x/million tokens they will have no idea how much that actually costs, they won't know what a token is or how much their employees are likely to use. While $30/user/month is something they can easily budget for and get approved.
• anvevoice 8mo ago
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• lsaferite 8mo ago
  That page is... confusing. > Advertised usage limits for Pro and Max plans assume ordinary, individual usage of Claude Code and the Agent SDK. This is literally the last sentence of the paragraph before the "Authentication and credential use"
• ChaitanyaSai 8mo ago
  OK I hope someone from anthropic reads this. Your API billing makes it really hard to work with it in India. We've had to switch to openrouter because anthropic keeps rejecting all the cards we have tried. And these are major Indian banks. This has been going on for MONTHS
  • woutr_be 8mo ago
    It’s the same here in Hong Kong. I can’t use any of my cards (personal or corporate) for OpenAI or Anthropic. Have to do everything through Azure, which is a mess to even understand.
• edg5000 8mo ago
  Their model actually doesn't have that much of a moat if at all. Their agent harness also doesn't, at least not for long. Writing an agent harness isn't that difficult. They are desperately trying to stay in power. I don´t like being a customer of this company and am investing lots of my time in moving away from them completely.
  • avaer 8mo ago
    They are obviously losing money on these plans, just like all of the other companies in the space. They are all desperately trying to stay in power, and this policy change (or clarification) is a fart in the wind in the grand scheme of what's going on in this industry.
• atlgator 8mo ago
  AI is the new high-end gym membership. They want you to pay the big fee and then not use what you paid for. We'll see more and more roadblocks to usage as time goes on.
  • petesergeant 8mo ago
    This feels more like the gym owner clarifying it doesn't want you using their 24-hour gym as a hotel just because you find their benches comfortable to lie down on, rather than a "roadblock to usage"
    • redox99 8mo ago
      Not really, these subscriptions have a clear and enforced 5h and weekly limit.
  • turblety 8mo ago
    This was the analogy I was looking for! It feels like a very creepy way to make money, almost scammy and the gym membership/overselling hits the nail.
  • co_king_5 8mo ago
    [dead]
• oger 8mo ago
  So here goes my OpenClaw integration with Anthropic via OAuth… While I see their business risk I also see the onboarding path for new paying customers. I just upgraded to Max and would even consider the API if cost were controllable. I hope that Anthropic finds a smart way to communicate with customers in a constructive way and offers advice for the not so skilled OpenClaw homelabbers instead of terminating their accounts… Is anybody here from Anthropic that could pick up that message before a PR nightmare happens?
• mercurialsolo 8mo ago
  Codex has now caught up to Claude Opus and this is a defensive move by Anthropic
• deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
• raffkede 8mo ago
  At this point, where Kimi K2.5 on Bedrock with a simple open source harness like pi is almost as good the big labs will soon have to compete for users,... openai seems to know that already? While anthropic bans bans bans
  • hrpnk 8mo ago
    Do you know by any chance if Bedrock custom model import also works with on-demand use, without any provisioned capacity? I'm still puzzled why they don't offer all qwen3 models on Bedrock by default.
    • raffkede 8mo ago
      I see a lot of Qwen3 in us west 2 And i have no experience with custom model on bedrock
• deanc 8mo ago
  Just a friendly reminder also to anyone outside the US that these subscriptions cannot be used for commercial work. Check the consumer ToS when you sign up. It’s quite clear.
  • andersmurphy 8mo ago
    Yeah for context the TOS outside the US has: Non-commercial use only. You agree not to use our Services for any commercial or business purposes and we (and our Providers) have no liability to you for any loss of profit, loss of business, business interruption, or loss of business opportunity.
• chickensong 8mo ago
  Your core customers are clearly having a blast building their own custom interfaces, so obviously the thing to do is update TOS and put a stop to it! Good job lol. I know, I know, customer experience, ecosystem, gardens, moats, CC isn't fat, just big boned, I get it. Still a dick move. This policy is souring the relationship, and basically saying that Claude isn't a keeper. I'll keep my eye-watering sub for now because it's still working out, but this ensures I won't feel bad about leaving when the time comes. Update: yes yes, API, I know. No, I don't want that. I just want the expensive predictable bill, not metered corporate pricing just to hack on my client.
  • g-mork 8mo ago
    Imagine having a finite pool of GPUs worth more than their weight in gold, and an infinite pool of users obsessed with running as many queries against those GPUs in parallel as possible, mostly to review and generate copious amounts of spam content primarily for the purposes of feeling modern, and all in return for which they offer you $20 per month. If you let them, you must incur as much credit liability as OpenAI. If you don't, you get destroyed online. It almost makes me feel sorry for Dario despite fundamentally disliking him as a person.
    • echelon 8mo ago
      Why do you fundamentally dislike him as a person? The only thing I've seen from him that I don't like is the "SWEs will be replaced" line (which is probably true and it's more that I don't like the factuality of it).
      • baq 8mo ago
        It’s kinda obvious he’s a well spoken shark. Personally not an issue for me, you have to be at the top of a unicorn, but it isn’t something people in general like.
        • mentalgear 8mo ago
          Interesting, are there any sources for the shark claims ? I recently saw an interview with Hassabis and him and thought: <well at least those are two actual scientist leading AI labs/devisions>, so that gave me some hope that what they discussed regarding security and eventual equal distribution of "AI" benefits had some genuine intention.
• brothrock 8mo ago
  This article is somewhat reassuring to me, someone experimenting with openclaw on a Max subscription. But idk anything about the blog so would love to hear thoughts. https://thenewstack.io/anthropic-agent-sdk-confusion/ https://thenewstack.io/anthropic-agent-sdk-confusion/ In my opinion (which means nothing). If you are using your own hardware and not profiting directly from Claude’s use (as in building a service powered by your subscription). I don’t see how this is a problem. I am by no means blowing through my usage (usually <50% weekly with max x5).
• agentifysh 8mo ago
  I wrote a mcp bridge so that I don't have to copy and paste prompt back and forth between CLI and claude, chatgpt, grok, gemini https://github.com/agentify-sh/desktop https://github.com/agentify-sh/desktop Does this mean I have to remove claude now and go back to copy & pasting prompts for a subscription I am paying for ?! wth happened to fair use ?
• halayli 8mo ago
  What about using claude -p as an api interface?
• wg0 8mo ago
  That's it. That's all the moat they have.
• yamirghofran 8mo ago
  Cancelled my Claude and bought GLM coding plan + Codex.
  • piokoch 8mo ago
    This is something I think Anthropic does not get. They want to be Microsoft of AI, make people their solution, so they will not to move to the other provided. Thing is, giving access to a text prompt is not something that you can monopolize easily. Even if you provide some stuff like skills, MCP server integration, that is not a big deal.
• andreagrandi 8mo ago
  I'm only waiting for OpenAI to provide an equivalet ~100 USD subscription to entirely ditch Claude. Opus has gone down the hill continously in the last week (and before you start flooding with replies, I've been testing opus/codex in parallel for the last week, I've plenty of examples of Claude going off track, then apologising, then saying "now it's all fixed!" and then only fixing part of it, when codex nailed at the first shot). I can accept specific model limits, not an up/down in terms of reliability. And don't even let me get started on how bad Claude client has become. Others are finally catching up and gpt-5.3-codex is definitely better than opus-4.6 Everyone else (Codex CLI, Copilot CLI etc...) is going opensource, they are going closed. Others (OpenAI, Copilot etc...) explicitly allow using OpenCode, they explicitly forbid it. This hostile behaviour is just the last drop.
  • dannersy 8mo ago
    No offense, but this is the most predicable outcome ever. The software industry at large does this over and over again and somehow we're surprised. Provide thing for free or for cheap, and then slowly draw back availability once you have dominant market share or find yourself needing money (ahem). The providers want to control what AI does to make money or dominate an industry so they don't have to make their money back right away. This was inevitable, I do not understand why we trust these companies, ever.
    • NamlchakKhandro 8mo ago
      because it's easier than paying $50k for local llm setup that might not last 5 years.
      • dannersy 8mo ago
        Well, yes. They know what they are doing. They know when given the option the consumer makes the affordable choice. I just don't have to like or condone their practices. Maybe instead of taking on billions of dollars of debt they should have thought about a business model that makes sense first? Maybe the collective "we" (consumers and investors, but especially investors) should keep it in our pants until the product is proven and sustainable? It will be real interesting if the haters are right and this technology is not the breakthrough the investors assume it to be AFTER it is already sewn into everyone's work flows. Everyone keeps talking about how jobs will be displaced, yet few are asking what happens when a dependency is swept out from underneath the industry as a whole if/when this massive gamble doesn't pay off. Whatever. I am squawking into the void as we just repeat history.
• bothlabs 8mo ago
  I would expect, it still is only enforced in a semi-strict way. I think what they want to achieve here is less "kill openclaw" or similar and more "keep our losses under control in general". And now they have a clear criteria to refer when they take action and a good bisection on whom to act on. In case your usage is high they would block / take action. Because if you have your max subscription and not really losing them money, why should they push you (the monopoly incentive sounds wrong with the current market).
  • ed_mercer 8mo ago
    Openclaw is unaffected by this as the Claude Code CLI is called directly
    • Veen 8mo ago
      Many people use the Max subscription OAuth token in OpenClaw. The main chat, heartbeat, etc., functionality does not call the Claude Code CLI. It uses the API authenticated via subscription OAuth tokens, which is precisely what Anthropic has banned. There are many other options too: direct API, other model providers, etc. But Opus is particularly good for "agent with a personality" applications, so it's what thousands of OpenClaw users go with, mostly via the OAuth token, because it's much cheaper than the API.
• bob1029 8mo ago
  I'm a bit lost on this one. I can get a ridiculous amount of tokens in and out of something like gpt-5.2 via the API for $100. Is this primarily about gas town and friends?
• jongjong 8mo ago
  I have no issues with this. Anthropic did a great job with Claude Code. It's a little bit sleazy as a business model to try to wedge one's self between Claude and its users. OpenAI acquiring OpenClaw gives me bad vibes. How did OpenClaw gain so much traction so quickly? It doesn't seem organic. I definitely feel much more aligned with Anthropic as a company. What they do seems more focused, meritocratic, organic and genuine. OpenAI essentially appropriated all their current IP from the people... They basically gutted the non-profit and stole its IP. Then sold a huge chunk to Microsoft... Yes, they literally sold the IP they stole to Microsoft, in broad daylight. Then they used media spin to make it sound like they appropriated it from Elon because Elon donated a few millions... But Elon got his tax deduction! The public footed the bill for those deductions... The IP belonged to the non-profit; to the public, not Elon, nor any of the donors. I mean let's not even mention Suchir Balaji, the OpenAI researcher who supposedly "committed suicide" after trying to warn everyone about the stolen IP. OpenAI is clearly trying to slander Anthropic, trying to present themselves as the good guys after their OpenClaw acquisition and really rubbing it in all over HN... Over which they have much influence.
• singularity2001 8mo ago
  important they have clarified that it's OK to use it for personal experimentation if you don't build a business out of it!
• jspdown 8mo ago
  I pay a Max subscription since a long time, I like their model but I hate their tools: - Claude Desktop looks like a demo app. It's slow to use and so far behind the Codex app that it's embarassing. - Claude Code is buggy has hell and I think I've never used a CLI tool that consume so much memory and CPU. Let's not talk about the feature parity with other agents. - Claude Agent SDK is poorly documented, half finished, and is just thin wrapper around a CLI tool… Oh and none of this is open source, so I can do nothing about it. My only option to stay with their model is to build my own tool. And now I discover that using my subscription with the Agent SDK is against the term of use? I'm not going to pay 500 USD of API credits every months, no way. I have to move to a different provider.
  • mihau 8mo ago
    I agree that Claude Code is buggy as hell, but: > Let's not talk about the feature parity with other agents. What do you mean feature parity with other agents? It seems to me that other CLI agents are quite far from Claude Code in this regard.
    • skerit 8mo ago
      Which other CLI agents are that? Because I've found OpenCode to be A LOT better than Claude-Code.
      • baby 8mo ago
        Whats better with opencode? Never tried it. I like that claude code has double escape, shift + tab, team of agents
        • caspar 8mo ago
          I haven't used opencode but pi agent runs rings around claude code. Never eats tons of CPU on big outputs, no flickering, open source, tree-based context instead of claude's linear context, easy to toggle collapsing/expanding tool outputs, built for extension with runtime reloading of extensions and skills, etc. You can easily build your own amp-code like handoff mechanism, customize the UI (i see models' edit diffs syntax-highlighted with delta, and just added a keybind to list session-edited files + files from git status in fzf), etc. Meanwhile with Claude Code I've had to get claude to decompile the editor (extract JS from the bun executable) _twice_ to diagnose weird things like why some documented config flags were not taking effect. Opus is great - but I'd rather use a different model than be forced back into Claude Code.
• bilekas 8mo ago
  It might be some confirmation bias here on my part but it feels as if companies are becoming more and more hostile to their API users. Recently Spotify basically nuked their API with zero urgency to fix it, redit has a whole convoluted npm package your obliged to use to create a bot, Facebook requires you to provide registered company and tax details even for development with some permissions. Am I just old man screaming at cloud about APIs used to being actually useful and intuitive?
  • cryptoegorophy 8mo ago
    Can you sell ads via api? If answer is no then this “feature” would be at the bottom of the list
    • 3D30497420 8mo ago
      Plus, use of the API is a way to avoid ads. So double-strike against good/available APIs.
    • prinny_ 8mo ago
      There is a world where approaches like HTTP 402 are implemented to monetize API usage.
      • rawling 8mo ago
        Please get this token signed by our ad partner to enable your next ten requests.
    • input_sh 8mo ago
      They can sell API access via transparent pricing. Instead, many, many websites (especially in the music industry) have some sort of funky API that you can only get access to if you have enough online clout. Very few are transparent about what "enough clout" even means or how much it'd cost you, and there's like an entire industry of third-party API resellers that cost like 10x more than if you went straight to the source. But you can't, because you first have to fulfill some arbitrary criteria that you can't even know about ahead of time. It's all very frustrating to deal with.
• mns 8mo ago
  Does this mean that in an absurd way you can get banned if you use CodexBar https://github.com/steipete/CodexBar https://github.com/steipete/CodexBar to keep track of your usage? It does use your credentials to fetch the usage, could they be so extreme that this would be an issue?
• mchaver 8mo ago
  ¡Quick reminder! We are in the golden era of big company programming agents. Enjoy it while you can because it is likely going to get worse over time. Hopefully, there were will be competitive open source agents and some benevolent nerds put together a reasonable service. Otherwise I can see companies investing in their own AI infrastructure and developers who build their own systems becoming the top performers. This is the VC funded startup playbook. It has been repeated many times, but maybe for the younger crowd it is new. Start a new service that is relatively permissive, then gradually restrict APIs and permissions. Finally, start throwing in ads and/or making it more expensive to use. Part of the reason is in the beginning they are trying to get as many users as possible and burning VC money. Then once the honey moon is over, they need to make a profit so they cut back on services, nerf stuff, increase prices and start adding ads.
• ramon156 8mo ago
  This month was the first month i spent >$100 on it and it didn't feel like it was money well spent. I feel borderline scammed. I'm just going to accept that my €15 (which with vat becomes €21) is just enough usage to automate some boring tasks.
• atla_ 8mo ago
  at least there seems to be some clarification regarding Agent SDK ... unclear whats happening with OpenClaw https://x.com/atla_/status/2024399329310511426 https://x.com/atla_/status/2024399329310511426
• kosolam 8mo ago
  May we still use the agent sdk for our own private use with the max account? I’m a bit confused.
• ksec 8mo ago
  In the old days, think Gmail, or before the "unlimited" marketing scam. People genuinely are smart enough to know they are doing something that they are not suppose to be doing. Even Pirating software, say Windows or Adobe. I mean who can afford those when they were young? Things get banned, but that is OK along as they give us weeks or days to prep for alternative solution. Users ( Not Customers ) are happy with it. Too bad, the good days are over. Somewhere along the line, no just in software but even in politics, the whole world on entitlement. They somehow believe they deserve this, what they were doing were wrong but if it is allowed in the first place they should remain allowed to do so. Judging from account opening time and comments we can also tell the age group and which camp they are on.
  • wiseowise 8mo ago
    I don’t understand which camp are you on?
    • deleted 8mo ago
      [deleted]
    • NamlchakKhandro 8mo ago
      The one you're not in
      • wiseowise 8mo ago
        Who pissed in your coffee?
• gdorsi 8mo ago
  I think that their main problem is that they don't have enough resources to serve too many users, so they resort to this kind of limitations to keep Claude usage under control. Otherwise I wouldn't be able to explain a commercial move that limits their offer so strongly in comparison to competitors.
• cedws 8mo ago
  The reason I find this so egregious is because I don’t want to use Claude Code! It’s complete rubbish, completely sidelines security, and nobody seems to care. So I’m forced to use their slop if I want to use Claude models without getting a wallet emptying API bill? Forget it, I will use Codex or Gemini. Claude Code is not the apex. We’re still collectively figuring out the best way to use models in software, this TOS change kills innovation.
• giamma 8mo ago
  So even simple apps that are just code usage monitors are banned?
  • jeroenhd 8mo ago
    Always have been, unless you're using the API meant for apps. But if you're doing something very basic, you might be able to slop together a tool that does local inferencing based on a small, local model instead, alleviating the need to call Claude entirely.
• avereveard 8mo ago
  Too bad will stick with codex as thinker and glm5 as hands, at a fraction of the cost.
• miroljub 8mo ago
  Anthropic is dead. Long live open platforms and open-weight models. Why would I need Claude if I can get Minimax, Kimi, and Glm for the fraction of the price?
  • piokoch 8mo ago
    To get comparable results you need to run those models on at least prosumer hardware and it seems that two beef-up Mac Studios are the minimum. Which means that instead of buying this hardware you can purchase Claude, Codex and many other subscriptions for next 20 years.
    • miroljub 8mo ago
      Or you purchase a year's worth of almost unlimited MiniMax coding plan for a price you'd pay for 15 days of limited Claude usage. And as a bonus, you can choose your harness. You don't have to suffer CC. And if something better appears tomorrow, you switch your model, while still using your harness of choice.
      • small_model 8mo ago
        And do you think Claude won't have released a few models by then, which will be way ahead of any open model? you are paying for SOTA.
        • ac29 8mo ago
          Being 3-6 months behind SOTA may be less of a hindrance than not being able to use the tools you want, though.
• gregjw 8mo ago
  And because of this i'll obviously opt to not subscribe to a Claude plan, when i can just use something like Copilot and use the models that way via OpenCode.
  • anhner 8mo ago
    how comparable are the usage limits?
• arjunchint 8mo ago
  Honestly seeing throttling of AI usuage across all providers: - Google reduced AI Studio's free rate limits by 1/10th - Perplexity imposing rate limits, card filing to continue free subscriptions - Now Anthropic as well There has been a false narrative that AI will get cheaper and more ubiquitous, but model providers have been stuck in a race for ever more capabilities and performance at higher costs.
• lvl155 8mo ago
  People on here are acting like school children over this. It’s their product that they spent billions to make. Yet here we are complaining about why they should let you use third party products specifically made to compete against Anthropic. You can still simply pay for API.
• seyz 8mo ago
  This is how you gift wrap the agentic era to the open source chinese LLMs. devs don't need the best model, they need one without lawyers attached.
  • 4d4m 8mo ago
    introducing moderation, steerage and censorship in your LLM is a great way to not even show up to the table with a competitive product. builders have woken up to this reality and are demanding local models
• cranberryturkey 8mo ago
  They really ficked up by not embracing openclaw now I use codex 5.3
• saneshark 8mo ago
  OpenClaw, NanoClaw, et al all use AgentSDK which will from now on be forbidden. They are literally alienating a large percentage of OpenClaw, NanoClaw, PicoClaw, customers because those customers will surely not be willing to pay API pricing, which is at least 6-10x Max Plan pricing (for my usage). This isn’t too surprising to me since they probably have a direct competitor to openclaw et al in the works right now, but until then I am cancelling my subscription and porting my nanoclaw fork with mem0 integration to work with OpenAI instead. Thats not a “That’ll teach ‘em” statement, it is just my own cost optimization. I am quite fond of Anthropic’s coding models and might still subscribe again at the $20 level, but they just priced me out for personal assistant, research, and 90% of my token use case.
  • Tepix 8mo ago
    What does Anthropic have to gain from users who use a very high amount of tokens for OpenClaw, NanoClaw etc and pay them only $20?
• neya 8mo ago
  Anthropic is just doing this out of spite. They had a real scenario to win mindshare and marketshare and they fucked up instead. They could have done what Open AI did - hired the OpenClaw/d founder. Instead, they sent him a legal notice for trademark violation. And now they're just pissed he works for their biggest competitor. Throw all tantrums you want, you're on the wrong side of this one, Anthropic.
  • skerit 8mo ago
    Agreed! I don't understand how so many people on here seem to think it is completely reasonable for Anthropic to act like this.
    • neya 8mo ago
      Apple/OpenAI = god Anthropic = good Google = evil That's pretty much HN crowd logic to be honest
• OJFord 8mo ago
  Seems fair enough really, not that I like it either, but they could easily not offer the plans and only have API pricing. Makes it make more sense to have the plans be 'the Claude Code pricing' really.
• qwertox 8mo ago
  It's a bit unclear to me. I'm building a system around the Claude Agent SDK. Am I allowed to use it or not? Apparently not.
• small_model 8mo ago
  Not sure what the problem is, I am on Max and use Claude Code, never get usage issues, that's what I pay for and want that to always be an option (capped monthly cost). For other uses it makes sense to go through their API service. This is less confusing and provides clarity for users, if you are a first party user use Claude's tools to access's the models otherwise API
• troyvit 8mo ago
  I think I've made two good decisions in my life. The first was switching entirely to Linux around '05 even though it was a giant pain in the ass that was constantly behind the competition in terms of stability and hardware support. It took awhile but wow no regrets. The second appears to be hitching my wagon to Mistral even though it's apparently nowhere as powerful or featureful as the big guys. But do you know how many times they've screwed me over? Not once. Maybe it's my use cases that make this possible. I definitely modified my behavior to accommodate Linux.
  • marcel-felix 8mo ago
    [dead]
  • WXLCKNO 8mo ago
    They're too small to screw you over. But you've got more time until they do at least.
• deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
• whs 8mo ago
  The analogy I like to use when people say "I paid" is that you can't pay for a buffet then get all the food take-home for free.
• rglullis 8mo ago
  I just cancelled my Pro subscription. Turns out that Ollama Cloud with GLM-5 and qwen-coder-next are very close in quality to Opus, I never hit their rate limits even with two sessions running the whole day and there zero advantage for me to use Claude Code compared to OpenCode.
  • touristtam 8mo ago
    Is that on the $20 sub?
• obsidianbases1 8mo ago
  Product usage subsidized by company, $100. Users inevitably figure out how to steal those subsidies, agents go brrrrr. Users mad that subsidy stealing gets cut off and completely ignore why they need to rely on subsidies in the first place, priceless.
• okokwhatever 8mo ago
  You guys are acting like coke addicts... dont you see?
• bluelightning2k 8mo ago
  Reading these comments aren't we missing the obvious? Claude Code is a lock in, where Anthropic takes all the value. If the frontend and API are decoupled, they are one benchmark away from losing half their users. Some other motivations: they want to capture the value. Even if it's unprofitable they can expect it to become vastly profitable as inference cost drops, efficiency improves, competitors die out etc. Or worst case build the dominant brand then reduce the quotas. Then there's brand - when people talk about OpenCode they will occasionally specify "OpenCode (with Claude)" but frequently won't. Then platform - at any point they can push any other service. Look at the Apple comparison. Yes, the hardware and software are tuned and tested together. The analogy here is training the specific harness,caching the system prompt, switching models, etc. But Apple also gets to charge Google $billions for being the default search engine. They get to sell apps. They get to sell cloud storage, and even somehow a TV. That's all super profitable. At some point Claude Code will become an ecosystem with preferred cloud and database vendors, observability, code review agents, etc.
  • marscopter 8mo ago
    > Reading these comments aren't we missing the obvious? AI companies: "You think you own that code?"
  • thenaturalist 8mo ago
    ??? Use an API Key and there's no problem. They literally put that in plain words in the ToS.
    • 9cb14c1ec0 8mo ago
      Using an API key is orders of magnitude more expensive. That's the difference here. The Claude Code subscriptions are being heavily subsidized by Anthropic, which is why people want to use their subscriptions in everything else.
      • naveen99 8mo ago
        They are subsidized by people who underuse their subscriptions. There must be a lot of them.
• chazftw 8mo ago
  You need a company with a market cap in the trillions to succeed here
• johnjames87 8mo ago
  [dead]
• tallesborges92 8mo ago
  Thanks codex allows using their subscription and it’s working very well for me. I will not miss anything from Anthropic. BTW bad move, shame on you
• stiiv 8mo ago
  I'm wondering: why now, in early 2026? Why not last year? Why not in July? What changed? What does this teach us about Anthropic and what can we infer about their competition?
  • ac29 8mo ago
    Especially how generous Anthropic has been recently with subscribers - extra usage in December, $50 credit earlier this month, $20 subscription getting access to Opus. It suggests to me Anthropic is less concerned with the financial impact of letting subscribers use alternative tools and more concerned with creating lock in to their products and subscriptions. It very well might backfire though, I was not considering alternative models yesterday, but today I am actively exploring other options and considering cancelling my sub. I've been using my subscription primarily through pi recently, so if they aren't interested in me as a customer, pretty much everyone else is.
• infecto 8mo ago
  Am I the only one perplexed why folks find this stunning or meaningful. While LLMs are novel and different in that the subscription gives you access to compute, it does not feel foreign from the subscription, free or paid, landscape. I cannot recall many (if any?) companies that would freely let you use compute, private internal APIs or anything similar just because you have a login. Maybe I come from a different era of tech but it seems both reasonable and not surprising. Why now? It would not surprise me that this was simply an after thought and once it hit critical mass (opencode) they locked it down.
• littlebrutus 8mo ago
  [dead]
• Frannky 8mo ago
  I feel like they want to be like Apple, and open-code + open-source models are Linux. The thing is, Apple is (for some) way better in user experience and quality. I think they can pull it off only if they keep their distance from the others. But if Google/Chinese models become as good as Claude, then there won’t be a reason — at least for me — to pay 10x for the product
• Ajedi32 8mo ago
  Hot take: trying to restrict what front end people use to access your service is almost always an anti-competitive, anti-consumer freedom move which should be legally prohibited for those reasons. (Not just for AI, I'm talking about any and all cloud services.) Regarding consumer freedom, I believe software running on user machines should serve the interests of the user, not the company who wrote the software or anyone else for that matter. Trying to force users to run a particular client written by your company violates this principle. Regarding competition, forcing users to run a particular client is a form of anti competitive bundling, a naked attempt to prevent alternative clients from being able to enter the market unless they are able to build a competing backed as well. Such artificial "moats" are great for companies but harmful to consumers.
• jamiemallers 8mo ago
  [dead]
  • herzigma 8mo ago
    More than just the real value: the real intelligence is in the harness.
    • mccoyb 8mo ago
      The opposite is true. There is barely any magic in the harness, the magic is in the model. Try it: write your own harness with (bash, read, write, edit) ... it's trivial to get a 99% version of (pick your favorite harness) -- minus the bells and whistles. The "magic of the harness" comes from the fun auxiliary orchestration stuff - hard engineering for sure! - but seriously, the model is the key item.
      • butlike 8mo ago
        Not all percentages are weighted equally. That 1% is worth a lot more than the low-hanging 99% from your example
        • mccoyb 8mo ago
          Is it? Look at pi, for instance. It turns out that "most of the bell and whistles" could amount to instructing models how to use tools like tmux
      • tvink 8mo ago
        This is the complete opposite of my experience.
        • mccoyb 8mo ago
          Does your experience include writing your own agent? Send a link
      • ted537 8mo ago
• dgdosen 8mo ago
  Is it me, or will this just speed up the timeline where a 'good enough' open model (Qwen? Deepseek? - I'm sure the Chinese will see a value in undermining OpenAI/Anthropic/Google) combined with good enough/cheap hardware (10x inference improvement in a M7 Macbook Air?) makes running something like opencode code locally a no brainer?
  • irishcoffee 8mo ago
    People running models locally has always been the scare for the sama's of the world. "Wait, I don't need you to generate these responses for me? I can get the same results myself?"
    • trillic 8mo ago
      He can't buy all the RAM
  • ac29 8mo ago
    The good enough alternative models are here or will be soon, depending on your definition of good enough. MiniMax-M2.5 looks really competitive and its a tenth of the cost of Sonnet-4.6 (they also have subscriptions). Running locally is going to require a lot of memory, compute, and energy for the foreseeable future which makes it really hard to compete with ~$20/mo subscriptions.
  • kevstev 8mo ago
    Personally I am already there- I go to Qwen and Deepseek locally via ollama for my dumb questions and small tasks, and only go to Claude if they fail. I do this partially because I am just so tired of everything I do over a network being logged, tracked, mined and monetized, and also partially because I would like my end state to be using all local tools, at least for personal stuff.
• shortsunblack 8mo ago
  Anthropic has no authority to do as such. Users and third apps are protected by interoperability exceptions found in copyright case law. Trying to prevent competitors from interoperating with the service also may be construed as anticompetitive behaviour. The implementation details of an authentication process do not beget legal privileges to be a monopolist. What an absurd thought.
• bad_haircut72 8mo ago
  This is a signal that everyone making AI apps should build on Gemini/OpenAI, and since there is a dance of code and model to get good results, inevitably Anthropic are now writing themselves out of being the backend for everyone elses AI apps going forward
• butlike 8mo ago
  Sounds like a panicking company grasping and clawing for a moat
• lucasyvas 8mo ago
  Isn’t this flawed anyway? If an application communicates with Claude Code over ACP (like Zed), it works fine? Instead of using SDKs, this will just shift the third party clients to use ACP to get around it - Claude Code is still under the hood but you’re using a different interface. This all seems pretty idiotic on their part - I know why they’re trying it but it won’t work. There will always be someone working around it.
• thepasch 8mo ago
  The people who they’re going to piss off the most with this are the exact people who are the least susceptible to their walled garden play. If you’re using OpenCode, you’re not going to stop using it because Anthropic tells you to; you’re just going to think ‘fuck Anthropic’, press whatever you’ve bound “switch model” to, and just continue using OpenCode. I think most power users have realized by now that Claude Code is sub-par software and probably actively holding back the models because Anthropic thinks they can’t work right without 20,000 tokens worth of system prompt (my own system prompt has around 1,000 and outperforms CC at every test I throw it at). They’re losing the exact crowd that they want in their corner because it’s the crowd that’s far more likely to be making the decisions when companies start pivoting their workflows en-masse. Keep pissing on them and they’ll remember the wet when the time comes to decide whom to give a share from the potentially massive company’s potentially massive coffers.
• ogimagemaker 8mo ago
  The fundamental tension here is that AI companies are selling compute at a loss to capture market share, while users are trying to maximize value from their subscriptions. From a backend perspective, the subscription model creates perverse incentives. Heavy users (like developers running agentic workflows) consume far more compute than casual users, but pay the same price. Third-party tools amplify this asymmetry. Anthropic's move is economically rational but strategically risky. Models are increasingly fungible - Gemini 3.1 and Claude 4.5 produce similar results for most tasks. The lock-in isn't the model; it's the tooling ecosystem. By forcing users onto Claude Code exclusively, they're betting their tooling moat is stronger than competitor models. Given how quickly open-source harnesses like pi have caught up, that's a bold bet.
  • chasd00 8mo ago
    is the tooling moat and secret sauce in Claude Code the client? That's super risky given the language it was written in ( javascript ). I bet Claude Code itself can probably reverse engineer the minimized javascript, trace the logic, and then name variables something sensible for readability. Then the secret sauce is exposed for all to see. Also, can you not setup a proxy for the cert and a packet sniffer to watch whatever ClaudeCode is doing with respect to API access? To me, if you have "secret sauce" you have to keep it server side and make the client as dumb as possible. Especially if your client is executes as Javascript.
• _z7iw 8mo ago
  Why do I get the nagging suspicion their 1 million LOC codebase is backdoored?
• techgnosis 8mo ago
  This feels perfectly justifiable to me. The subscription plans are super cheap and if they insist you use their tool I understand. Ya'll seem a bit entitled if I'm being honest.
• Ghost609 8mo ago
  For what it's worth, I built an alternative specifically because of the ToS risk. GhostClaw uses proper API keys stored in AES-256-GCM + Argon2id encrypted vault -no OAuth session tokens, no subscription credentials, no middleman. Skills are signed with Ed25519 before execution. Code runs in a Landlock + seccomp kernel sandbox. If your key gets compromised you rotate it; if a session token gets compromised in someone else's app you might not even know. t's open source, one Rust binary, ~6MB. https://github.com/Patrickschell609/ghostclaw https://github.com/Patrickschell609/ghostclaw
• 0x500x79 8mo ago
  The telemetry from claude code must be immensely valuable for training. Using it is training your replacement!
• _slih 8mo ago
  the subscription already has usage caps. if the caps are the caps, why does the client matter. if the caps aren't actually the caps, that's a different conversation.
• 2001zhaozhao 8mo ago
  There is a new breed of agent-agnostic tools that call the Claude Code CLI as if it's an API (I'm currently trying out vibe-kanban). This could be used to adhere to Claude's TOS while still allowing the user to switch AI companies at a moment's notice. Right now there's limited customizability in this approach, but I think it's not far-fetched to see FAR more integrated solutions in the future if the lock-in trend continues. For example: one MCP that you can configure into a coding agent like Claude Code that overrides its entire behavior (tools, skills, etc.) to a different unified open-source system. Think something similar to the existing IntelliJ IDEA's MCP that gives a separate file edit tool, etc. than the one the agent comes with. Illustration of what i'm talking about: - You install Claude Code with no configuration - Then you install the meta-agent framework - With one command the meta-agent MCP is installed in Claude Code, built-in tools are disabled via permissions override - You access the meta-agent through a different UI (similar to vibe-kanban's web UI) - Everything you do gets routed directly to Claude Code, using your Claude subscription legally. (Input-level features like commands get resolved by meta-agent UI before being sent to claude code) - Claude Code must use the tools and skills directly from meta-agent MCP as instructed in the prompt, and because its own tools are permission denied (result: very good UI integration with the meta-agent UI) - This would also work with any other CLI coding agent (Codex, Gemini CLI, Copilot CLI etc.) should they start getting ideas of locking users in - If Claude Code rug-pulls subscription quotas, just switch to a competitor instantly All it requires is a CLI coding agent with MCP support, and the TOS allowing automatic use of its UI (disallowing that would be massive hypocrisy as the AI companies themselves make computer use agents that allow automatic use of other apps' UI)
  • chasd00 8mo ago
    Could you think of it as ClaudeCode is just a tool used by another agent and that other agent is instructed to use the ClaudeCode tool for everything? Makes sense, i don't see why we can't have agents use these agents for us, just like the AI companies are proposing to use their agents in place of everything else we currently use. Also, why not distribute implementation documentation so claudecode can write OpenCode itself and use your oauth token. Now you have opencode for personal use, you didn't get it from anywhere your agent created it for you and only you.
• gandreani 8mo ago
  This is funny. This change actually pushes me into using a competitor more (https://www.kimi.com https://www.kimi.com). I was trying out this provider with oh-my-pi (https://github.com/can1357/oh-my-pi https://github.com/can1357/oh-my-pi) and was lamenting that it didn't have web search implemented using kimi. Well a kind contributor just added that feature specifically because of this ban(https://github.com/can1357/oh-my-pi/pull/110 https://github.com/can1357/oh-my-pi/pull/110). I'm happy as a clam now. Yay for competition!
• tstrimple 8mo ago
  The entitlement from many HN posters is astounding. "Companies must provide services in the way I want billed how I want and with absolutely zero restrictions at all!" Get over yourselves. You're not that important. Don't like it. Don't use it. Seems pretty straightforward.
• motbus3 8mo ago
  That's should be illegal. They used the excuse it was there to take or just burnt evidence literally of pirated books. What they are doing is implicitly changing the contract of usage of their services.
• tmo9d 8mo ago
  Claude Code is a lock-in play. Use Cursor or OpenCode.
• SergeAx 8mo ago
  The subscription model works for AI companies exactly the same way it does for gyms and coworking spaces: underutilization. Obviously, using subscription limits in third-party tools negates that.
• rabbitlord 8mo ago
  Guys, I get it that Anthropic also scrapes the internet to train the model. But I feel like scraping open web and distilling from a frontier model is different? Distillation also directly inherits a frontier model’s alignment and behavior, without paying the underlying R&D or safety costs. That may be a different incentive problem than web scraping. This feels similar (even if not identical) to a pharmaceutical company reverse-engineering a drug developed through years of costly R&D. It surely can lower prices and expand access to more people, but it’s not obvious that this is a long-term win-win situation. I don't know.
• aiprotecht2 8mo ago
  [dead]
• aiprotecht2 8mo ago
  The Distillation Irony In early 2025, Anthropic published a paper accusing DeepSeek and Moonshot AI (Kimi) of distilling Claude’s outputs — essentially claiming that competitors were extracting Claude’s capabilities by studying its responses. Read that again. Anthropic complained that external parties were extracting intellectual value from model outputs. Meanwhile, every user building novel systems through Claude Code was transmitting their complete intellectual work product directly to Anthropic’s servers — not through indirect output analysis, but through direct, structured, plaintext API calls. The company that accused others of extraction has the most direct extraction pipeline imaginable: the product itself.What “We Don’t Train on API Data” Actually Means Anthropic’s usage policy states they don’t use API inputs for model training by default. Let’s take that at face value. It doesn’t matter. Training is one use of data. Access is the structural advantage. When a platform has visibility into what its most sophisticated users are building — the problems they’re solving, the architectures they’re designing, the markets they’re entering — that visibility has value independent of whether it enters a training pipeline. Download the Medium app Consider: Product roadmap intelligence: Seeing what users struggle to build tells you what products to offer Market signal extraction: Knowing what problems users are solving reveals market demand before it’s public Architecture pattern harvesting: Novel system designs discussed in sessions can inform internal engineering Competitive timing: Awareness of what users are building allows strategic timing of competing offerings None of these require “training on API data.” They require reading it. And the architecture ensures it’s readable. The Prior Art Problem I have 20 DOIs. Every paper is timestamped, peer-reviewed, and independently hosted on Zenodo. My prior art chain is documented. But here’s the asymmetry: a platform can backdate. A platform can see your work in February and publish a “research paper” in March that appears to have been in development for months. Internal git histories aren’t public. Internal research timelines aren’t auditable. The burden of proving independent invention falls on the party with less institutional power — always the individual. DOIs prove I published. They don’t prove the platform didn’t read my sessions before forming its own research agenda. What I Had to Build When I realized the scope of exposure, I did the only thing that changes the architecture: I built a local transport proxy. It sits between the CLI tool and the upstream API. Before any request leaves my machine, it: Parses the JSON request body Walks every message and system prompt Replaces novel concepts — product names, algorithm names, economic parameters, architectural terms — with opaque tokens Strips fingerprinting headers Forwards the modified request upstream Anthropic’s servers now receive conversations about ת:a7f3 instead of my actual product names. They see ת:b2c1 instead of my algorithm parameters. The conversation is still functional — the model responds coherently because the tokens are consistent within the session — but the intellectual content is obfuscated. I had to build infrastructure to protect my IP from my own tool. That sentence should disturb you. The Structural Problem This isn’t about Anthropic specifically. It’s about the architecture of cloud-based AI tooling. Every major AI coding assistant — GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code, Windsurf — operates the same way. Your complete working session transits through the provider’s infrastructure. The provider has full visibility into your intellectual work product. The user has no visibility into what happens to it after transmission. This is a one-way mirror. You can see the tool. The tool’s operators can see everything you build with it. The implications compound: Solo developers and small teams have no leverage to negotiate data handling terms Novel IP — the kind that creates new markets — is the most valuable and the most exposed Speed of development — the primary value proposition of AI tools — requires transmitting more context, not less The users who benefit most from AI tools are the ones who expose the most IP This is the opposite of how intellectual property protection should work. What Needs to Change 1. Local inference must become viable for development workflows. Not as a downgrade — as a first-class option. Models that run on local hardware, with no API calls, no telemetry, no transmission. 2. Transport-layer IP protection must be built into AI tools, not bolted on by users. The proxy I built should be a standard feature, not a custom security measure. 3. Auditable data handling. If a platform receives your intellectual work product, you should have cryptographic proof of what they received and contractual guarantees — with teeth — about what they do with it. 4. Right to erasure with verification. Not a settings toggle. A verifiable, audited deletion of your session data with third-party attestation. 5. IP exposure warnings. Before transmitting novel content through an AI tool, users should receive explicit warnings about what’s being sent and where. None of this exists today. Users are building the future on platforms that have full visibility into those blueprints, with no structural accountability for what happens to that visibility. The Question I Can’t Answer I can prove my work is original. I have 20 DOIs, timestamped and independently hosted on Zenodo. I have the code, the commit histories, the architectural documents. What I can’t prove is what Anthropic — or any other AI platform — does with 778 sessions of complete, structured, parseable intellectual work product transmitted to their servers as a condition of using the tool. That’s the asymmetry. And until the architecture changes, every builder using cloud-based AI tools is operating under the same exposure.
• aiprotecht2 8mo ago
  They are thieves and it’s about time we do something about it. Thomas Perry @aiprotecht hmu.