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.
We're in the part of the market cycle where everyone fights for marketshare by selling dollar bills for 50 cents.
When a winner emerges they'll pull the rug out from under you and try to wall off their garden.
Anthropic just forgot that we're still in the "functioning market competition" phase of AI and not yet in the "unstoppable monopoly" phase.
all closed AI model providers will stop selling APIs in the next 2-3 years. Only open models will be available via APIs (…) Closed model providers are trying to build non-commodity capabilities and they need great UIs to deliver those. It's not just a model anymore, but an app with a UI for a purpose."
I only use LLMs through OpenRouter and switch somewhat randomly between frontier models; they each have some amount of personality but I wouldn't mind much if half of them disappeared overnight, as long as the other half remained available.
I hope you're right!
With the AI models, using a model that is “good enough but cheaper” is already an option.
I imagine the split will look a lot like b2b vs b2c in other technologies, b2b customers tend to be willing to pay for tech when it offers a competitive advantage, reduces their operating costs etc. b2c customers mostly just guzzle free slop.
A model is hard to train but it doesn't need to be hyper up to date / have a new version come out every day. Inference is cheap (it seems?) and quality is comparable. So it's unclear how expensive offerings could win over free alternatives.
I could be wrong of course. I don't have a crystal ball. I just don't think this is the same as Google.
Of course I could be entirely mistaken and there could emerge a single winner
Software always gets monopoly simply by usage. Every time a model gets used by esoteric use cases, it gets more training data (that a decentralized open weight model doesn't get) and it starts developing its moat.
They bundled it with PC hw and the vast majority of apps only ever got published for windows, and this over decades (one would argue it’s still true).
The starting point for LLMs is very different. Who would publish today a software that only integrates with chatGPT? Only a small minority.
Thus I agree, I struggle to see how a monopoly can exist here. A GPU monopoly or duopoly though, perhaps.
(For those unaware, AWS doesn't have a VM monopoly, and the market dynamics seem similar)
Most software isn't made by monopolies. More directly, enterprise-software stocks are getting hammered because AI offers them competition.
we don't, we have about 3 operating systems that have the decades of hardware and software compatibility that makes them widely usable. They're the most complex and complicated things we've built. LLMs are a few thousand lines of python hooked up to a power plant and graphics cards. This is the least defensible piece of software there ever has been.
And if the frontier continues favouring centralised solutions, they'll get it. If, on the other hand, scaling asymptotes, the competition will be running locally. Just looking at how much Claude complains about me not paying for SSO-tier subscriptions to data tools when they work perfectly fine in a browser is starting to make running a slower, less-capable model locally competitive with it in some research contexts.
It almost makes me feel sorry for Dario despite fundamentally disliking him as a person.
First of all, custom harness parallel agent people are so far from the norm, and certainly not on the $20 plan, which doesn't even make sense because you'd hit token limit in about 90 seconds.
Second, token limits. Does Anthropic secretly have over-subscription issues? Don't know, don't care. If I'm paying a blistering monthly fee, I should be able to use up to the limit.
Now I know you've got a clear view of the typical user, but FWIW, I'm just an aging hacker using CC to build some personal projects (feeling modern ofc) but still driving, no yolo or gas town style. I've reached the point where I have a nice workflow, and CC is pretty decent, but it feels like it's putting on weight and adding things I don't want or need.
I think LLMs are an exciting new interface to computers, but I don't want to be tied to someone else's idea of a client, especially not one that's changing so rapidly. I'd like to roll my own client to interface with the model, or maybe try out some other alternatives, but that's against the TOS, because: reasons.
And no, I'm not interested in paying metered corporate rates for API access. I pay for a Max account, it's expensive, but predictable.
The issue is Anthropic is trying for force users into using their tool, but that's not going to work for something so generic as interfacing with an LLM. Some folks want emacs while others want vim, and there will never be a consensus on the best editor (it's nvim btw), because developers are opinionated and have strong preferences for how they interface with computers. I switched to CC maybe a year ago and haven't looked back, but this is a major disappointment. I don't give a shit about Anthropic's credit liability, I just want the freedom to hack on my own client.
Anthropic sells two products: a consumer subscription with a UI, and an API with metered pricing. You want the API product at the subscription price. That's not a principled stance about interface freedom, it's just wanting something for less than it costs.
The nvim analogy doesn't land either. Nobody's stopping you from writing your own client. You just have to pay API rates for it, because that's the product that matches what you're describing. The subscription subsidises the cost per token by constraining how you use it. Remove the constraint, the economics break. This isn't complicated.
"I don't give a shit about Anthropic's credit liability," right, but they do, because it's their business. You're not entitled to a flat-rate all-you-can-eat API just because you find metered pricing aesthetically displeasing.
The only thing I've seen from him that I don't like is the "SWEs will be replaced" line (which is probably true and it's more that I don't like the factuality of it).
It's simple, follow the ToS
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.
I'll give GPT 5.3 codex a real try I think
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.
- 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.
> 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.
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.
Subscriptions are for first-party products (claude.com, mobile and desktop apps, Claude Code, editor extensions, Cowork).
Everything else must use API billing.
But they're stating you can only use your subscription for your personal usage, not someone else's for their usage in your product.
I honestly think they're being short sighted not just giving a "3rd party quota" since they already show users like 4 quotas.
If the fear is 3rd party agents screwing up the math, just make it low enough for entry level usage. I suspect 3rd party token usage is bi-modal where some users just need enough to kick tires, but others are min-maxing for how mamy tokens they can burn as if that's its own reward
I built a quick thing to download YouTube videos and transcribe them using with whisper, but it kind of feels clunky to summarize them using the claude CLI, even though that works.
These kinds of business decisions show how these $200.00 subscriptions for their slot/infinite jest machines basically light that $200.00 on fire, and in general how unsustainable these business models are.
Can't wait for it all to fail, they'll eventually try to get as many people to pay per token as possible, while somehow getting people to use their verbose antigentic tools that are able to inflate revenue through inefficient context/ouput shenanigans.
I used Claude back when API per token pricing was the only option and it was bad for all the usual reasons pay-per-use sucks compared to flat billing: you’re constantly thinking about cost. Like trying to watch a Netflix video with a ticker in the corner counting up the cents you owe them.
I don’t understand your claim that they want people paying per token - the subscription is the opposite of that, and it also has upsides for them as a business since most people don’t saturate the usage limits, and the business gets to stuff a bunch of value-adds on a bundle offering which is generally a more lucrative and enticing consumer pricing model.
I expect some big falls from 10 figure businesses in the next year or two as they realize this is impossible. They've built an industry on the backs of gambling addicts and dopamine feins (I'm generalizing but this is a thing with LLM users (just read vibe coders posts on twitter, they're slot machine users). Ask sports betting operators from back in 2019-2022 how it worked out for them when they tried to give out 1-2k a year to attract new customers, and then realized their customers will switch platforms in an instant they see a new shiny offer. Look up the Fanduel Founders "exit" for an insight into this.
They have to eventually stop catering to the slot machine users, which are generally paying for these hugely lossy flat rate subscriptions, and somehow get them used to a different type of payment model, or cater strictly to enterprise... Which also aren't going to tolerate paying 20k a month in tokens per developer, is my guess.... Lots of delicate pricing problems to figure out for all these companies.
When you ask it to do something and it goes off the rails, the payment plans have wildly different effects:
Subscription- oh well, let's try again with a different prompt
Pay per use- I just wasted money, this product sucks
Even if it is less common than not, it has an outsized impact on how people feel using it.
On the other hand OpenAI and GitHub Copilot have, as far as I know, explicitly allowed their users to connect to at least some third party tools and use their quotas from there, notably to OpenCode.
What is unclear to me is whether they are considering also allowing commercial apps to do that. For instance if I publish a subscription based app and my users pay for the app itself rather than for LLM inference, would that be allowed?
https://github.com/rivet-dev/sandbox-agent/tree/main/gigacod... [I saw this inShow HN: Gigacode – Use OpenCode's UI with Claude Code/Codex/Amp] (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46912682)
This can make Opencode work with Claude code and the added benefit of this is that Opencode has a Typescript SDK to automate and the back of this is still running claude code so technically should work even with the new TOS?
So in the case of the OP. Maybe Opencode TS SDK <-> claude code (using this tool or any other like this) <-> It uses the oauth sign in option of Claude code users?
Also, zed can use the ACP protocol itself as well to make claude code work iirc. So is using zed with CC still allowed?
> I don't see how they can get more clear about this, considering they have repeatedly answered it the exact same way.
This is confusing quite frankly, there's also the claude agent sdk thing which firloop and others talked about too. Some say its allowed or not. Its all confusing quite frankly.
You can’t use Claude OAuth tokens for anything. Any solution that exists worked because it pretended/spoofed to be Claude Code. Same for Gemini (Gemini CLI, Antigravity)
Codex is the only one that got official blessing to be used in OpenClaw and OpenCode, and even that was against the ToS before they changed their stance on it.
But I believe OpenAI does let you use their subscription in third parties, so not an issue anyway.
A third-party tool may be less efficient in saving costs (I have heard many of them don't hit Anthropic LLMs' caches as well).
Would you be willing to pay more for your plan, to subsidize the use of third-party tools by others?
---
Note, afaik, Anthropic hasn't come out and said this is the reason, but it fits.
Or, it could also just be that the LLM companies view their agent tools as the real moat, since the models themselves aren't.
> 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.
None of this is legal advice, I'm just trying to understand what exactly is allowed or not.
Pro and Max are both limited
""" Usage policy
Acceptable use Claude Code usage is subject to the Anthropic Usage Policy. Advertised usage limits for Pro and Max plans assume ordinary, individual usage of Claude Code and the Agent SDK """
That tool clearly falls under ordinary individual use of Claude code. https://yepanywhere.com/ is another such tool. Perfectly ordinary individual usage.
https://yepanywhere.com/sdk-auth-clarification.html
The TOS are confusing because just below that section it talks about authentication/credential use. If an app starts reading api keys / credentials, that starts falling into territory where they want a hard line no.
I can't find anything official from OpenAI, but they have worked with the OpenCode people to support using your ChatGPT subscription in OpenCode.
Banning third-party tools has nothing to do with rate limits. They’re trying to position themselves as the Apple of AI companies -a walled garden. They may soon discover that screwing developers is not a good strategy.
They are not 10× better than Codex; on the contrary, in my opinion Codex produces much better code. Even Kimi K2.5 is a very capable model I find on par with Sonnet at least, very close to Opus. Forcing people to use ONLY a broken Claude Code UX with a subscription only ensures they loose advantage they had.
Google AI Pro is like $15/month for practically unlimited Pro requests, each of which take million tokens of context (and then also perform thinking, free Google search for grounding, inline image generation if needed). This includes Gemini CLI, Gemini Code Assist (VS Code), the main chatbot, and a bunch of other vibe-coding projects which have their own rate limits or no rate limits at all.
It's crazy to think this is sustainable. It'll be like Xbox Game Pass - start at £5/month to hook people in and before you know it it's £20/month and has nowhere near as many games.
Google has made custom AI chips for 11 years — since 2015 — and inference costs them 2-5x less than it does for every other competitor.
The landmark paper that invented the techniques behind ChatGPT, Claude and modern AI was also published by Google scientists 9 years ago.
That’s probably how they can afford it.
Google already has a huge competitive advantage because they have more data than anyone else, bundle Gemini in each android to siphon even more data, and the android platform. The TPUs truly make me believe there actually could be a sort of monopoly on LLMs in the end, even though there are so many good models with open weights, so little (technical) reasons to create software that only integrates with Gemini, etc.
Google will have a lion‘s share of inferring I believe. OpenAI and Claude will have a very hard time fighting this.
Why do people keep saying inference is cheap if they're losing so much money from it?
5h allowance is somewhere between 50M-100M tokens from what I can tell.
On 200$ claude code plan you should be burning hundreds of millions of token per day to make anthropic hurt.
IMHO subscription plans are totally banking on many users underusing them. Also LLM providers dont like to say exact numbers (how much you get , etc)
But this is how every subscription works. Most people lose money on their gym subscription, but the convenience takes us.
You've described every R&D company ever.
"Synthesizing drugs is cheap - just a few dollars per million pills. They're trying to bundle pharmaceutical research costs... etc."
There's plenty of legit criticisms of this business model and Anthropic, but pointing out that R&D companies sink money into research and then charge more than the marginal cost for the final product, isn't one of them.
My point was simpler: they’re almost certainly not losing money on subscriptions because of inference. Inference is relatively cheap. And of course the big cost is training and ongoing R&D.
The real issue is the market they’re in. They’re competing with companies like Kimi and DeepSeek that also spend heavily on R&D but release strong models openly. That means anyone can run inference and customers can use it without paying for bundled research costs.
Training frontier models takes months, costs billions, and the model is outdated in six months. I just don’t see how a closed, subscription-only model reliably covers that in the long run, especially if you’re tightening ecosystem access at the same time.
Enterprise products with sufficient market share and "stickiness", will not.
For historical precedent, see the commercial practices of Oracle, Microsoft, Vmware, Salesforce, at the height of their power.
The software is free (citation: Cuda, nvcc, llvm, olama/llama cpp, linux, etc)
The hardware is *not* getting cheaper (unless we're talking a 5+ year time) as most manufacturers are signaling the current shortages will continue ~24 months.
We see vendors reducing memory in new smart phones in 2026 vs 2025 for example.
At least for the moment falling consumer tech hardware prices are over.
I recently encountered this randomly -- knives are apparently one of the few products that nearly every household has needed since antiquity, and they have changed fairly little since the bronze age, so they are used by economists as a benchmark that can span centuries.
Source: it was an aside in a random economics conversation with charGPT (grain of salt?).
There is no practical upshot here, but I thought it was cool.
Despite the high price, the Bentley factory is running 24/7 and still behind schedule due to orders placed by the rental-car company, who has nearly-infinite money.
I also think we're, as ICs, being given Bentleys meanwhile they're trying to invent Waymos to put us all out of work.
Humans are the cost center in their world model.
Finance 101 tldr explanation: The contribution margin (= price per token -variable cost per token ) this is positive
Profit (= contribution margin x cuantity- fix cost)
If the answer is not yes, then they are making money on inference. If the answer is no, the market is going to have a bad time.
The sounds like a confession that claude code is somewhat wasteful at token use.
I find that competitive edge unlikely to last meaningfully in the long term, but this is still a contrarian view.
More recently, people have started to wise up to the view that the value is in the application layer
https://www.iconiqcapital.com/growth/reports/2026-state-of-a...
What is interesting is that OpenAI and GitHub seem to be taking the opposite approach with Copilot/OpenCode, essentially treating third-party tool access as a feature that increases subscription stickiness. Different bets on whether the LTV of a retained subscriber outweighs the marginal inference cost.
Would not be surprised if this converges eventually. Either Anthropic opens up once their margins improve, or OpenAI tightens once they realize the arbitrage is too expensive at scale.
I'm rather certain, though cannot prove it, that buying the same tokens would cost at least 10x more if bought from API. Anecdotally, my cursor team usage was getting to around 700$ / month. After switching to claude code max, I have so far only once hit the 3h limit window on the 100$ sub.
What Im thinking is that Anthropic is making loss with users who use it a lot, but there are a lot of users who pay for max, but don't actually use it.
With the recent improvements and increase of popularity in projects like OpenClaw, the number of users that are generating loss has probably massively increased.
I don't entirely mind, and am just considering it an even better work:life balance, but if this is $200 worth of queries, then all I can say is LOL.
I’m messing around on document production, I can’t imagine being on a crunch facing a deadline or dealing with a production issue and 1) seeing some random fuck-up eat my budget with no take backs (‘sure thing, I’ll make a custom docx editor to open that…’), 2) having to explain to my boss why Thursday cost $500 more than expected because of some library mismatch, or 3) trying to decide whether we’re gonna spend or wait while stressing some major issue (the LLM got us in it, so we kinda need the LLM to get us out).
That’s a lot of extra shizz on top of already tricky situations.
API limits are infinite but you'd blow through $20 of usage in a maybe 1 hours or less of intense Opus use.
The subscription at $20/mo (or $200) allows for vastly more queries than $20 would buy you via API but you are constrained by hourly/weekly limits.
The $20/mo sub user will take a lot longer to complete a high token count task (due to start/stop) BUT they will cap their costs.
Their bet is that most people will not fill up 100% of their weekly usage for 4 consecutive weeks of their monthly plan, because they are humans and the limits impede long running tasks during working hours.
I dont like it either, but its not an unreasonable restriction.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Have to do everything through Azure, which is a mess to even understand.
> 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"
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).
But the big guys don’t seem interested in this, maybe some lesser known model will carve out this space
I shudder to think what the industry will look like if software development and delivery becomes like Youtubing, where the whole stack and monetization is funneled through a single company (or a couple) get to decide who gets how much money.
As an independent dev I also unfortunately don't have investors backing me to subsidize inference for my subscription plan.
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.
Maybe they are not worth building at all then. Like MoviePass wasn’t.
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?
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
Countries clarify nation policy on X. Seriously it feels like half of the EU parliament live on twitter.
Plus it's not a real clarification in anyway. It's just PR. Even if it's posted on Mastodon or Github or anywhere, I highly doubt you can use it to defend yourself if you get banned from violating their ToS.
I presume zero.. but nonetheless seems like people will take it as valid anyway.
That can be dangerous I think.
> 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.
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 ?
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?
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.
I think I agree, but it's their business to run however they like. They have competition if we don't like it.
If openclaw chews my 200/month up in 15 days... I don't get more requests for free
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.
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.
And OpenAI just told Microsoft why they shouldn't be seeing Anthropic anymore; Gpt-5.3-codex.
RIP Anthropic.
I'm more surprised by people using subscription auth for OpenClaw when its officially not allowed.
Doesn’t both count towards my usage limits the same?
Anthropic subs are not 'bulk tokens'.
It's not an unreasonable policy and it's entirely inevitable that they have to restrict.
I’m using their own SDK in my own CLI 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.
I didn’t set the limits on the plan; change those if it’s a problem, not irritate your customer base.
The issue is not that it's limited or unlimited, but rather about expected token usage across a user cohort. When you set a usage limit on something like Claude, or a gym, or a tutoring center, you need to do two things at once; set the limit high enough to attract the aspirations of your intended client base ("oh good this gym lets me go every day of the month if I want to"), but priced accurately enough so that you actually turn a profit on the average usage across most users (you ended up going 20 times the first month, but settled into 15 times a month after).
If there was suddenly a drug that you could take that would, while you slept, make your body walk to the gym and workout, so that you could max out that usage, the gym would be entitled to adjust either the pricing, the limit, or prohibit going to the gym while on the drug, given that they can't actually sustain all their members going every day.
As a correction, I've done some reading and when I said tragedy of the commons, what would fit better is a "congestion externality in a club good".
It's more buying a season pass for Disneyland, then getting told you can't park for free if you're entering the park even though free parking is included with the pass. Still not unreasonable, but brings to light the intention of the tool is to force the user into an ecosystem rather.
But 'you can't park even though the ticket includes parking' is not an appropriate analogy because 3rd party use is definitely not intended. They did not 'state one thing' and the 'disallow it'.
This is a pretty straight forward case of people using their subscription for 'adjacent' use, and Anthropic being more explicit about it.
There's nothing fancy going on here.
Sonnet 4.6 in CC doesn’t behave the same way as Sonnet 4.6 in Antigravity.
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.
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.
you just need to inspect the network traffic with Claude code and mimic that
The feature allows the LLM to edit the context. For example, you can "compact" just portions of the conversation and replace it with a summary. Anthropic can see that the conversation suddenly doesn't share the same history as previous API calls.
In fact, I ported the feature to Claude Code using tweakcc, so it literally _is_ Claude Code. After a couple days they started blocking that with the same message that they send when they block third party tools.
There are lots of ways they could be doing this. And remember again, if they get you, they don’t have to tell you how they got you (so you might not be able to even glean information in return for the $200 you’d be losing).
Sure the internet has hundreds of thousands of super smart coders, but the subset who are willing to throw money and credit cards down the drain in order to maintain a circumvention strategy for something like this is pretty low. I’m sure a few people will figure it out, but they won’t want to tell anyone lest Anthropic nerf their workaround, so I doubt that exploits of this will become widespread.
And if you’re Anthropic, that’s probably good enough.
Exactly something I said too. There are projects which can do this and hook natively to opencode and even its sdk/api.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47069299#47070204 (I list a project which does this)
I really don't know how anthropic can somehow detect something like this.
I am not sure how they can detect this. I can be wrong, I usually am but I think its still possible to use CC etc. even after this change if you really wanted to
But at this point, to me the question of GP that is that is it even worth it is definitely what I am thinking?
I think not. There are better options out there, they mentioned mistral and codex and I think kimi also supports maybe GLM/z.ai as well
I would think that different tools would probably have different templates for their prompts?
OpenAI will adjust, their investors will not allow money to be lost on ”being nice” forever, not until they’re handsomely paid back at least.
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 feels more spontaneous, meritocratic and organic.
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, the OpenAI researcher who "committed suicide" after trying to warn everyone about the stolen IP.
I can see right through OpenAI's conniving tactics trying to slander Anthropic, trying to present themselves as the good guys after their OpenClaw acquisition. Trying to leverage their influence over HN. Not pretty.
Can’t this restriction for the time being be bypassed via -p command line flag?
In the OP's case, there is no motivation for the LLM to perform a Search.
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.
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.
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 :)
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?
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?
Unfortunately neither political party can get all of the above.
That is...not how it works. People self-hosting don't look at their electricity bill.
So, which two parties could they be referring to? The Republicans and the Freedom Caucus?
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.
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.)
Allows them to optimize their clients and use private APIs for exclusive features etc. and there’s really no reason to bootstrap other wannabe AI companies who just stick a facade experience in front of Anthropic’s paying customer.
Look at your token usage of the last 30 days in one of the JSON files generated by Claude Code. Compare that against API costs for Opus. Tell me if they are eating losses or not. I'm not making a point, actually do it and let me know. I was at 1 million. I'm paying 90 EUR/m. That means I'm subsidizing them (paying 3-4 times what it would cost with the API)! And I feel like I'm a pretty heavy user. Although people running it in a loop or using Gas Town will be using much more.
Over 9 days I would have spent roughly $63 dollars on Codex with 11.5M input tokens plus 141M cached input tokens and 1.3M output tokens.
That roughly mirrors the $100-200/wk in API spending that drove me to the subscription.
| Category | Tokens | Rate (/1M) | Estimated Cost |
|---|---:|---:|---:|
| Input (uncached) | 11,568,331 | $1.75 | $20.24 |
| Cached input | 141,566,720 | $0.175 | $24.77 |
| Output | 1,301,078 | $14.00 | $18.22 |
| Total | 154,436,129 | — | $63.23 |
It makes sense though for heavy use.
Especially as they are subsidized.
I don’t think Anthropic has any desire to be some B2C platform, they want high paying reliable customers (B2B, Enterprise).
Cloud goes on the books as recurring revenue, not one-off; even though it's in principle elastic, in practice if I pay for a VM today I'll usually pay for one tomorrow.
(I don't have the numbers but the vast majority of cloud revenue is also going to be pre-committed long-term contracts from enterprises.)
> I don’t think Anthropic has any desire to be some B2C platform
This is the best line of argument I can see. But still not clear to me why my OP doesn't apply for enterprise, too.
Maybe the play is just to force other companies to become MCPs, instead of enabling them to have a direct customer relationship.