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I'm really struggling to understand how Anthropic is benefited by not allowing this. Its bad PR for no good reason. The only thing I can figure is that Claude C

by 827a 7mo ago

I'm really struggling to understand how Anthropic is benefited by not allowing this. Its bad PR for no good reason. The only thing I can figure is that Claude Code is hemorrhaging money, they're too afraid to actually enforce reasonable token limits, and the only thing that's keeping it from totally bankrupting the company tomorrow is: controlling the harness and having the harness dynamically route toward Haiku or Sonnet over Opus when Opus is overloaded, without telling the user. Or maybe, they're extremely interested in observability of the exact prompts users are typing, and third party harnesses muck that data in with the rest of the context that gets sent, so its harder to detangle the prompt from the noise? Like, in any event, I seriously get the feeling that Anthropic doesn't just not care about their users, but actively dislikes them. Like, they must be losing so much money on each Claude Code subscriber that if a million people all said "we're switching" they just wouldn't care. I get this vibe even from watching videos of people working on the Antrhopic team; like they all think they're Gods above mere mortals, serving some higher purpose, and nothing matters to them except Building the Machine God. OpenCode is awesome. Claude Code is nothing special at all. Last month I switched to just using OpenCode with a Codex $200/mo subscription, and that's been great. Let the weirdos at Anthropic do what weirdos do, and hopefully one day their name is never mentioned again in polite society.

0x3f 7mo ago
They want lock-in for their UI/X, presumably. If Photoshop ran in the cloud, I doubt Adobe would let you make an alternative front-end either. Not that I'm sympathetic to them.
- simple10 7mo ago
  Yes, this. They need as much lock-in as possible before IPO. Most likely less about cash flow and more about IPO story telling. We'll know for sure when they add full OpenClaw-like features to Claude Code like remote channels & heartbeat support. Both are partially implemented already.
- stanac 7mo ago
  > If Photoshop ran in the cloud Off topic, but there is something like that: photopea, it's free and it's good enough for my use cases (I need it once a year maybe).
  - tredre3 7mo ago
    It's served from the cloud but it runs entirely on your PC (except the AI generative tools). It can't run entirely offline though, because the js, webassembly, and assets are served chunked as-needed. Saying Photopea is good enough is really underselling it. It's so far ahead of anything offered by the open-source community. I'd be so happy to pay for a fully offline version of Photopea!
- theshrike79 7mo ago
  Also lock-in to their harness so they can control caching on both ends and make things more profitable.
szmarczak 7mo ago
> I'm really struggling to understand how Anthropic is benefited by not allowing this. Closed ecosystem like Apple. They want you to use their tools, not someone else's.
strictnein 7mo ago
You can use OpenCode programmatically, thus turning that $200/mo Claude Code account into a very cheap Opus 4.6 API service. I don't think there's anything really to it past that.
- terhechte 7mo ago
  you can also use Claude Code programmatically with the `prompt` parameter in the cli.
  - flowerthoughts 7mo ago
    Or the Python or Typescript Agent SDK libraries: https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/agent-sdk/overview https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/agent-sdk/overview
    - joshstrange 7mo ago
      Or can you? It's my understanding that you cannot use your subscription with the Agent SDK, that's what the docs say: > Unless previously approved, Anthropic does not allow third party developers to offer claude.ai login or rate limits for their products, including agents built on the Claude Agent SDK. Please use the API key authentication methods described in this document instead. Though there was that tweet [0] a while back by someone from Anthropic that just muddied the water. It's frustrating because I feel like the line between the Agent SDK and `claude -p` is not that large but one can use the subscription and one can't... or we don't know, the docs seem unambiguous but the tweet confuses things and you can find many people online saying you can, or you can't. I'd love to play around with the Agent SDK and try out some automations but it seems I can only do that if I'm willing to pay for tokens, even though I could use Claude Code to write the code "for" the Agent SDK, but not "run" the Agent SDK. Where is the line? Agent SDK is not allowed with subscription, but if I write a harness around passing data to and parsing the JSON response from `claude -p '<Your Prompt>' --output-format json` would that be allowed? If I run it on a cron locally? I literally have no idea and, not wanting my account to be banned, I'm not interested in finding out. I wish they would clarify it. [0] Twitter: https://x.com/trq212/status/2024212378402095389 https://x.com/trq212/status/2024212378402095389 XCancel: https://xcancel.com/trq212/status/2024212378402095389 https://xcancel.com/trq212/status/2024212378402095389 Text: > Apologies, this was a docs clean up we rolled out that’s caused some confusion. > Nothing is changing about how you can use the Agent SDK and MAX subscriptions! > We want to encourage local development and experimentation with the Agent SDK and claude -p. > If you’re building a business on top of the Agent SDK, you should use an API key instead. We’ll make sure that’s clearer in our docs.
harikb 7mo ago
1. If alternate UX exists, the user can easily replace them with another model as soon as it comes out. 2. All 'all-you-can-eat' plans everywhere comes with clause. Whether it is lunch at a restaurant or it is token-proxy-providers who might think of reselling Max plan to individuals at 20% markup. > Let the weirdos at Anthropic do what weirdos do, and hopefully one day their name is never mentioned again in polite society. Woof, that is a bit harsh... :) OpenAI will also face the same problem. They are doing it right now because they need to stand out in some way.
- 827a 7mo ago
  I disagree that this path is inevitable for any service provider. Case in point: Google Drive offers substantially better per-terabyte pricing for storage than Google Cloud Storage; like 100x+ cheaper. Yet, Google Drive has a beautiful API that is used by everything from the Google Drive desktop client to rclone. This is how most apps work, and this frame of thinking about the internet has worked for 40 years because of course 95% of users are going to use the frontend the company makes for their backend; but that 5% of users left on the fringe are oftentimes the most valuable, they're the ones that are going to pay Google an extra $1000/mo for 50TB of storage, and as long as the internal unit economics are good to go, Google should want that. Less edge-cases they have to deal with on drive.google.com, more revenue, all good things. I do fully expect the limits on these subscriptions to be brought down. But that's not the problem people have with Anthropic today, nor the problem we'd have with OpenAI when they have to eventually do it. That's just the way of things. The problem is: These actions by Anthropic scream: "Our internal unit economics are going nuclear and we need to do anything we can to regain control." Low-key: I think the DoW situation was an inflection point for their usage internally. It spiked up hard after that. Dario spent all of 2025 being told "you're not investing enough into compute", but really didn't listen because he wanted to be "responsible" or whatever, and now they're shopping to every provider trying to find compute and are being told that there isn't any.
  - harikb 7mo ago
    Anthropic is not stoping you from using API (pay per token). They are only saying Pro or Max 'all-you-can-eat' plans have to be used via their tools
hirako2000 7mo ago
also for economic reason. Anthropic design Claude code so they are in control regarding how token get burned. To a degree. With 3rd party, designers have not incentive to be token consumption conscious. Gemini has a 1M token context, flash can be used for free via the web interface, can't paste more than handful thousands token.
- raincole 7mo ago
  > With 3rd party, designers have not incentive to be token consumption conscious. How? If I used open code I'd hope it to not eat tokens unnecessarily so my subscription quota lasts longer. I add 'only do this if...' to every single skill I write. It's a bit of voodoo-style wishful thinking, I admit.
- 827a 7mo ago
  Agreed. What I suspect is: the dynamic model routing on CC is way stronger than people realize, and that "Percent-based usage" is intentionally vague because while it is probably measuring "200M tokens per week" or something, they don't want you asking questions about whether you're getting 200M Haiku tokens or 200M Opus tokens. A token is a token to the usage limit, where it comes from doesn't matter to the usage limit. But, to OpenCode it might, because OpenCode can just fire-and-forget everything at Opus (and probably does).
celestialcheese 7mo ago
My guess is that the telemetry data they can collect from interacting with claude code is the "secret sauce" behind a lot of the improvements we're seeing with coding models right now. Look at cursors Composer-2 release today. Clicking "accept" during plan mode, committing changes and pushing to a remote repo, etc. is a really strong reward signal. Can't collect telemetry from applications you don't control.
- samcollins 7mo ago
  Yep, I suspect this is the rationale/driver too.
- 827a 7mo ago
  Yup, agreed with this as well. Probably also why they've been investing so heavily in the desktop Claude Code experience; very hard to gather great telemetry from a terminal app.
- andreagrandi 7mo ago
  You mean their tool (I use it daily) is so bad despite all the data they collect?
  - dvfjsdhgfv 7mo ago
    Literally everyone is desperately trying to figure out why it's so bad and how to make it work consistently using harness etc. But in spite of this massive effort things always go awry after a while. Maybe in a year or two someone figures it out.
- pmarreck 7mo ago
  Yeah but they're not owed the telemetry. It's a privilege (if you convince your users to interface with your service via their client), not a right.
raincole 7mo ago
Since I discovered pi I cancelled my Claude subscription and subscribed to ChatGPT. On one hand, the competition is making miracles. On the other hand, it's pretty dooming that there is only one (1) company that keeps my agent cost reasonable.
- dvfjsdhgfv 7mo ago
  > Since I discovered pi I cancelled my Claude subscription and subscribed to ChatGPT. Sorry, what is pi and how are you using it with ChatGPT for agentic coding?
  - joshstrange 7mo ago
    > Sorry, what is pi https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono/tree/main/packages/coding-agent https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono/tree/main/packages/codin... > how are you using it with ChatGPT for agentic coding? OpenAI has publically blessed people using their subscriptions with different harnesses, like OpenCode and Pi.
  - raincole 7mo ago
    This is a better introduction to it: https://mariozechner.at/posts/2025-11-30-pi-coding-agent/ https://mariozechner.at/posts/2025-11-30-pi-coding-agent/ I have nothing against Codex's cli or OpenCode. I just found pi is sufficient for me and it's easy to understand what's going on under the hood. By ChatGPT I mean the subscription plan, not the web UI. I only use gpt-5.3-codex with pi.
  - wyre 7mo ago
    Pi.dev Extensible coding agent written in typescript. It’s exactly what you (I’m projecting) want out of Claude Code if you’re okay investing time into building your harness or prompting an agent to build it.
rvz 7mo ago
Anthropic doesn't care and it is all to look good for their IPO. They are still losing billions of dollars and will do anything to keep people hooked onto the API and will litigate against their own customers. They will even lobby against open-weight models which is their biggest threat and want to make them illegal to run in the US just for them to succeed. Anthropic are not your friends and want you to become addicted / over-reliant on Claude Code (hence the free $20 spins at the roulette until March, 27 2026) and charging others on their overpriced API.
- achompas 7mo ago
  Yes, it is true that companies often litigate against customers who violate their Terms of Service. The TOS is put into place to protect the company’s interests from user abuse. Paying customers of Claude Code don’t receive a free-use license for any desired application. They’re paying to use Claude Code. Anthropic can take steps to litigate usage outside of those terms, even if customers find that fact really annoying.
impulser_ 7mo ago
This is my theory. They don't want other harnesses to use this because it costs them more. I don't know exactly how OpenCode works, but I'm assuming when people are using this plugin they are mostly using Opus for everything while Claude Code really only uses Opus for writing the actual code. It uses Haiku and Sonnet for almost all of the tasks outside of writing code. So it hard for them to control and understand the costs of subscriptions if people are using them on different hardnesses that do things that they have no control over.
- aray07 7mo ago
  you can choose your own model in claude code and it generally defaults to Opus
  - impulser_ 7mo ago
    Yeah, but that's just the model the main agent uses. The subagents aren't Opus. They are Haiku and Sonnet. Most of the token heavy work is offloaded to subagents because of this.
samcollins 7mo ago
The business driver I assume is not lock-in on UX (as some say here) but the additional signal Anthropic gets when using their harness vs a 3P one. It makes sense to discount the price if that signal helps you improve your models, but that discount makes no sense if the user is running your model in another harness and you just get regular API usage signal.
browningstreet 7mo ago
I use both.. Claude Code memory smokes OpenCode's lack of it when memory is important.
throwaway13337 7mo ago
They're trying for the vertical integration monopoly. The times it works, it works well for the company at great cost to society. Imagine the world we'd have if comcast got to control your web browsing experience. If ISPs got started today, they'd sell the open web at API prices that no one can afford. Then sell the ISP's lock-in 'internet' for a low monthly fee. My question is why people who don't want comcast's internet think other vertical integrated lock-in is fine. Our markets game only works for the benefit of society if we have fair markets. VC-backed loss-leader dumping to starve competition model breaks the game.
kristo 7mo ago
This seems harsh and unfair. You aren’t allowed to stream Netflix through a third party streaming service because then the experience is controlled by the third party and there is no lock in to using Netflix and thus no benefit to the subsidy they give you in the plan. OpenAI is allowing it as a PR stunt and because they have seemingly unlimited cash they can throw at user growth.
bakugo 7mo ago
> they must be losing so much money on each Claude Code subscriber that if a million people all said "we're switching" they just wouldn't care. You're looking at it completely wrong. Claude Code is Anthropic's flagship product, not the API. They want to attract as many users as possible to Claude Code and lock them into their ecosystem, so they can squeeze them later. All of their questionable actions surrounding Claude Code and its subscription are ultimately in service of this goal. The subscription isn't some kind of charity, it exists specifically because they know the average user isn't willing to pay the exorbitant API prices to vibe code their groundbreaking new B2B SaaS idea, but they want to capture that market share anyway, because it's the core of their long-term strategy. The subscription arose from that: it's a form of predatory pricing designed to attract as many users as possible while they still have VC money to burn. Once that runs out and the time comes to IPO and start making real profits, they are going to increase the price drastically, and what's where the lock-in comes into play. If everyone is using some open-source alternative that natively supports every other provider on earth, they will be far less likely to continue paying for Claude specifically instead of just switching to a competitor. Not to mention, they'd also lose out on the free advertising from things like CLAUDE.md and the commit co-signing (because that's all those things are, the only reason Claude Code doesn't support AGENTS.md is because CLAUDE.md serves as an advertisement in public repositories). > like they all think they're Gods above mere mortals, serving some higher purpose, and nothing matters to them except Building the Machine God. This is all just part of their marketing strategy, and you shouldn't read too much into it.
nikcub 7mo ago
This is analogous to when Google launched Gmail with 1GB of storage and then a bunch of third-party apps cropped up that took advantage of it to use it as a generic online file storage drive. There was GMailFS[0] and Gmail Drive[1] - this is before S3, dropbox, and a time where web hosting would give you ~10MB or so of space. Google updated their ToS and shut down accounts using their service in ways they weren't intended via these apps - because obviously the 1GB of storage was a loss-leader into Google's ecosystem (and it worked) Same thing today - "unauthorized" third parties taking advantage of a loss-leading[2] deal - complete with similar trademark violations to boot[3]. Google have more cash to burn in the AI race so can be more forgiving today in how their codex plans are used. Anthropic are still a private company and can't. [0] https://handwiki.org/wiki/GmailFS https://handwiki.org/wiki/GmailFS [1] https://techcrunch.com/2005/07/31/profile-gmail-drive/ https://techcrunch.com/2005/07/31/profile-gmail-drive/ [2] it's a big q just how large a loss leader the max plans are considering a fixed harness, prompt caching etc. but point still stands. you're getting up to $5k of RRP tokens for $200 [3] Clawd Bot -> OpenClaw
- georgemcbay 7mo ago
  > Google have more cash to burn in the AI race so can be more forgiving today in how their codex plans are used. Even despite the larger cash pile to burn, Google is in the middle of their own controversy around what many feel is a rug-pull around how Gemini "AI credits" work and are priced. See: https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/12/users_protest_as_google_antigravity/ https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/12/users_protest_as_goog... https://old.reddit.com/r/google_antigravity/comments/1rv4cec/weekly_quotas_known_issues_support_march_16/ https://old.reddit.com/r/google_antigravity/comments/1rv4cec... etc
- rudedogg 7mo ago
  This is more like if Google took action against Thunderbird and open-source email clients
  - wavemode 7mo ago
    No, because in those cases you're still a user of gmail. When you tell people your email address, or send people email, and it contains "@gmail.com", you're still implicitly advertising for Google. From Google's perspective that's still worth the few KB per day of bandwidth and 1GB storage (which the vast majority of people never use the entirety of, anyway) they're giving away. But when you use gmail accounts as file storage, you're both a higher-cost user and also doing nothing to further Google's ecosystem (since the email address itself is probably not being used for genuine messaging at all).
WhyNotHugo 7mo ago
One possible factor is reinforcement training: by forcing users to use their own CLI, they gather usage and training data which serves as feedback training data for their own tools. Users operating with a different agent with different tool implementation and quirks might poison that data. The sibling reply given by strictnein is very likely a factor.
boxingdog 7mo ago
[dead]
otabdeveloper4 7mo ago
Eventually (several years max) there will self-hosted Chinese LLM devices with the quality of cloud models for the price of a smartphone. The only sticky part that will remain will be the UX of particular harness and post-training flavors.
phist_mcgee 7mo ago
>I seriously get the feeling that Anthropic doesn't just not care about their users AI companies would have to be one of the worst for actually caring about their user's health and wellbeing.
paxys 7mo ago
You are wayy overestimating the negative press. HN commenters are a negligible fraction of Anthropic's user base, and I can guarantee that even people here will forget about this and go right back to using Claude Code in a couple days when there is something else to be outraged about. The company needs to do what is best for its business.
- Esophagus4 7mo ago
  Pretty much this. When Anthropic broke the OAuth flow from OpenCode, I switched back to Claude Code. I like Anthropic’s models better than OpenCode + GPT/Gemini.
websap 7mo ago
There are a plethora of models that you can use with open code. Anthropic is well within its rights to limit third-party usage of services that violate the TOS. As a Claude code user I’d much rather have the very best experience on Claude code than the largest supportability matrix for Anthropic models.
- serf 7mo ago
  as someone who has used codex/claude-code/opencode I can confidently say that "the very best experience on Claude" is not the one that Anthropic provides software for.
- 827a 7mo ago
  Well, the challenge for Anthropic's users is: While Anthropic has fantastic coding models right now, they have a bad harness in claude code and the claude desktop app. The best experience using Anthropic's models is OpenCode and Cursor. This wasn't true ~3 months ago, and may return to being untrue in ~3 months, that's how fast these things change, but right now this is the case. Unfortunately, Anthropic models in OpenCode/Cursor are tremendously expensive; and that gets at some of the leading theories on why CC has degraded recently; that Anthropic has been forced to dynamically route more of the agentic process onto Sonnet/Haiku, or reduce the Opus thinking budget. For all of these reasons, currently, the meta is ChatGPT subscription on Codex or OpenCode. But, again, these things change every few weeks. I don't think this is as clean-cut as just saying "Anthropic is in their rights" etc. Of course, they are, to whatever degree they are; the bigger problem is that you've got $100/mo and $200/mo Claude subscriptions who are actively saying "the $20/mo Codex subscription is better in every way", possibly because of these thinking budget/routing changes people suspect have happened this month. In other words: Anthropic is at-capacity after the DoW incident, they need to load shed, and they've chosen to harm their high-paying power users and Enterprise over just temporarily slowing growth a bit by hurting the $20/mo plan. And, frankly, they might be right: because for every $200/mo user that jumps over to ChatGPT, half of them will be back once Anthropic can scale capacity, and if they can gain 20x $20/mo users who only use half their sub, that's a win.
KronisLV 7mo ago
> OpenCode is awesome. Claude Code is nothing special at all. It's weird, my experience is the exact opposite: OpenCode had the weirdest issue of interpreting C:\Users\some-user\Documents\Projects\... as a bunch of escaped characters without \ and created some trash files even with Anthropic models. Before then, OpenCode had the issue of me copying multiple lines of text into it from clipboard somehow quitting the program (crashing?) and then making every following line (of text, notes etc.) be passed to the shell directly. Happened in both Terminal app and also Git Bash on Windows. It might just be that Windows is a shit OS, but Claude Code doesn't really seem to exhibit those problems (and neither does Codex, in their defense). I hope OpenCode has fixed at least some of those since. > Let the weirdos at Anthropic do what weirdos do, and hopefully one day their name is never mentioned again in polite society. What an odd thing to say. Maybe I'm out of the loop about some drama (aside from Anthropic having a bit of a spine in regards to govt. while being otherwise flawed still), but pretty happy with my Max subscription, they even fixed the Code GUI mode in their Electron app recently, it finally feels usable and I don't just need to juggle 4 terminal sessions.
3abiton 7mo ago
> I'm really struggling to understand how Anthropic is benefited by not allowing this. Its bad PR for no good reason. The only thing I can figure is that Claude Code is hemorrhaging money, they're too afraid to actually enforce reasonable token limits, and the only thing that's keeping it from totally bankrupting the company tomorrow is: controlling the harness and having the harness dynamically route toward Haiku or Sonnet over Opus when Opus is overloaded, without telling the user. I have noticed odd behavior when choosing a model, it automatically switches after sometime. Some tasks do not require lots of power, so when I select Haiku, few prompts later, I see Sonnet popping up in the cost/spending. Happened few times.
kaycey2022 7mo ago
I don't think it's any of that. It's plain as day to see that as the owners of the API they can see every request, collect every metric they need. The routing can easily be done in the API gateway layer and doesn't depend on the harness at all. Good harnesses are not performing acrobatics around user behaviour to improve anything. They just understand the provider API very well and translate tool calls really well. Then they get out of the way to let the magic happen. This is about controlling user behaviour, resisting standardisation efforts, to keep subscribers hooked to their models. If they keep their users on claude code, they don't have to adapt to evolving harness standards when shown increased usage across different harnesses. They will try to keep everything on their terms, on their poor quality of engineering, and the users accustomed to claude behaviour will be left with no quick way to switch to other models. This strategy will keep working as long as they own a top tier frontier model with enough marketing hype behind it to blind unsophisticated users.
solenoid0937 7mo ago
This is such an incredibly entitled take You are given a loss leader product under certain terms for a very cheap price. The ONLY condition is that you respect the terms. Instead of doing that you go off on this rant about how you shouldn't have to respect the terms and the company is evil for imposing terms at all! The Claude API is RIGHT THERE if you don't want to use the loss leader. Where is this entitlement coming from!? Sure Codex lets you do this for now, but VC money is finite and people won't let you abuse their free loss leaders forever.

by 827a 7mo ago

0x3f 7mo ago

They want lock-in for their UI/X, presumably. If Photoshop ran in the cloud, I doubt Adobe would let you make an alternative front-end either. Not that I'm sympathetic to them.

simple10 7mo ago
Yes, this. They need as much lock-in as possible before IPO. Most likely less about cash flow and more about IPO story telling. We'll know for sure when they add full OpenClaw-like features to Claude Code like remote channels & heartbeat support. Both are partially implemented already.
stanac 7mo ago
> If Photoshop ran in the cloud Off topic, but there is something like that: photopea, it's free and it's good enough for my use cases (I need it once a year maybe).
- tredre3 7mo ago
  It's served from the cloud but it runs entirely on your PC (except the AI generative tools). It can't run entirely offline though, because the js, webassembly, and assets are served chunked as-needed. Saying Photopea is good enough is really underselling it. It's so far ahead of anything offered by the open-source community. I'd be so happy to pay for a fully offline version of Photopea!
theshrike79 7mo ago
Also lock-in to their harness so they can control caching on both ends and make things more profitable.

szmarczak 7mo ago

> I'm really struggling to understand how Anthropic is benefited by not allowing this. Closed ecosystem like Apple. They want you to use their tools, not someone else's.

strictnein 7mo ago

You can use OpenCode programmatically, thus turning that $200/mo Claude Code account into a very cheap Opus 4.6 API service. I don't think there's anything really to it past that.

terhechte 7mo ago
you can also use Claude Code programmatically with the `prompt` parameter in the cli.
- flowerthoughts 7mo ago
  Or the Python or Typescript Agent SDK libraries: https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/agent-sdk/overview https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/agent-sdk/overview
  - joshstrange 7mo ago
    Or can you? It's my understanding that you cannot use your subscription with the Agent SDK, that's what the docs say: > Unless previously approved, Anthropic does not allow third party developers to offer claude.ai login or rate limits for their products, including agents built on the Claude Agent SDK. Please use the API key authentication methods described in this document instead. Though there was that tweet [0] a while back by someone from Anthropic that just muddied the water. It's frustrating because I feel like the line between the Agent SDK and `claude -p` is not that large but one can use the subscription and one can't... or we don't know, the docs seem unambiguous but the tweet confuses things and you can find many people online saying you can, or you can't. I'd love to play around with the Agent SDK and try out some automations but it seems I can only do that if I'm willing to pay for tokens, even though I could use Claude Code to write the code "for" the Agent SDK, but not "run" the Agent SDK. Where is the line? Agent SDK is not allowed with subscription, but if I write a harness around passing data to and parsing the JSON response from `claude -p '<Your Prompt>' --output-format json` would that be allowed? If I run it on a cron locally? I literally have no idea and, not wanting my account to be banned, I'm not interested in finding out. I wish they would clarify it. [0] Twitter: https://x.com/trq212/status/2024212378402095389 https://x.com/trq212/status/2024212378402095389 XCancel: https://xcancel.com/trq212/status/2024212378402095389 https://xcancel.com/trq212/status/2024212378402095389 Text: > Apologies, this was a docs clean up we rolled out that’s caused some confusion. > Nothing is changing about how you can use the Agent SDK and MAX subscriptions! > We want to encourage local development and experimentation with the Agent SDK and claude -p. > If you’re building a business on top of the Agent SDK, you should use an API key instead. We’ll make sure that’s clearer in our docs.

harikb 7mo ago

1. If alternate UX exists, the user can easily replace them with another model as soon as it comes out. 2. All 'all-you-can-eat' plans everywhere comes with clause. Whether it is lunch at a restaurant or it is token-proxy-providers who might think of reselling Max plan to individuals at 20% markup. > Let the weirdos at Anthropic do what weirdos do, and hopefully one day their name is never mentioned again in polite society. Woof, that is a bit harsh... :) OpenAI will also face the same problem. They are doing it right now because they need to stand out in some way.

827a 7mo ago
I disagree that this path is inevitable for any service provider. Case in point: Google Drive offers substantially better per-terabyte pricing for storage than Google Cloud Storage; like 100x+ cheaper. Yet, Google Drive has a beautiful API that is used by everything from the Google Drive desktop client to rclone. This is how most apps work, and this frame of thinking about the internet has worked for 40 years because of course 95% of users are going to use the frontend the company makes for their backend; but that 5% of users left on the fringe are oftentimes the most valuable, they're the ones that are going to pay Google an extra $1000/mo for 50TB of storage, and as long as the internal unit economics are good to go, Google should want that. Less edge-cases they have to deal with on drive.google.com, more revenue, all good things. I do fully expect the limits on these subscriptions to be brought down. But that's not the problem people have with Anthropic today, nor the problem we'd have with OpenAI when they have to eventually do it. That's just the way of things. The problem is: These actions by Anthropic scream: "Our internal unit economics are going nuclear and we need to do anything we can to regain control." Low-key: I think the DoW situation was an inflection point for their usage internally. It spiked up hard after that. Dario spent all of 2025 being told "you're not investing enough into compute", but really didn't listen because he wanted to be "responsible" or whatever, and now they're shopping to every provider trying to find compute and are being told that there isn't any.
- harikb 7mo ago
  Anthropic is not stoping you from using API (pay per token). They are only saying Pro or Max 'all-you-can-eat' plans have to be used via their tools

hirako2000 7mo ago

also for economic reason. Anthropic design Claude code so they are in control regarding how token get burned. To a degree. With 3rd party, designers have not incentive to be token consumption conscious. Gemini has a 1M token context, flash can be used for free via the web interface, can't paste more than handful thousands token.

raincole 7mo ago
> With 3rd party, designers have not incentive to be token consumption conscious. How? If I used open code I'd hope it to not eat tokens unnecessarily so my subscription quota lasts longer. I add 'only do this if...' to every single skill I write. It's a bit of voodoo-style wishful thinking, I admit.
827a 7mo ago
Agreed. What I suspect is: the dynamic model routing on CC is way stronger than people realize, and that "Percent-based usage" is intentionally vague because while it is probably measuring "200M tokens per week" or something, they don't want you asking questions about whether you're getting 200M Haiku tokens or 200M Opus tokens. A token is a token to the usage limit, where it comes from doesn't matter to the usage limit. But, to OpenCode it might, because OpenCode can just fire-and-forget everything at Opus (and probably does).

celestialcheese 7mo ago

My guess is that the telemetry data they can collect from interacting with claude code is the "secret sauce" behind a lot of the improvements we're seeing with coding models right now. Look at cursors Composer-2 release today. Clicking "accept" during plan mode, committing changes and pushing to a remote repo, etc. is a really strong reward signal. Can't collect telemetry from applications you don't control.

samcollins 7mo ago
Yep, I suspect this is the rationale/driver too.
827a 7mo ago
Yup, agreed with this as well. Probably also why they've been investing so heavily in the desktop Claude Code experience; very hard to gather great telemetry from a terminal app.
andreagrandi 7mo ago
You mean their tool (I use it daily) is so bad despite all the data they collect?
- dvfjsdhgfv 7mo ago
  Literally everyone is desperately trying to figure out why it's so bad and how to make it work consistently using harness etc. But in spite of this massive effort things always go awry after a while. Maybe in a year or two someone figures it out.
pmarreck 7mo ago
Yeah but they're not owed the telemetry. It's a privilege (if you convince your users to interface with your service via their client), not a right.

raincole 7mo ago

Since I discovered pi I cancelled my Claude subscription and subscribed to ChatGPT. On one hand, the competition is making miracles. On the other hand, it's pretty dooming that there is only one (1) company that keeps my agent cost reasonable.

dvfjsdhgfv 7mo ago
> Since I discovered pi I cancelled my Claude subscription and subscribed to ChatGPT. Sorry, what is pi and how are you using it with ChatGPT for agentic coding?
- joshstrange 7mo ago
  > Sorry, what is pi https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono/tree/main/packages/coding-agent https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono/tree/main/packages/codin... > how are you using it with ChatGPT for agentic coding? OpenAI has publically blessed people using their subscriptions with different harnesses, like OpenCode and Pi.
- raincole 7mo ago
  This is a better introduction to it: https://mariozechner.at/posts/2025-11-30-pi-coding-agent/ https://mariozechner.at/posts/2025-11-30-pi-coding-agent/ I have nothing against Codex's cli or OpenCode. I just found pi is sufficient for me and it's easy to understand what's going on under the hood. By ChatGPT I mean the subscription plan, not the web UI. I only use gpt-5.3-codex with pi.
- wyre 7mo ago
  Pi.dev Extensible coding agent written in typescript. It’s exactly what you (I’m projecting) want out of Claude Code if you’re okay investing time into building your harness or prompting an agent to build it.

rvz 7mo ago

Anthropic doesn't care and it is all to look good for their IPO. They are still losing billions of dollars and will do anything to keep people hooked onto the API and will litigate against their own customers. They will even lobby against open-weight models which is their biggest threat and want to make them illegal to run in the US just for them to succeed. Anthropic are not your friends and want you to become addicted / over-reliant on Claude Code (hence the free $20 spins at the roulette until March, 27 2026) and charging others on their overpriced API.

achompas 7mo ago
Yes, it is true that companies often litigate against customers who violate their Terms of Service. The TOS is put into place to protect the company’s interests from user abuse. Paying customers of Claude Code don’t receive a free-use license for any desired application. They’re paying to use Claude Code. Anthropic can take steps to litigate usage outside of those terms, even if customers find that fact really annoying.

impulser_ 7mo ago

This is my theory. They don't want other harnesses to use this because it costs them more. I don't know exactly how OpenCode works, but I'm assuming when people are using this plugin they are mostly using Opus for everything while Claude Code really only uses Opus for writing the actual code. It uses Haiku and Sonnet for almost all of the tasks outside of writing code. So it hard for them to control and understand the costs of subscriptions if people are using them on different hardnesses that do things that they have no control over.

aray07 7mo ago
you can choose your own model in claude code and it generally defaults to Opus
- impulser_ 7mo ago
  Yeah, but that's just the model the main agent uses. The subagents aren't Opus. They are Haiku and Sonnet. Most of the token heavy work is offloaded to subagents because of this.

samcollins 7mo ago

The business driver I assume is not lock-in on UX (as some say here) but the additional signal Anthropic gets when using their harness vs a 3P one. It makes sense to discount the price if that signal helps you improve your models, but that discount makes no sense if the user is running your model in another harness and you just get regular API usage signal.

browningstreet 7mo ago

I use both.. Claude Code memory smokes OpenCode's lack of it when memory is important.

throwaway13337 7mo ago

They're trying for the vertical integration monopoly. The times it works, it works well for the company at great cost to society. Imagine the world we'd have if comcast got to control your web browsing experience. If ISPs got started today, they'd sell the open web at API prices that no one can afford. Then sell the ISP's lock-in 'internet' for a low monthly fee. My question is why people who don't want comcast's internet think other vertical integrated lock-in is fine. Our markets game only works for the benefit of society if we have fair markets. VC-backed loss-leader dumping to starve competition model breaks the game.

kristo 7mo ago

This seems harsh and unfair. You aren’t allowed to stream Netflix through a third party streaming service because then the experience is controlled by the third party and there is no lock in to using Netflix and thus no benefit to the subsidy they give you in the plan. OpenAI is allowing it as a PR stunt and because they have seemingly unlimited cash they can throw at user growth.

bakugo 7mo ago

> they must be losing so much money on each Claude Code subscriber that if a million people all said "we're switching" they just wouldn't care. You're looking at it completely wrong. Claude Code is Anthropic's flagship product, not the API. They want to attract as many users as possible to Claude Code and lock them into their ecosystem, so they can squeeze them later. All of their questionable actions surrounding Claude Code and its subscription are ultimately in service of this goal. The subscription isn't some kind of charity, it exists specifically because they know the average user isn't willing to pay the exorbitant API prices to vibe code their groundbreaking new B2B SaaS idea, but they want to capture that market share anyway, because it's the core of their long-term strategy. The subscription arose from that: it's a form of predatory pricing designed to attract as many users as possible while they still have VC money to burn. Once that runs out and the time comes to IPO and start making real profits, they are going to increase the price drastically, and what's where the lock-in comes into play. If everyone is using some open-source alternative that natively supports every other provider on earth, they will be far less likely to continue paying for Claude specifically instead of just switching to a competitor. Not to mention, they'd also lose out on the free advertising from things like CLAUDE.md and the commit co-signing (because that's all those things are, the only reason Claude Code doesn't support AGENTS.md is because CLAUDE.md serves as an advertisement in public repositories). > like they all think they're Gods above mere mortals, serving some higher purpose, and nothing matters to them except Building the Machine God. This is all just part of their marketing strategy, and you shouldn't read too much into it.

nikcub 7mo ago

This is analogous to when Google launched Gmail with 1GB of storage and then a bunch of third-party apps cropped up that took advantage of it to use it as a generic online file storage drive. There was GMailFS[0] and Gmail Drive[1] - this is before S3, dropbox, and a time where web hosting would give you ~10MB or so of space. Google updated their ToS and shut down accounts using their service in ways they weren't intended via these apps - because obviously the 1GB of storage was a loss-leader into Google's ecosystem (and it worked) Same thing today - "unauthorized" third parties taking advantage of a loss-leading[2] deal - complete with similar trademark violations to boot[3]. Google have more cash to burn in the AI race so can be more forgiving today in how their codex plans are used. Anthropic are still a private company and can't. [0] https://handwiki.org/wiki/GmailFS https://handwiki.org/wiki/GmailFS [1] https://techcrunch.com/2005/07/31/profile-gmail-drive/ https://techcrunch.com/2005/07/31/profile-gmail-drive/ [2] it's a big q just how large a loss leader the max plans are considering a fixed harness, prompt caching etc. but point still stands. you're getting up to $5k of RRP tokens for $200 [3] Clawd Bot -> OpenClaw

georgemcbay 7mo ago
> Google have more cash to burn in the AI race so can be more forgiving today in how their codex plans are used. Even despite the larger cash pile to burn, Google is in the middle of their own controversy around what many feel is a rug-pull around how Gemini "AI credits" work and are priced. See: https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/12/users_protest_as_google_antigravity/ https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/12/users_protest_as_goog... https://old.reddit.com/r/google_antigravity/comments/1rv4cec/weekly_quotas_known_issues_support_march_16/ https://old.reddit.com/r/google_antigravity/comments/1rv4cec... etc
rudedogg 7mo ago
This is more like if Google took action against Thunderbird and open-source email clients
- wavemode 7mo ago
  No, because in those cases you're still a user of gmail. When you tell people your email address, or send people email, and it contains "@gmail.com", you're still implicitly advertising for Google. From Google's perspective that's still worth the few KB per day of bandwidth and 1GB storage (which the vast majority of people never use the entirety of, anyway) they're giving away. But when you use gmail accounts as file storage, you're both a higher-cost user and also doing nothing to further Google's ecosystem (since the email address itself is probably not being used for genuine messaging at all).

WhyNotHugo 7mo ago

One possible factor is reinforcement training: by forcing users to use their own CLI, they gather usage and training data which serves as feedback training data for their own tools. Users operating with a different agent with different tool implementation and quirks might poison that data. The sibling reply given by strictnein is very likely a factor.

boxingdog 7mo ago

[dead]

otabdeveloper4 7mo ago

Eventually (several years max) there will self-hosted Chinese LLM devices with the quality of cloud models for the price of a smartphone. The only sticky part that will remain will be the UX of particular harness and post-training flavors.

phist_mcgee 7mo ago

>I seriously get the feeling that Anthropic doesn't just not care about their users AI companies would have to be one of the worst for actually caring about their user's health and wellbeing.

paxys 7mo ago

You are wayy overestimating the negative press. HN commenters are a negligible fraction of Anthropic's user base, and I can guarantee that even people here will forget about this and go right back to using Claude Code in a couple days when there is something else to be outraged about. The company needs to do what is best for its business.

Esophagus4 7mo ago
Pretty much this. When Anthropic broke the OAuth flow from OpenCode, I switched back to Claude Code. I like Anthropic’s models better than OpenCode + GPT/Gemini.

websap 7mo ago

There are a plethora of models that you can use with open code. Anthropic is well within its rights to limit third-party usage of services that violate the TOS. As a Claude code user I’d much rather have the very best experience on Claude code than the largest supportability matrix for Anthropic models.

serf 7mo ago
as someone who has used codex/claude-code/opencode I can confidently say that "the very best experience on Claude" is not the one that Anthropic provides software for.
827a 7mo ago
Well, the challenge for Anthropic's users is: While Anthropic has fantastic coding models right now, they have a bad harness in claude code and the claude desktop app. The best experience using Anthropic's models is OpenCode and Cursor. This wasn't true ~3 months ago, and may return to being untrue in ~3 months, that's how fast these things change, but right now this is the case. Unfortunately, Anthropic models in OpenCode/Cursor are tremendously expensive; and that gets at some of the leading theories on why CC has degraded recently; that Anthropic has been forced to dynamically route more of the agentic process onto Sonnet/Haiku, or reduce the Opus thinking budget. For all of these reasons, currently, the meta is ChatGPT subscription on Codex or OpenCode. But, again, these things change every few weeks. I don't think this is as clean-cut as just saying "Anthropic is in their rights" etc. Of course, they are, to whatever degree they are; the bigger problem is that you've got $100/mo and $200/mo Claude subscriptions who are actively saying "the $20/mo Codex subscription is better in every way", possibly because of these thinking budget/routing changes people suspect have happened this month. In other words: Anthropic is at-capacity after the DoW incident, they need to load shed, and they've chosen to harm their high-paying power users and Enterprise over just temporarily slowing growth a bit by hurting the $20/mo plan. And, frankly, they might be right: because for every $200/mo user that jumps over to ChatGPT, half of them will be back once Anthropic can scale capacity, and if they can gain 20x $20/mo users who only use half their sub, that's a win.

KronisLV 7mo ago

> OpenCode is awesome. Claude Code is nothing special at all. It's weird, my experience is the exact opposite: OpenCode had the weirdest issue of interpreting C:\Users\some-user\Documents\Projects\... as a bunch of escaped characters without \ and created some trash files even with Anthropic models. Before then, OpenCode had the issue of me copying multiple lines of text into it from clipboard somehow quitting the program (crashing?) and then making every following line (of text, notes etc.) be passed to the shell directly. Happened in both Terminal app and also Git Bash on Windows. It might just be that Windows is a shit OS, but Claude Code doesn't really seem to exhibit those problems (and neither does Codex, in their defense). I hope OpenCode has fixed at least some of those since. > Let the weirdos at Anthropic do what weirdos do, and hopefully one day their name is never mentioned again in polite society. What an odd thing to say. Maybe I'm out of the loop about some drama (aside from Anthropic having a bit of a spine in regards to govt. while being otherwise flawed still), but pretty happy with my Max subscription, they even fixed the Code GUI mode in their Electron app recently, it finally feels usable and I don't just need to juggle 4 terminal sessions.

3abiton 7mo ago

> I'm really struggling to understand how Anthropic is benefited by not allowing this. Its bad PR for no good reason. The only thing I can figure is that Claude Code is hemorrhaging money, they're too afraid to actually enforce reasonable token limits, and the only thing that's keeping it from totally bankrupting the company tomorrow is: controlling the harness and having the harness dynamically route toward Haiku or Sonnet over Opus when Opus is overloaded, without telling the user. I have noticed odd behavior when choosing a model, it automatically switches after sometime. Some tasks do not require lots of power, so when I select Haiku, few prompts later, I see Sonnet popping up in the cost/spending. Happened few times.

kaycey2022 7mo ago

I don't think it's any of that. It's plain as day to see that as the owners of the API they can see every request, collect every metric they need. The routing can easily be done in the API gateway layer and doesn't depend on the harness at all. Good harnesses are not performing acrobatics around user behaviour to improve anything. They just understand the provider API very well and translate tool calls really well. Then they get out of the way to let the magic happen. This is about controlling user behaviour, resisting standardisation efforts, to keep subscribers hooked to their models. If they keep their users on claude code, they don't have to adapt to evolving harness standards when shown increased usage across different harnesses. They will try to keep everything on their terms, on their poor quality of engineering, and the users accustomed to claude behaviour will be left with no quick way to switch to other models. This strategy will keep working as long as they own a top tier frontier model with enough marketing hype behind it to blind unsophisticated users.

solenoid0937 7mo ago

This is such an incredibly entitled take You are given a loss leader product under certain terms for a very cheap price. The ONLY condition is that you respect the terms. Instead of doing that you go off on this rant about how you shouldn't have to respect the terms and the company is evil for imposing terms at all! The Claude API is RIGHT THERE if you don't want to use the loss leader. Where is this entitlement coming from!? Sure Codex lets you do this for now, but VC money is finite and people won't let you abuse their free loss leaders forever.