Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use
code.claude.com452 points by theahura 10 hours ago
452 points by theahura 10 hours ago
Reading these comments aren't we missing the obvious?
Claude Code is a lock in, where Anthropic takes all the value.
If the frontend and API are decoupled, they are one benchmark away from losing half their users.
Some other motivations: they want to capture the value. Even if it's unprofitable they can expect it to become vastly profitable as inference cost drops, efficiency improves, competitors die out etc. Or worst case build the dominant brand then reduce the quotas.
Then there's brand - when people talk about OpenCode they will occasionally specify "OpenCode (with Claude)" but frequently won't.
Then platform - at any point they can push any other service.
Look at the Apple comparison. Yes, the hardware and software are tuned and tested together. The analogy here is training the specific harness,caching the system prompt, switching models, etc.
But Apple also gets to charge Google $billions for being the default search engine. They get to sell apps. They get to sell cloud storage, and even somehow a TV. That's all super profitable.
At some point Claude Code will become an ecosystem with preferred cloud and database vendors, observability, code review agents, etc.
???
Use an API Key and there's no problem.
They literally put that in plain words in the ToS.
Using an API key is orders of magnitude more expensive. That's the difference here. The Claude Code subscriptions are being heavily subsidized by Anthropic, which is why people want to use their subscriptions in everything else.
It might be some confirmation bias here on my part but it feels as if companies are becoming more and more hostile to their API users. Recently Spotify basically nuked their API with zero urgency to fix it, redit has a whole convoluted npm package your obliged to use to create a bot, Facebook requires you to provide registered company and tax details even for development with some permissions. Am I just old man screaming at cloud about APIs used to being actually useful and intuitive?
They put no limits on the API usage, as long as you pay.
Here, they put limits on the "under-cover" use of the subscription. If they can provide a relatively cheap subscription against the direct API use, this is because they can control the stuff end-to-end, the application running on your system (Claude Code, Claude Desktop) and their systems.
As you subscribe to these plans, this is the "contract", you can use only through their tools. If you want full freedom, use the API, with a per token pricing.
For me, this is fair.
> If they can provide a relatively cheap subscription against the direct API use
Except they can't. Their costs are not magically lower when you use claude code vs when you use a third-party client.
> For me, this is fair.
This is, plain and simple, a tie-in sale of claude code. I am particularly amused by people accepting it as "fair" because in Brazil this is an illegal practice.
> This is, plain and simple, a tie-in sale of claude code. I am particularly amused by people accepting it as "fair" because in Brazil this is an illegal practice
I am very curious what is particularly illegal about this. On the sales page nowhere do they actually talk about the API https://claude.com/pricing
Now we all know obviously the API is being used because that is how things work, but you are not actually paying a subscription for the API. You are paying for access to Claude Code.
Is it also illegal that if you pay for Playstation Plus that you can't play those games on an Xbox?
Is it illegal that you can't use third party netflix apps?
I really don't want to defend and AI company here but this is perfectly normal. In no other situation would we expect access to the API, the only reason this is considered different is because they also have a different service that gives access to the API. But that is irrelevant.
I've heard they actually cache the full Claude Code system prompt on their servers and this saves them a lot of money. Maybe they cache the MCP tools you use and other things. If another harness like Opencode changes that prompt or adds significantly to it, that could increase costs for them.
What I don't understand is why start this game of cat and mouse? Just look at Youtube and YT-DLP. YT-DLP, and the dozens of apps that use it, basically use Youtube's unofficial web API and it still works even after Youtube constantly patches their end. Though now, YT-DLP has to use a makeshift JS interpreter and maybe even spawn Chromium down the line.
> Except they can't. Their costs are not magically lower when you use claude code vs when you use a third-party client.
I don't have a dog in this fight but is this actually true? If you're using Claude Code they can know that whatever client-side model selection they put into it is active. So if they can get away with routing 80% of the requests to Haiku and only route to Opus for the requests that really need it, that does give them a cost model where they can rely on lower costs than if a third-party client just routes to Opus for everything. Even if they aren't doing that sort of thing now, it would be understandable if they wanted to.
It (CC) does have a /models command, you can still decide to route everything to Opus if you just want to burn tokens I guess it's not default so most wouldn't, but still, people willing to go to a third party client are more likely that kind of power user anyway
They still have the total consumption under their control (*bar prompt caching and other specific optimizations) where in the past they even had different quotas per model, it shouldn't cost them more money, just be a worse/different service I guess
That’s not how Claude Code works. It’s not like a web chatbot with a layer that routes based on complexity of request.
While the cost may not be lower the price certainly can be if they are operating like any normal company and adding margin.
> Their costs are not magically lower when you use claude code vs when you use a third-party client.
If subsidizing that offering is a good hook to get higher paying API users on board, then some of that cost is a customer aquisition cost, whereas the cost to them of providing the API doesn't have the same proportion that they can justify as a customer acquisition cost.
I absolutely have zero concerns about their cost to acquire new customers. As a (former) customer, all I am concerned is the freedom to consume the service I am paying for however I see fit.
Is there any service in the world that gives you complete freedom on how you consume it? I can’t think of one.
Netflix: limits number of devices and stream quality and offline use.
AWS: does not allow any number of applications (spamming, crypto mining, adult content)
Airlines: do not allow smoking, boom boxes
Is there any service that gives complete freedom?
I think what most people don't realize is running an agent 24/7 fully automated is burning a huge hole in their profitability. Who even knows how big it is. It could be getting it on the 8/9 figures a day for all we know.
There's this pervasive idea left over from the pre-llm days that compute is free. You want to rent your own H200x8 to run your Claude model, that's literally going to cost $24/hour. People are just not thinking like that. I have my home PC, it does this stuff I can run it 24/7 for free.
there are usage limits preventing you from running it 24/7 on all subscriptions tiers
I understand you mean for free in the sense that you don't pay a third party to use it, however let's no forget that you still use the power grid and that's not free. Also worth to note that energy prices have increased worldwide.
Depending on utilisation and good use of low-power or sleep (or full off) states when things aren't actively processing, it can still be a _lot_ cheaper to run things at home than on a rented service. Power costs have increased a lot in recent years, but so have compute-per-watt ratios and you are not paying the that indirect compute price when the processors are asleep or off whereas with subscription access to LLMs you are paying at least the base subscription each month even if you don't use it at all in that period. Much the same as the choice between self-hosting an open-source project or paying for a hosted instance - and in both cases people don't tend to consider the admin cost (for some of us the admin is “play time”!) so the self-hosted option it does practically feel free.
Coder doing the coding should use subscription, and now they ban the choice of your preferred ide for agentc coding. API is for automation not coding. I'm going to cancel their subscription today, I already use codex with opencode.
Sure it's $24/hour, but it'll crank through tens of thousands of tokens per second --- those beefy GPUs are meant for large amounts of parallel workflow. You'll never _get_ that many tokens for a single request. That's why the mathematics work when you get dozens or hundreds of people using it.
No. The sauce is in KV caching: when to evict, when to keep, how to pre-empt an active agent loop vs someone who are showing signs of inactivity at their pc, etc.
This is honestly the key difference here. I’m morally okay with using Claude Max Whatever with something like OpenCode because it’s literally the same thing from the usage pattern perspective. Plugging Nanoclaw into it is a whole another thing.
It probably doesn't help that the creator of OpenClaw just got hired by Anthropic's competitor.
This sounds like engineering, finance, and legal got together and decided they were in an untenable position if OpenAI started nudging OpenClaw to burn even more tokens on Anthropic (or just never optimize) + continually updated workarounds to using subscription auth. But I'm sure OpenAI would never do something like that...
At the end of the day, it's the same 'fixed price plan for variable use on a constrained resource' cellular problem: profitability becomes directly linked to actual average usage.
I don't see how it's fair. If I'm paying for usage, and I'm using it, why should Anthropic have a say on which client I use?
I pay them $100 a month and now for some reason I can't use OpenCode? Fuck that.
You aren't paying for usage, you are paying for the product that the subscription is offered to. If you are paying for usage, well, that's their billed by token-usage API plan, which they are quite happy for you to use with any client you want.
Even worse, if I'm paying a subscription for the product, and I don't want to use the product, what's it to them?
You are free to not use it. You are not free to use the API provided specifically for the product, which you are not explicitly paying for, for a different product.
You can of course use OpenCode or any other project with the API, which is also offered as a separate product. People just don't want to do that because it's not subsidized, ie. more expensive. But the entire reason it's subsidized is that Anthropic can use the data to improve their product.
> But the entire reason it's subsidized is that Anthropic can use the data to improve their product.
This is grade A, absolute crap. It's subsidized because everyone else is subsidizing it, and everyone is doing it because they are trying to lock their consumer share.
The solution is quite simple. Just get the FTC to forbid tie-in sales so that we don't get the huge corporations using their infinite resources to outlive the competition. Anthropic/Amazon/Google/OpenAI/Facebook can offer any type of service they want, but if the access to the API costs $X when offered standalone, then that is the baseline price for anything that depends on the API to work.
I'm fine with this as well. I just dislike everyone here presenting it like this is Anthropic being unreasonable. Given the product that is offered and why it's being offered, this is completely reasonable to do.
I don't use the Anthropic subscriptions either.
Do you not understand that they run the regular subscription at a huge loss? In exchange they require you to stick with Claude Code.
You are free to use the API.
Stop giving money to the company that doesn't give you what you want.
It is important that the company knows why they are losing customers, though.
Internal sales data is probably a lot more effective and attended to than HN posts.
I canceled my Claude subscription (other reasons) and they had an "exit interview" question of why you canceled. They know why.
> If I'm paying for usage
You are not paying for usage. You are paying for usage via their application.
If their business plan is based on how quickly a human can enter requests and react to the results, and Claude Code is optimized for that, why should you be allowed to use an alternative client that e.g. always tries to saturate the token limits?
Btw API is not for coding, it's designed for pipelines, automation, products. They just kill competition making better software like opencode.
But a) I'm not doing that and b) they can just ban that, like they have rate limits. Why ban OpenCode?
They have rate limits, but they also want to control the nozzle, and not all their users use all their allocation all the time.
In reality, heavy subscription users are subsidized by light subscription users. The rate limits aren't everything.
If agent harnesses other than Claude Code consume more tokens than average, or rather, if users of agent harnesses other than CC consume more tokens than average, well, Anthropic wouldn't be unhappy if those consumers had to pay more for their tokens.
> If agent harnesses other than Claude Code consume more tokens than average, or rather, if users of agent harnesses other than CC consume more tokens than average
Do they, though?
The speculative reasoning I've seen is that they have optimizations in their CC client that reduces their costs. If that's true, I think it's fair that they can limit subscription usage to their client. If you don't want those optimizations and prefer more freedom, use the API.
They rather have yolo permissions to run arbitrary code on your machine and phone home all the time, then opencode having it and phoning home all the time.
Now just imagine the rug-pull if you ever get really dependent on the product.
Read the ToS, you are paying to use their products. If you want to use other products that integrate with the Anthropic LLMs they offer a product which is the API. You can use Opencode by connecting your API and being charged per token.
Doesn't that make sense? If you use it more you get charged more, if you use it less you get charged less.
But you understand that they changed the ToS today, and that's what I'm complaining about, right? "Read the ToS" isn't an answer to "I don't like this ToS change".
I didn't see today's ToS change. But this was always against ToS. OpenClaw specifically is built against tech that breaks ToS.
Probably the ToS change was to make it more clear.
To be fair, the developer is the one breaking the ToS in the most significant way, breaking boilerplate reverse engineering clauses.
But the user also is very aware that they are doing something funny, in order to authenticate, the user is asked to authorize Claude Code, n ot Opencode or OpenClaw, it's clearly a hack and there is no authorization from Anthropic to OpenClaw, and you are not giving Anthropic authorization to give access to OC, the user asks Anthropic to give access to Claude Code, the only reason this works is because OC is pretending to be Claude Code.
The bottom line issue is that as a user you are paying for a subscription to a package that includes an expected usage. That package is not metered, but it is given on the condition that you will use it as it is expected to be used, by chatting manually with the chatbot, which results in a reasonable expected token usage. By using a program that programatically calls the chat interface, the token consumption increases beyond what was part of the original deal, and so the price should be different.
A similar scenario would be if you go to an all you can eat buffet, you pay for a single person, but then you actually unload an army of little clones that start eating the whole buffet. Technically it was an all you can eat buffet and you paid the price right? Well no, come on, don't play dumb.
Sure, that's why I'm cancelling my max subscription because I'm tied to opencode :)
Their subscriptions aren't cheap, and it has nothing really to do with them controlling the system.
It's just price differentiation - they know consumers are price sensitive, and that companies wanting to use their APIs to build products so they can slap AI on their portfolio and get access to AI-related investor money can be milked. On the consumer-facing front, they live off branding and if you're not using claude code, you might not associate the tool with Anthropic, which means losing publicity that drives API sales.
It would be less of an issue if Claude-Code was actually the best coding client, and would actually somehow reduce the amount of tokens used. But it's not. I get more things done with less tokens via OpenCode. And in the end, I hit 100% usage at the end of the week anyway.
The problem is incentives. The organization selling the per-token model doesn't have the incentive, at scale to have you reduce token consumption. Other technologies do, hence adding value.
It doesn't really make sense to me because the subscriptions have limits too.
But I agree they can impose whatever user hostile restrictions they want. They are not a monopoly. They compete in a very competitive market. So if they decide to raise prices in whatever shape or form then that's fine.
Arbitrary restrictions do play a role for my own purchasing decisions though. Flexibility is worth something.
I don't and would never pay for an LLM, but presumably they also want for force ads down your throat eventually, yea? Hard to do if you're just selling API access.
But the idea of an API is more to encourage creativity and other people/companies building products and services on or around your systems. This used to be seen as a positive as it would mean you were an important cog in other peoples products and so more users, exposure, brand awareness etc.
Anthropic do of course sell API access and you can of course use any product with it.
Compared to the heavily subsidized subscriptions, I don't think API is sold at loss.
Also why would you create a throwaway for this question? Are you trying to rage bait?
> Also why would you create a throwaway for this question? Are you trying to rage bait?
You should never question anyone's route to privacy :)
> Are you trying to rage bait?
If you have to ask, it's probably not rage bait. I'm just too lazy to come up with a username.
Every garden eventually becomes a walled garden once enough people are inside.
And if you don't guard your garden and let the whole third world in, your garden becomes a junkyard.
What a weird metaphor for a company which most likely wants nothing more than growing markets.
Spotify are probably reacting to https://annas-archive.li/blog/backing-up-spotify.html where basically the whole archive was downloaded
Can you sell ads via api? If answer is no then this “feature” would be at the bottom of the list
They can sell API access via transparent pricing.
Instead, many, many websites (especially in the music industry) have some sort of funky API that you can only get access to if you have enough online clout. Very few are transparent about what "enough clout" even means or how much it'd cost you, and there's like an entire industry of third-party API resellers that cost like 10x more than if you went straight to the source. But you can't, because you first have to fulfill some arbitrary criteria that you can't even know about ahead of time.
It's all very frustrating to deal with.
Of course they can [1].
Though, in this case, you get free API access to the model.
Plus, use of the API is a way to avoid ads. So double-strike against good/available APIs.
There is a world where approaches like HTTP 402 are implemented to monetize API usage.
Please get this token signed by our ad partner to enable your next ten requests.
I think that these companies are understanding that as the barrier to entry to build a frontend gets lower and lower, APIs will become the real moat. If you move away from their UI they will lose ad revenue, viewer stats, in short the ability to optimize how to harness your full attention. It would be great to have some stats on hand and see if and how much active API user has increased decreased in the last two years, as I would not be surprised if it had increased at a much faster pace than in the past.
> the barrier to entry to build a frontend gets lower
My impression is the opposite: frontend/UI/UX is where the moat is growing because that's where users will (1) consume ads (2) orchestrate their agents.
I agree with you - we are saying the same thing, by restricting their API or making less developer friendly, they want you to be captive in their UI. This might not be true for Anthropic or OpenAI - another child commenter made a comment about ads in CLI, I would not be surprised if in a while we will have product placements in LLM responses exactly as we have it in movies - not a plain ad but just a slightly less subliminal suggestion.
It’s objectively easier to build a frontend now and therefore that moat is disappearing. What you can argue is the moat is in incumbent advantage at the UI layer, not the UI itself.
Everyone has heard the word "enshittification" at this point and this falls in line. But if you haven't read the book [0] it's a great deep dive into the topical area.
But the real issue is that these companies, once they have any market leverage, do things in their best interest to protect the little bit of moat they've acquired.
APIs leak profit and control vs their counterpart SDK/platforms. Service providers use them to bootstrap traffic/brand, but will always do everything they can to reduce their usage or sunset them entirely if possible.
Given the Cambridge Analytica scandal, I don’t take too much issue to FB making their APIs a little tougher to use
I don't it's particularly hard to figure it out: APIs have been particularly at risk of being exploited for negative purposes due the explosion of AI powered bots
I’m predicting that there would be a new movement to make everything an MCP. It’s now easier to consume an api by non technical people.
Facebook doing that is actually good, to protect consumers from data abuse after incidents like cambridge analytica. They are holding businesses who touches your personal data responsible.
> Facebook doing that is actually good, to protect consumers from data abuse after incidents like cambridge analytica.
There is nothing here stopping cambridge analytica from doing this again, they will provide whatever details needed. But a small pre launch personal project work that might use a facebook publishing application can't be developed or tested without first going through all the bureaucracy.
Nevermind the non profit 'free' application you might want to create on the FB platform, lets say a share chrome extension "Post to my FB", for personal use, you can't do this because you can't create an application without a company and IVA/TAX documents. It's hostile imo.
Before, you could create an app, link your ToS, privacy policy etc, verify your domain via email, and then if users wanted to use your application they would agree, this is how a lot of companies still do it. I'm actually not sure why FB do this specifically.
Facebook knew very early and very well about the data harvesting that was going on at Cambridge Analytica through their APIs. They acted so incredibly slowly and not-harsh that it's IMO hard to believe that they did not implicitly support it.
> to protect consumers
We are talking about Meta. They have never, and will never, protect customers. All they protect is their wealth and their political power.
Is it? I’ve never touched Facebook api, but it sounds ridiculous that you need to provide tax details for DEVELOPMENT. Can’t they implement some kind of a sandbox with dummy data?
You can mock their API all you want for development and there are many pre-built options for that, but it you want to touch their systems, they're sending a very clear signal. You must be a corporate with an RBO. Seems prudent to me.
WhatsApp takes bot spam very very seriously, and as a result, there is zero bot spam.
Before you can sign up to build a WhatsApp bot, you need to jump through a million hoops, and after that, every automated message template must be vetted by Meta before it can be sent out, apple style.
I'm glad of this, because unlike SMS and other messaging platforms, WhatsApp is spam free and a pleasure to use.
WhatsApp is certainly not spam free. I get spam over WhatsApp, less than on telegram but still more than zero.
> WhatsApp is spam free and a pleasure to use.
At least here in Italy whatsapp is a spam house unless you actively update the default privacy settings in-app. There is no discernable difference between SMS and WhatsApp to spammers.
They just want people to use facebook. If you can see facebook content without being signed in they have a harder time tracking you and showing you ads.
APIs are the best when they let you move data out and build cool stuff on top. A lot of big platforms do not really want that anymore. They want the data to stay inside their silo so access gets slower harder and more locked down. So you are not just yelling at the cloud this feels pretty intentional.
This is sort of true!
Spotify in particular is just patently the very worst. They released an amazing and delightful app sdk, allowing for making really neat apps in the desktop app in 2011. Then cancelled it by 2014. It feels like their entire ecosystem has only ever gone downhill. Their car device was cancelled nearly immediately. Every API just gets worse and worse. Remarkable to see a company have only ever such a downward slide. The Spotify Graveyard is, imo, a place of singnificantly less honor than the Google Graveyard. https://web.archive.org/web/20141104154131/https://gigaom.co...
But also, I feel like this broad repulsive trend is such an untenable position now that AI is here. Trying to make your app an isolated disconnected service is a suicide pact. Some companies will figure out how to defend their moat, but generally people are going to prefer apps that allow them to use the app as they want, increasingly, over time. And they are not going to be stopped even if you do try to control terms!
Were I a smart engaged company, I'd be trying to build WebMCP access as soon as possible. Adoption will be slow, this isn't happening fast, but people who can mix human + agent activity on your site are going to be delighted by the experience, and that you will spread!
WebMCP is better IMHO than conventional APIs because it layers into the experience you are already having. It's not a separate channel; it can build and use the session state of your browsing to do the things. That's a huge boon for users.
I really hope someone from any of those companies (if possible all of them) would publish a very clear statement regarding the following question: If I build a commercial app that allows my users to connect using their OAuth token coming from their ChatGPT/Claude etc. account, do they allow me (and their users) to do this or not?
I totally understand that I should not reuse my own account to provide services to others, as direct API usage is the obvious choice here, but this is a different case.
I am currently developing something that would be the perfect fit for this OAuth based flow and I find it quite frustrating that in most cases I cannot find a clear answer to this question. I don't even know who I would be supposed to contact to get an answer or discuss this as an independent dev.
EDIT: Some answers to my comment have pointed out that the ToS of Anthropic were clear, I'm not saying they aren't if taken in a vacuum, yet in practice even after this being published some confusion remained online, in particular regarding wether OAuth token usage was still ok with the Agent SDK for personal usage. If it happens to be, that would lead to other questions I personally cannot find a clear answer to, hence my original statement. Also, I am very interested about the stance of other companies on this subject.
Maybe I am being overly cautious here but I want to be clear that this is just my personal opinion and me trying to understand what exactly is allowed or not. This is not some business or legal advice.
I don't see how they can get more clear about this, considering they have repeatedly answered it the exact same way.
Subscriptions are for first-party products (claude.com, mobile and desktop apps, Claude Code, editor extensions, Cowork).
Everything else must use API billing.
The biggest reason why this is confusing is the Claude Agent SDK[0] will use subscription/oauth credentials if present. The terms update implies that there's some use cases where that's ok and other use cases (commercial?) where using their SDK on a user's device violates terms.
Had the same question, comment below quotes their docs saying Agent SDK using oAuth token is also not allowed.
The SDK is Claude Code in a harnesss, so it works with your credentials the same way CC does.
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
How can they be clearer that the Agents SDK is not allowed?
> 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.
I agree, it'd actually be great if they did give maybe $5 or $10 worth of API tokens per month to max subscribers, since they're likely to be the most likely to actually build stuff that uses the Claude APIs.
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.
just ran into this myself. I got Claude Code to build a tool that calls Claude for <stuff>. Now I have to create a console account and do the API thing and it sucks balls.
And at that point, you might as well use OpenRouter's PKCE and give users the option to use other models..
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 think the subscription pricing exists because it’s a far more palatable way to bill people for day to day personal use.
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.
The bundle only works if it’s +EV for them. A lot of analyses (though not all - it’s complicated) say that the $200/mo bundle (and certainly the $20/mo bundle) costs more than that for most users, and the bundle is currently a loss leader. If so, then eventually prices will need to go up, and API per usage pricing will seem much more attractive.
I'm not going to say what platform but it's an agentic coding tool, I know for a fact the platform loses in the mid $200.00s on a $20.00 plan. 10:1 loss leader for customer acquisition is crazy, and they'll have to make that up in the future somehow, they're all fumbling on how to vendor lock their customers, and its not necessarily clear they're going to be able to.
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.
That's crazy. I'm already barely willing to pay $10/month on Github Copilot. A product I love. Best value for money.
If they pump it up to $200 (or to $20). I'll simply use crappier local model. It won't be as good. But I already own my gaming PC that can run local models, and electricity is cheap.
Calling LLM users "slot machine users" makes no sense and tells me that you just have an axe to grind.
Even if it more expensive, people will prefer subscription pricing over pay per use.
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.
And it also caps your maximum expenses. A subscription user don’t have to worry something goes wrong and end up with a huge bill.
If the pay-per-use cost predictable enough, it’s less of an issue. That’s how electricity works and it’s fine.
The issue with Claude Code is it’s not at all obvious how any given task or query translates to cost. I was finding some days I spent very little and other days cost a fortune despite what seemed to me to be similar levels of usage.
People 100% want subscriptions in this space.
The alternative is AWS where you need to be a billing expert to keep costs locked at $20/month.
You are talking about Anthropic and indeed compared to OpenAI or GitHub Copilot they have seemed to be the ones with what I would personally describe as a more restrictive approach.
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?
Same question here. A while ago I read rumors OpenAI might build a "Login with OpenAI" (comparable to login with Apple, Facebook, Google) so people can also use their existing sub in commercial apps. Hope it's true.
Then why does the SDK support subscription usage? Can I at least use my subscription for my own use of the SDK?
What if you wrap the service using their Agent SDK?
That should be fine, because it's still using their tooling. And this seems like the better way to go. I have a couple of tools that work like this. I think the issue is mostly 3rd party harnesses that seek to do the same as Claude Code. And it seems reasonable that Anthropic decides how you can use the subscription, because it's heavily subsidized. Get a Claude $200 sub and max out the usage limits, then compare that usage to the cost of using their API. The difference is significant, which is why people are getting multiple $200 subs rather than paying for API usage (and I have seen reports where they are cracking down on this as well.)
It literally says in the linked page it's not fine.
Okay, I was mistaken. The tooling I was speaking of uses Claude Code rather than the SDK. One uses the Zed ACP protocol. I'm not sure about the other. I should have said Claude Code rather than the SDK. For example, I can run a session through one of the tools, and then access that session directly in Claude Code. It's still Claude though. It seems the important element is that you're not using OAuth tokens from a sub to use in a different tool. If you go through Claude Code, then Claude Code is handling everything and giving your tool the output. Thanks for the correction.
Yeah, I'm designing some stuff right now and I'm having it run Claude Code headless rather than use the Agents SDK for this exact reason.
Quick question but what if I use claude code itself for the purpose?
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.
That’s very clearly a no, I don’t understand why so many people think this is unclear.
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.
Is Codex ok with any other third party applications, or just those?
Yes. You can build third party applications on top of codex app server. All open source. https://developers.openai.com/codex/app-server/
Codex app-server is the interface Codex uses to power rich clients (for example, the Codex VS Code extension). Use it when you want a deep integration inside your own product.
I think it's permissible. Zed uses it to power their Codex integration. OpenAI has been quite vocal about it.
By default, assume no. The lack of any official integration guide should be a clear sign. Even saying that you reverse-engineer Codex for apps to pretend to be Codex makes it clear that this is not an officially endorsed thing to do
Codex is Open Source though, so I wonder at what stage me adding features to Codex is different from me starting a new project and using the subscription.
But I believe OpenAI does let you use their subscription in third parties, so not an issue anyway.
But why does it matter which program consumes the tokens?
Why does it matter to the free buffet manager where do you consume the food? We may never know.
They must be getting something out of it, because we sure aren't.
They'll own entire pipeline interface, conduit, backend. Interface is what people get habitual to. If I am a regular user of Claude Code, I may not shift to competitor for 10-20% gains in cost.
Presumably because their flat rate pricing is based off their ability to manage token use via their first-party tools.
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.
But wouldn't a less efficient tool simply consume your 5-hour/weekly quota faster? There's gotta be something else, probably telemetry, maybe hoping people switch to API without fighting, or simply vendor lock-in.
Presumably most people also do not use their full quota when using the official client, whereas third-party clients could be set up to start back up every 5 hours to use 100% of the quota every day and week.
It's the whole "unlimited storage" discussion again.
> But wouldn't a less efficient tool simply consume your 5-hour/weekly quota faster?
Maybe.
First, Anthropic is also trying to manage user satisfaction as well as costs. If OpenCode or whatever burns through your limits faster, are you likely to place the blame on OpenCode?
Maybe a good analogy was when DoorDash/GrubHub/Uber Eats/etc signed up restaurants to their system without their permission. When things didn't go well, the customers complained about the restaurants, even though it wasn't their fault, because they chose not to support delivery at scale.
Second, flat-rate pricing, unlike API pricing, is the same for cached vs uncached iirc, so even if total token limits are the same, less caching means higher costs.
What if I'm only willing to pay if it support by tool of choice? Would you pay for a streaming service that enforces a certain TV brand?
Given the latest changes on Claude Code where they hide the actions
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47033622
it's likely more the other way around. They control how fast your subscription tokens are burned
> What if I'm only willing to pay if it support by tool of choice?
I don’t want to say that you won’t be missed but they will get over it.
It is pretty obviously no. API keys billed by the token, yes, Oauth to the flat rate plans no.
> 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.
If you look at this tweet [1] and in particular responses under it, it still seems to me like some parts of it need additional clarification. For instance, I have seen some people interpret the tweet as meaning using the OAuth token is actually ok for personal experimentation with the Agent SDK, which can be seen as a slight contradiction with what you quoted. A parent tweet also mentioned the docs clean up causing some confusion.
None of this is legal advice, I'm just trying to understand what exactly is allowed or not.
Read the actual ToS. What you describe is NOT allowed.
That tweet is from a product leader on Claude Code itself...
A tweet is not a ToS.
Then they should speak to legal about fixing the ToS before making public statements about their intentions with it. It won't look good to show up at arbitration and have to explain why your public comms contradict your ToS.
What flatrate?
Pro and Max are both limited
Flat rate does not imply unlimited.
What else would it mean?
That you are buying a bundle and it doesnt matter how much of the bundle you use you pay the same amount every billing period?
>A flat fee, also referred to as a flat rate or a linear rate refers to a pricing structure that charges a single fixed fee for a service, regardless of usage.
I think you're just trying to see ambiguity where it doesn't exist because the looser interpretation is beneficial to you. It totally makes sense why you'd want that outcome and I'm not faulting you for it. It's just that, from a POV of someone without stake in the game, the answer seems quite clear.
> OAuth authentication (used with Free, Pro, and Max plans) is intended exclusively for Claude Code and Claude.ai.
I think this is pretty clear - No.
So it’s forbidden to use the Claude Mac app. I would say the ToS as it is, can’t be enforced
Does https://happy.engineering/ need to use the API keys or can use oauth? It's basically a frontend for claude-cli.
It doesn't even touch auth right?
""" 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.
If it's a wrapper that invokes the `claude` binary then I believe it's fine.
Is there a way to legally or even practically prevent this? `claude` CLI execution in a shell is certainly included in the subscription - it’s the product.
Practically; yes. MMOs have been doing this kind of thing (Preventing alteration / automation of the client) for ages now.
Usually, it is already stated in their documentation (auth section). If a statement is vague, treat it as a no. It is not worth the risk when they can ban you at any time. For example, ChatGPT allows it, but Claude and Gemini do not.
Maybe I am missing something from the docs of your link, but I unfortunately don't think it actually states anything regarding allowing users to connect and use their Codex quota in third party apps.
https://x.com/thdxr/status/2013010664776683644
I can't find anything official from OpenAI, but they have worked with the OpenCode people to support using your ChatGPT subscription in OpenCode.
From TFA: “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.”
They're not asking if Claude forbids it. They're asking if OpenAI (Codex, specifically) allows it.
One set of applications to build with subscription is to use the claude-go binary directly. Humanlayer/Codelayer projects on GitHub do this. Granted those are not ideal for building a subscription based business to use oathu tokens from Claude and OpenaAI. But you can build a business by building a development env and gating other features behind paywall or just offering enterprise service for certain features like vertical AI(redpanada) offerings knowledge workers, voice based interaction(there was a YC startup here the other day doing this I think), structured outputs and workflows. There is lots to build on.
I'm only waiting for OpenAI to provide an equivalet ~100 USD subscription to entirely ditch Claude.
Opus has gone down the hill continously in the last week (and before you start flooding with replies, I've been testing opus/codex in parallel for the last week, I've plenty of examples of Claude going off track, then apologising, then saying "now it's all fixed!" and then only fixing part of it, when codex nailed at the first shot).
I can accept specific model limits, not an up/down in terms of reliability. And don't even let me get started on how bad Claude client has become. Others are finally catching up and gpt-5.3-codex is definitely better than opus-4.6
Everyone else (Codex CLI, Copilot CLI etc...) is going opensource, they are going closed. Others (OpenAI, Copilot etc...) explicitly allow using OpenCode, they explicitly forbid it.
This hostile behaviour is just the last drop.
I was underwhelmed by Opus4.6. I didn’t get a sense of significant improvement, but the token usage was excessive to the point that I dropped the subscription for codex. I am suspect that all the models are so glib that they can create a quagmire for themselves in a project. I have not yet found a satisfying strategy for non-destructive resets when the systems own comments and notes poisons new output. Fortunately, deleting and starting over is cheap.
OpenAI forces users to verify with their ID + face scan when using Codex 5.3 if any of your conversations was redeemed as high risk.
It seems like they currently have a lot of false positives: https://github.com/openai/codex/issues?q=High%20risk
I’m unsure exactly in what way you believe it has gone “down the hill” so this isn’t aimed at you specifically but more a general pattern I see.
That pattern is people complaining that a particular model has degraded in quality of its responses over time or that it has been “nerfed” etc.
Although the models may evolve, and the tools calling them may change, I suspect a huge amount of this is simply confirmation bias.
> Opus has gone down the hill continously in the last week
Is a week the whole attention timespan of the late 2020s?
We’re still in the mid-late 2020s. Once we really get to the late 2020s, attention spans won’t be long enough to even finish reading your comment. People will be speaking (not typing) to LLMs and getting distracted mid-sentence.
I would even call it mid 2020s. I think in a couple years people's attention spans will be so short they won't even finish reading comments.
Seems we're already there.
My brain trailed off after "won’t be long enough to even finish"...
That's still impressive, given your claim of being a fish...
The most impressive thing is that this looks like it is your only comment on this network ^^
ps: imafish may only be a fan of <https://mumband.bandcamp.com/track/if-i-were-a-fish>
Opus 4.6 genuinely seems worse than 4.5 was in Q4 2025 for me. I know everyone always says this and anecdote != data but this is the first time I've really felt it with a new model to the point where I still reach for the old one.
I'll give GPT 5.3 codex a real try I think
Huh… I’ve seen this comment a lot in this thread but I’ve really been impressed with both Anthropic’s latest models and latest tooling (plugins like /frontend-design mean it actually designs real front ends instead of the vibe coded purple gradient look). And I see it doing more planning and making fewer mistakes than before. I have to do far less oversight and debugging broken code these days.
But if people really like Codex better, maybe I’ll try it. I’ve been trying not to pay for 2 subscriptions at once but it might be worth a test.
I asked Codex 5.3 and Opus 4.6 to write me a macos application with a certain set of requirements.
Opus 4.6 wrote me a working macos application.
Codex wrote me a html + css mockup of a macos application that didn't even look like a macos application at all.
Opus 4.5 was fine, but I feel that 4.6 is more often on the money on its implementations than 4.5 was. It is just slower.
I asked both to help me with a hardware bug. Codex kept trying things, being sure of what the problem is every time, and every time making it worse.
Opus went off and browsed my dependencies for ten minutes, and came back and solved the problem firs try.
Funnily enough I've been using Codex 5.3 on maximum thinking for bug hunting and code reviews and it's been really good at it (it's just seem to have a completely different focus than Opus.)
I generally don't like the way codex approaches coding itself so I just feed its review comments back in to Claude Code and off we go.
I just created an OpenCode skill where both these models will talk to each other and discuss bug-finding approaches.
In my experience, two different models together works much better than one, that's why this subscription banning is distressing. I won't be able to use a tool that can use both models.
I agree with you. Codex 5.3 is good it's just a bit slower.
It is (slower), especially at xhigh setting. But if I have to redo things three times, keep confirming trivial stuff (Claude Code seems to keep changing the commands it uses to read code... once it uses "bash-read", once it uses "tree", once it uses "head" and I have to keep confirming permission), I definitely waste more time than give a command to codex (or in my case OpenCode + codex model) and come back after 10 minutes.
It's the most overrated model there is. I do Elixir development primarily and the model sucks balls in comparison to Gemini and GPT-5x. But the Claude fanboys will swear by it and will attack you if you ever say even something remotely negative about their "god sent" model. It fails miserably even in basic chat and research contexts and constantly goes off track. I wired it up to fire up some tasks. It kept hallucinating and swearing it did when it didn't even attempt to. It was so unreliable I had to revert to Gemini.
It might simply be that it was not trained enough in Elixir RL environments compared to Gemini and gpt. I use it for both ts and python and it's certainly better than Gemini. For Codex, it depends on the task.
No offense, but this is the most predicable outcome ever. The software industry at large does this over and over again and somehow we're surprised. Provide thing for free or for cheap, and then slowly draw back availability once you have dominant market share or find yourself needing money (ahem).
The providers want to control what AI does to make money or dominate an industry so they don't have to make their money back right away. This was inevitable, I do not understand why we trust these companies, ever.
because it's easier than paying $50k for local llm setup that might not last 5 years.
Well, yes. They know what they are doing. They know when given the option the consumer makes the affordable choice. I just don't have to like or condone their practices. Maybe instead of taking on billions of dollars of debt they should have thought about a business model that makes sense first? Maybe the collective "we" (consumers and investors, but especially investors) should keep it in our pants until the product is proven and sustainable?
It will be real interesting if the haters are right and this technology is not the breakthrough the investors assume it to be AFTER it is already sewn into everyone's work flows. Everyone keeps talking about how jobs will be displaced, yet few are asking what happens when a dependency is swept out from underneath the industry as a whole if/when this massive gamble doesn't pay off.
Whatever. I am squawking into the void as we just repeat history.
Or the companies can be transparent about their product roadmap. I can guarantee this enshittification was on the roadmap way before we knew about it. They let us operate under false information, that's just weak behavior.
No offense taken here :)
First, we are not talking about a cheap service here. We are talking about a monthly subscription which costs 100 USD or 200 USD per month, depending on which plan you choose.
Second, it's like selling me a pizza and pretending I only eat it while sitting at your table. I want to eat the pizza at home. I'm not getting 2-3 more pizzas, I'm still getting the same pizza others are getting.
No developer writes the same prompt twice. How can you be sure something has changed?
I regularly run the same prompts twice and through different models. Particularly, when making changes to agent metadata like agent files or skills.
At least weekly I run a set of prompts to compare codex/claude against each other. This is quite easy the prompt sessions are just text files that are saved.
The problem is doing it enough for statistical significance and judging the output as better or not.
The economic tension here is pretty clear: flat-rate subscriptions are loss leaders designed to hook developers into the ecosystem. Once third parties can piggyback on that flat rate, you get arbitrage - someone builds a wrapper that burns through $200/month worth of inference for $20/month of subscription cost, and Anthropic eats the difference.
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.
Another possibility is that more people start using open-weights AI models (which have gotten very competitive recently [1]) running on cloud computing providers, and the main competition becomes just another aspect of the cloud computing wars: AWS vs. Azure vs. Google vs. Everyone Else.
[1] As I write this, GLM-5 is ranked fifth place on the LLM Leaderboard at https://artificialanalysis.ai/leaderboards/models
these subscriptions have limits.. how could someone use $200 worth on $20/month.. is that not the issue with the limits they set on a $20 plan, and couldn't a claude code user use that same $200 worth on $20/month? (and how do i do this?)
The limits in the max subscriptions are more generous and power users are generating loss.
I'm rather certain, though cannot prove it, that buying the same tokens would cost at least 10x more if bought from API. Anecdotally, my cursor team usage was getting to around 700$ / 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.
This exactly. I think this is why Anthropic simply don’t want 3rd party businesses to max out the subscription plans by sharing them across their own clients.
I'd agree on this. I ended up picking up a Claude Pro sub and am very less than impressed at the volume allowance. I generally get about a dozen queries (including simple follow up/refinements/corrections) across a relatively small codebase, with prompts structured to minimize the parts of the code touched - and moving onto fresh contexts fairly rapidly, before getting cut off for their ~5 hour window. Doing that ~twice a day ends up getting cut off on the weekly limit with about a day or two left on it.
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.
Bumping into those limits is trivial, those 5 hour windows are anxiety inducing, and I guess the idea is to have a credit card on tap to pay for overages but…
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.
The median subscriber generates about 50% gross margin, but some subscribers use 10x the amount of inference compute as other subscribers (due to using it more...), and it's a positive skewness distribution.
The usage limit on your $20/month subscription is not $20 of API tokens (if it was, why subscribe?). Its much much higher, and you can hit the equivalent of $20 of API usage in a few days.
I think you've stated this in reverse.
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.
So I’m not allowed to use the $20 plan and max out its limits?
Max out on their terms, not yours.
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.
You can max it out via first party clients only.
I dont like it either, but its not an unreasonable restriction.
I do believe it's unreasonable. The limits are the limits, you reach them there's no more free lunch after.
Fix the limits, so the limits are reached at a rate that sustains their business.. ? obviously this WILL happen eventually when they need to pay for things.
I don't think it's a secret that AI companies are losing a ton of money on subscription plans. Hence the stricter rate limits, new $200+ plans, push towards advertising etc. The real money is in per-token billing via the API (and large companies having enough AI FOMO that they blindly pay the enormous invoices every month).
They are not losing money on subscription plans. Inference is very cheap - just a few dollars per million tokens. What they’re trying to do is bundle R&D costs with inference so they can fund the training of the next generation of models.
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.
> "just a few dollars per million tokens"
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.
OpenAI only released ChatGPT 4 years ago but…
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.
I agree that the TPUs are one of the things that are underestimated (based on my personal reading of HN).
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.
I’m not familiar with the Claude Code subscription, but with Codex I’m able to use millions of tokens per day on the $200/mo plan. My rough estimate was that if I were API billing, it would cost about $50/day, or $1200/mo. So either the API has a 6x profit margin on inference, the subscription is a loss leader, or they just rely on most people not to go anywhere near the usage caps.
I use GLM lite subscription for personal use. It is advertised as 3x claude code pro (the 20$ one).
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)
Inference might be cheap, but I'm 100% sure Anthropic has been losing quite a lot of money with their subscription pricing with power users. I can literally see comparison between what my colleagues Claude cost when used with an API key vs when used with a personal subscription, and the delta is just massive
Of course they bundle R&D with inference pricing, how else could you the recoup that investment.
The interesting question is: In what scenario do you see any of the players as being able to stop spending ungodly amounts for R&D and hardware without losing out to the competitors?
In the scenario where that market collapses, ie when we stop making significant gains with new models. It might be a while, though, who knows.
I wonder how many people have a subscription and don’t fully utilize it. That’s free money for them, too.
The trick is that the jump goes from 20 to 100 Dollar for the Pro to Max subscription. Pro is not enough for me, Max is too much. 60 would be ideal, but currently at 100 it's worth the cost.
But this is how every subscription works. Most people lose money on their gym subscription, but the convenience takes us.
What can bite them in this case though is alternate providers at the same price point that can bridge the gap. e.g. you currently get a lot more bang for your buck with the $20 OpenAI Codex subscription than you get for the $20 Claude Code subscription.
What walled garden man? There’s like four major API providers for Anthropic.
For example, OpenAI’s agent (Codex) is open source, and you can use any harness you want with your OpenAI subscription. Anthropic keeps its tooling closed source and forbids using third-party tooling with a Claude subscription.
Didn't OpenAI spend like 10 billion on inference in 2025? Which is around the same as their total revenue?
Why do people keep saying inference is cheap if they're losing so much money from it?
When you have 800–900 million active users, no matter how cheap it is, your costs will be in the billions.
They paid about $10B on inference and had about $10B in revenue in 2025. The users and numbers of zeroes on those numbers are not relevant. What is relevant is the ratio of those numbers. They apparently are not even profitable on inference, wich is the cheap part of the whole business.
And cost of inference tripled from $3B in 2024 to $10B in 2025, so cost of revenue linearly grows with number of users, i.e. it does not get cheaper.
Except all those GPUs running inference need to be replaced every 2 years.
Why?
They wear down being run at 100% all the time. Support slowly drops off, the architecture and even the rack format become deprecated.
GPUs do not wear down from being ran at 100%, unless they're pushed past their voltage limits, or gravely overheating.
You can buy a GPU that's been used to mine bitcoin for 5 years with zero downtime, and as long as it's been properly taken care of (or better, undervolted), that GPU functions the exact same as a 5 year old GPU in your PC. Probably even better.
GPUs are rated to do 100%, all the time. That's the point. Otherwise it'd be 115%.
Yeah that's not how it works in practice in a datacenter with the latest GPUs, they are basically perishable goods.
You don't run your gaming PC 24/7.
No, you're fundamentally wrong. There's the regular wear & tear of GPUs that all have varying levels of quality, you'll have blown capacitors (just as you do with any piece of hardware), but running in a datacenter does not damage them more. If anything, they're better taken care of and will last longer. However, since instead of having one 5090 in a computer somewhere, you have a million of them. A 1% failure rate quickly makes a big number. My example included mining bitcoin because, just like datacenters, they were running in massive farms of thousands of devices. We have the proof and the numbers, running at full load with proper cooling and no over voltage does not damage hardware.
The only reason they're "perishable" is because of the GPU arms race, where renewing them every 5 years is likely to be worth the investment for the gains you make in power efficiency.
Do you think Google has a pile of millions of older TPUs they threw out because they all failed, when chips are basically impossible to recycle ? No, they keep using them, they're serving your nanobanana prompts.
GPU bitcoin mining rigs had a high failure rate too. It was quite common to run at 80% power to keep them going longer. That's before taking into account that the more recent generations of GPUs seems to be a lot more fragile in general.
Yeah what's crazy is most of these companies are making accounting choices that obscure the true cost. By extending the stated useful life of their equipment, in some cases from 3 years to 6. Perfectly legal. And it has the effect of suppressing depreciation expenses and inflating reported earnings.
But don't they palpitate for thise sweet depreciation credits to decrease their tax on revenue?
> They are not losing money on subscription plans. Inference is very cheap - just a few dollars per million tokens. What they’re trying to do is bundle R&D costs with inference so they can fund the training of the next generation of models.
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.
I’m not saying charging above marginal cost to fund R&D is weird. That’s how every R&D company works.
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.
Yes, and my point is that thinking the cost of subscriptions is only inference, and not the research, is mistaken.
They can totally lose money on subscriptions despite the costs of inference, because research costs have to be counted too.
> Yes, and my point is that thinking the cost of subscriptions is only inference, and not the research, is mistaken.
Of course they are losing money when you factor in R&D. Everybody knows that. That is not what people mean when they say that they "lose money" on subscriptions.
"They're not losing money on subscriptions, it's just their revenue is smaller than their costs". Weird take.
It means the marginal cost to sell another subscription is lower than what they sell it for. I don't know if that's true, but it seems plausible.
The secret is there is no path on making that back.
the path is by charging just a bit less than the salary of the engineers they are replacing.
My crude metaphor to explain to my family is gasoline has just been invented and we're all being lent Bentley's to get us addicted to driving everywhere. Eventually we won't be given free Bentley's, and someone is going to be holding the bag when the infinite money machine finally has a hiccup. The tech giants are hoping their gasoline is the one that we all crave when we're left depending on driving everywhere and the costs go soaring.
Why? Computers and anything computer related have historically been dropping in prices like crazy year after year (with only very occasional hiccups). What makes you think this will stop now?
Commodity hardware and software will continue to drop in price.
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.
> Commodity hardware and software will continue to drop in price.
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.
> The hardware is not getting cheaper (unless we're talking a 5+ year time)
Yes, that's the time I'm talking about.
You also had a blip with increasing hard disk prices when Thailand flooded a few years ago.
It has stopped. Demand is now rising faster than supply in memory, storage and GPUs.
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.
On consumer side looking at a few past generations I question that. I would guess that we are nearing some sort of plateau there or already on it. There was inflation, but still not even considering RAM prices from last jump gains relative to cost were not that massive.
Recent price trends for DRAM, SSDs, hard drives?
Short term squeeze, because building capacity takes time and real funding. The component manufacturers have been here before. Booms rarely last long enough to justify a build-out. If AI demand turns out to be sustained, the market will eventually adapt by building supply, and prices will drop. If AI demand turns out to be transient, demand will drop, and prices will drop.
Cars have also been dropping in price.
And knives apparently.
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.
Yeah I’d definitely take that knife thing with a grain of salt. I have most of a history degree, took a lot of Econ classes (before later going back for CS), and it’s a topic I’m very interested in and I’ve never heard that (and some digging didn’t find anything).
It’s also false that the technology has changed very little.
The jumps from bronze to iron to steel to modern steel and sometimes to stainless steel all result in vastly different products. Not to mention the advances in composite materials for handles.
Then you need to look at substitute goods and the what people actually used knives for.
A huge amount of the demand for knives evaporated thanks to societal changes and substitute goods like forks. A few hundred years ago the average person had a knife that was their primary eating utensil, a survival tool, and a self defense weapon. Knives like that exist today but they’re not something every household has or needs.
This is a good example of why learning from ChatGPT is dangerous. This is a story that sounds very plausible at first glance, but doesn’t make sense once you dig in.
Evidence for this claim?
I had a 1990 Ford Taurus as my first car. I had got it used and I remember it being completely impossible to afford a new car at the time.
It was sticker price of $33,000 adjusted for inflation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Taurus_%28second_generati...
I don't think it would even feel safe to drive at all compared to what we have got use to with modern cars. It broke down 3 times while I had it and stranded me on the road. No cell phone of course to call anyone.
These were the mythic "good ol days".
A few generations ago almost nobody could afford a car, now many low income families afford two.
In the GP's analogy, the Bentley can be rented for $3/day, but if you want to purchase it outright, it will cost you $3,000,000.
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 like this analogy.
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.
Depends on how you do the accounting. Are you counting inference costs or are you amortizing next gen model dev costs. "Inference is profitable" is oft repeated and rarely challenged. Most subscription users are low intensity users after all.
I agree; unfortunately when I brought up that they're losing before I get jumped on demanding me to "prove it" and I guess pointing at their balance sheets isn't good enough.
The question I have: how much are they _also_ losing on per-token billing?
From what I understand, they make money per-token billing. Not enough for how much it costs to train, not accounting for marketing, subscription services, and research for new models, but if they are used, they lose less money.
Finance 101 tldr explanation: The contribution margin (= price per token -variable cost per token ) this is positive
Profit (= contribution margin x cuantity- fix cost)
Why do you think they're losing money on subscriptions?
Does a GPU doing inference server enough customers for long enough to bring in enough revenue to pay for a new replacement GPU in two years (and the power/running cost of the GPU + infrastructure). That's the question you need to be asking.
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.
Because they're not saying they are making a profit
That doesn’t mean that the subscription itself is losing money. The margin on the subscription could be fine, but by using that margin to R&D the next model, the org may still be intentionally unprofitable. It’s their investment/growth strategy, not an indictment of their pricing strategy.
They have investors that paid for training of these models too. It could be argued that R&D for the next generation is a separate issue, but they need to provide a return on the R&D in this generation to stay in business.
But why does it matter which program you use to consume the tokens?
The sounds like a confession that claude code is somewhat wasteful at token use.
No, it's a confession they have no moat other than trying to hold onto the best model for a given use case.
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...
But if more users use your service you get an advantage. Letting the users chose their tool for that would be a good thing.
Honestly I think I am already sold on AI, who is the first company that is going to show us all how much it really costs and start enshitification? First to market wins right?
I pay a Max subscription since a long time, I like their model but I hate their tools:
- Claude Desktop looks like a demo app. It's slow to use and so far behind the Codex app that it's embarassing.
- Claude Code is buggy has hell and I think I've never used a CLI tool that consume so much memory and CPU. Let's not talk about the feature parity with other agents.
- Claude Agent SDK is poorly documented, half finished, and is just thin wrapper around a CLI tool…
Oh and none of this is open source, so I can do nothing about it.
My only option to stay with their model is to build my own tool. And now I discover that using my subscription with the Agent SDK is against the term of use?
I'm not going to pay 500 USD of API credits every months, no way. I have to move to a different provider.
I agree that Claude Code is buggy as hell, but:
> Let's not talk about the feature parity with other agents.
What do you mean feature parity with other agents? It seems to me that other CLI agents are quite far from Claude Code in this regard.
Which other CLI agents are that? Because I've found OpenCode to be A LOT better than Claude-Code.
Whats better with opencode? Never tried it. I like that claude code has double escape, shift + tab, team of agents
I think I've made two good decisions in my life. The first was switching entirely to Linux around '05 even though it was a giant pain in the ass that was constantly behind the competition in terms of stability and hardware support. It took awhile but wow no regrets.
The second appears to be hitching my wagon to Mistral even though it's apparently nowhere as powerful or featureful as the big guys. But do you know how many times they've screwed me over? Not once.
Maybe it's my use cases that make this possible. I definitely modified my behavior to accommodate Linux.
Your core customers are clearly having a blast building their own custom interfaces, so obviously the thing to do is update TOS and put a stop to it! Good job lol.
I know, I know, customer experience, ecosystem, gardens, moats, CC isn't fat, just big boned, I get it. Still a dick move. This policy is souring the relationship, and basically saying that Claude isn't a keeper.
I'll keep my eye-watering sub for now because it's still working out, but this ensures I won't feel bad about leaving when the time comes.
Update: yes yes, API, I know. No, I don't want that. I just want the expensive predictable bill, not metered corporate pricing just to hack on my client.
They'll all do this eventually.
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.
"Naveen Rao, the Gen AI VP of Databricks, phrased it quite well:
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."
~ https://vintagedata.org/blog/posts/model-is-the-product A. Doria
> new Amp Free (10$) access is also closed up since of last night
Unstoppable monopoly will be extremely hard to pull off given the number of quality open (weights) alternatives.
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'm old, so I remember saying the same thing about Google and search.
I hope you're right!
I think the big difference is that Google is free: everyone is using Google because it doesn’t cost anything and for a long time was the best search engine out there. I am sure that if Google would suddenly charge a few dollars per month for access, Bing market share would explode overnight, because it would become “good enough but cheaper”.
With the AI models, using a model that is “good enough but cheaper” is already an option.
There's no reason that a sizeable portion of LLM usage can't and won't end up free/ad-sponsored. Cutting edge stuff for professional use will probably be monetized via subscription or API credits for a long time to come. But running an older and less resource intensive model works just fine for tasks like summarization. These models will just become another feature in a "free" product that people pay for by watching or clicking ads.
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.
I too am old. Google search is free, hard to replicate, and while there used to be lots of search engines, Google was (and arguably still is) miles ahead of all the others in terms of quality and performance.
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
I would say Google's monopoly mainly comes from its name recognition, definitely not because its still ahead in core search as I have been using DuckDuckGo for 2 years once I noticed search results are the same or better than Google.
In the first years, I remember no other search engine was close to Google quality. We all ditched AltaVista because Google was incredibly better. It would have been awful to switch back to any other options. We can already switch between the 3 big proprietary models without feeling too much differences, so it’s quite a different landscape.
This is saying we have hundreds of open source OSes and Windows will never be a monopoly.
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.
I think windows has historical monopoly.
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.
It's more like saying AWS has a monopoly on virtual machine hosting.
(For those unaware, AWS doesn't have a VM monopoly, and the market dynamics seem similar)
It’ll be a bunch of tiny moats in that scenario. LLMs are way too generic, adaptable, flexible in how you use it to make a big most out of it.
> Software always gets monopoly simply by usage
Most software isn't made by monopolies. More directly, enterprise-software stocks are getting hammered because AI offers them competition.
>This is saying we have hundreds of open source OSes
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.
OpenRouter falls in the acceptable use category. They targeting users that are misusing their Claude OAuth token on non-Anthropic products.
They will [try to] ban open weights for ethics / security reasons: to stop spammers, to protect children, to stop fascism, to defend minorities. Take your pick; it won't matter why, it will only matter which media case can they thrust in the spotlight first.
Yes of course they will; the CEO of Anthropic makes that argument, very openly, all the time. But it will be hard to do, I think.
Hopefully, but they'll lobby hard, supported by all the money they raised.
> They'll all do this eventually
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.
Imagine having a finite pool of GPUs worth more than their weight in gold, and an infinite pool of users obsessed with running as many queries against those GPUs in parallel as possible, mostly to review and generate copious amounts of spam content primarily for the purposes of feeling modern, and all in return for which they offer you $20 per month. If you let them, you must incur as much credit liability as OpenAI. If you don't, you get destroyed online.
It almost makes me feel sorry for Dario despite fundamentally disliking him as a person.
Hello old friend, I've been expecting you.
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.
You're not "rolling your own client." You're using a subscription that prices in a specific usage pattern, the one mediated by their client, and trying to route around it to extract more value than you're paying for. That's not hacking, it's arbitrage, and pretending it's about editor philosophy is cope.
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.
As my sibling mentioned, it's not all-you-can-eat, it's metered and capped. Is it the client mediating usage patterns? I don't know, but why not do it server-side and let people use it however they want? Control of course, but that's not in the interest of users.
I'm not trying to arbitrage or route around anything, I just want predictable billing to access the model. Maybe the API would be cheaper for me, I don't know. I'm just a normal user, not scheduling an agent army to blast at maximum 24/7.
You don't need to explain what Anthropic is selling, I get it, but you're off-base claiming that I'm pretending about editor philosophy as cope. I think Anthropic is where they are today because they have a good model for coding, made popular by software folks who value things like editor choice and customization. Anthropic is free to do as they wish of course, as am I, but I'm displeased with their decision here, and voicing my opinion about it.
If usage is truly constrained by the client not the server, I guess I can't argue that, but it still feels bad as an end user. As a consumer, I just want a fair deal and freedom to use what I purchase however I see fit. But that seems harder to find these days, and most businesses seem intent on maximum extraction by any means possible. I might be wrong, but this feels like business move to build a consumer moat by controlling the interface, because consumers don't want the API. It's not in my best interests, which alienates me as a customer.
It seems to me the consumer subscription still has metered token limits (it's not all you can eat), so why should it matter how we use those tokens?
Why do you fundamentally dislike him as a person?
The only thing I've seen from him that I don't like is the "SWEs will be replaced" line (which is probably true and it's more that I don't like the factuality of it).
It’s kinda obvious he’s a well spoken shark. Personally not an issue for me, you have to be at the top of a unicorn, but it isn’t something people in general like.
Interesting, are there any sources for the shark claims ? I recently saw an interview with Hassabis and him and thought: <well at least those are two actual scientist leading AI labs/devisions>, so that gave me some hope that what they discussed regarding security and eventual equal distribution of "AI" benefits had some genuine intention.
Don’t be mad at it, be happy you were able to throw some of that sweet free vc money at your hobbies instead of paying the market rate.
Oh I'm not mad, it's more of a sad clown type of thing. I'm still stoked to use it for now. We can always go back to the old ways if things don't work out.
They offer an API for people who want to build their own clients. They didn't stop people from being able to use Claude.
So basically you are saying Anthropic models are indispensable but you are too cheap to pay for it.
Nowhere did I say they're indispensable, and I explicitly said I'm still paying for it. If all AI companies disappear tomorrow that's fine. I'm just calling out what I think is tone-deaf move, by a company I pay a large monthly bill to.
Sure they are having a blast, they are paying 20$ instead of getting charged hundreds for forr tokens.
It's simple, follow the ToS
Not according to this guy who works on Claude Code: https://x.com/trq212/status/2024212378402095389?s=20
What a PR nightmare, on top of an already bad week. I’ve seen 20+ people on X complaining about this and the related confusion.
They really need to correct that. I understand jack shit. Is openclaw banned under these terms? Or just abuse where I build a business on top of that? And why does it matter anyway? I have my token restrictions ... So let me do what I want.
No, it is prohibited. They're just updating the docs to be more clear about their position, which haven't changed. Their docs was unclear about it.
Yes, it was always prohibited, hence the OpenCode situation one or two months ago.
woof, does Anthropic not have a comms team and a clear comms policy for employees that aren’t on that comms team?
Incorrect, the third-party usage was already blocked (banned) but it wasn't officially communicated or documented. This post is simply identifying that official communication rather than the inference of actual functionality.
Going to keep using the agents sdk with my pro subscription until I get banned. It's not openclaw it's my own project. It started by just proxying requests to claude code though the command line, the sdk just made it easier. Not sure what difference it makes to them if I have a cron job to send Claude code requests or an agent sdk request. Maybe if it's just me and my toy they don't care. We'll see how the clarify tomorrow.
Anthropic is dead. Long live open platforms and open-weight models. Why would I need Claude if I can get Minimax, Kimi, and Glm for the fraction of the price?
To get comparable results you need to run those models on at least prosumer hardware and it seems that two beef-up Mac Studios are the minimum. Which means that instead of buying this hardware you can purchase Claude, Codex and many other subscriptions for next 20 years.
Or you purchase a year's worth of almost unlimited MiniMax coding plan for a price you'd pay for 15 days of limited Claude usage.
And as a bonus, you can choose your harness. You don't have to suffer CC.
And if something better appears tomorrow, you switch your model, while still using your harness of choice.
And do you think Claude won't have released a few models by then, which will be way ahead of any open model? you are paying for SOTA.
This is how you gift wrap the agentic era to the open source chinese LLMs. devs don't need the best model, they need one without lawyers attached.
Product usage subsidized by company, $100. Users inevitably figure out how to steal those subsidies, agents go brrrrr. Users mad that subsidy stealing gets cut off and completely ignore why they need to rely on subsidies in the first place, priceless.
AI is the new high-end gym membership. They want you to pay the big fee and then not use what you paid for. We'll see more and more roadblocks to usage as time goes on.
This was the analogy I was looking for! It feels like a very creepy way to make money, almost scammy and the gym membership/overselling hits the nail.
This feels more like the gym owner clarifying it doesn't want you using their 24-hour gym as a hotel just because you find their benches comfortable to lie down on, rather than a "roadblock to usage"
Not really, these subscriptions have a clear and enforced 5h and weekly limit.
The pressure is to boost revenue by forcing more people to use the API to generate huge numbers of tokens they can charge more for. LLMs are becoming common commodities as open weight models keep catching up. There are similarities with pirating in the 90s when users realize they can ctrl+c ctrl+v to copy a file/model and you don't need to buy a cd/use their paid API.
And that is how it should be - the knowledge that the LLM trained on should be free, and cannot (and should never be) gatekept behind money.
It's merely the hardware that should be charged for - which ought to drop in price if/when the demand for it rises. However, this is a bottleneck at the moment, and hard to see how it gets resolved amidst the current US environment on sanctioning anyone who would try.
Is there no value in how the training was done such that it's accessible via inference in a particularly useful way?
That value is there, but google has decided to give it away as public knowledge (ala, their transformer paper).
And i would also argue that the researchers doing this are built on shoulders of other public knowledge - things funded by public institutions with taxpayer money.
The analogy I like to use when people say "I paid" is that you can't pay for a buffet then get all the food take-home for free.
I just cancelled my Pro subscription. Turns out that Ollama Cloud with GLM-5 and qwen-coder-next are very close in quality to Opus, I never hit their rate limits even with two sessions running the whole day and there zero advantage for me to use Claude Code compared to OpenCode.
OK I hope someone from anthropic reads this. Your API billing makes it really hard to work with it in India. We've had to switch to openrouter because anthropic keeps rejecting all the cards we have tried. And these are major Indian banks. This has been going on for MONTHS
It’s the same here in Hong Kong. I can’t use any of my cards (personal or corporate) for OpenAI or Anthropic.
Have to do everything through Azure, which is a mess to even understand.
And because of this i'll obviously opt to not subscribe to a Claude plan, when i can just use something like Copilot and use the models that way via OpenCode.
OpenClaw, NanoClaw, et al all use AgentSDK which will from now on be forbidden.
They are literally alienating a large percentage of OpenClaw, NanoClaw, PicoClaw, customers because those customers will surely not be willing to pay API pricing, which is at least 6-10x Max Plan pricing (for my usage).
This isn’t too surprising to me since they probably have a direct competitor to openclaw et al in the works right now, but until then I am cancelling my subscription and porting my nanoclaw fork with mem0 integration to work with OpenAI instead.
Thats not a “That’ll teach ‘em” statement, it is just my own cost optimization. I am quite fond of Anthropic’s coding models and might still subscribe again at the $20 level, but they just priced me out for personal assistant, research, and 90% of my token use case.
What does Anthropic have to gain from users who use a very high amount of tokens for OpenClaw, NanoClaw etc and pay them only $20?
Not sure what the problem is, I am on Max and use Claude Code, never get usage issues, that's what I pay for and want that to always be an option (capped monthly cost). For other uses it makes sense to go through their API service. This is less confusing and provides clarity for users, if you are a first party user use Claude's tools to access's the models otherwise API
I got banned for violating terms of use apparently, but I'm mystified as to what I rule I broke, and appealing just vanishes into the ether.
Two accounts of mine were banned for some reason and my sub was refunded. Literally from just inane conversations. Conversations also disappear and break randomly, but this happens on ChatGPT too sometimes
I would expect, it still is only enforced in a semi-strict way.
I think what they want to achieve here is less "kill openclaw" or similar and more "keep our losses under control in general". And now they have a clear criteria to refer when they take action and a good bisection on whom to act on.
In case your usage is high they would block / take action. Because if you have your max subscription and not really losing them money, why should they push you (the monopoly incentive sounds wrong with the current market).
Openclaw is unaffected by this as the Claude Code CLI is called directly
Many people use the Max subscription OAuth token in OpenClaw. The main chat, heartbeat, etc., functionality does not call the Claude Code CLI. It uses the API authenticated via subscription OAuth tokens, which is precisely what Anthropic has banned.
There are many other options too: direct API, other model providers, etc. But Opus is particularly good for "agent with a personality" applications, so it's what thousands of OpenClaw users go with, mostly via the OAuth token, because it's much cheaper than the API.
In enterprise software, this is an embedded/OEM use case.
And historically, embedded/OEM use cases always have different pricing models for a variety of reasons why.
How is this any different than this long established practice?
It's not, but do you really think the people having Claude build wrappers around Claude were ever aware of how services like this are typically offered.
At this point, where Kimi K2.5 on Bedrock with a simple open source harness like pi is almost as good the big labs will soon have to compete for users,... openai seems to know that already? While anthropic bans bans bans
Do you know by any chance if Bedrock custom model import also works with on-demand use, without any provisioned capacity? I'm still puzzled why they don't offer all qwen3 models on Bedrock by default.
I see a lot of Qwen3 in us west 2 And i have no experience with custom model on bedrock
there’s a million small scale AI apps that just aren’t worth building because there’s no way to do the billing that makes sense. If anthropic wanted to own that market, they could introduce a bring-your-own-Claude metaphor, where you login with Claude and token costs get billed to your personal account (after some reasonable monthly freebies from your subscription).
But the big guys don’t seem interested in this, maybe some lesser known model will carve out this space
This is going to happen. Unfortunately.
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.
I am a bit worried that this is the situation I am in with my (unpublished) commercial app right now: one of the major pain points I have is that while I have no doubt the app provides value in itself, I am worried about how many potential users will actually accept paying inference per token...
As an independent dev I also unfortunately don't have investors backing me to subsidize inference for my subscription plan.
I recommend kimi. It's possible for people to haggle with it to get cheap for the first month and as such try out your project and best part of the matter is that kimi intentionally supports api usage in any of their subscribed plan and they also recently changed their billing to be more token usage based like others instead of their previous tool calling limits
It's seriously one of the best models. very comparable to sonnet/opus although kimi isn't the best in coding. I think its a really great solid model overall and might just be worth it in your use case?
Is the use case extremely coding intensive related (where even some minor improvement can matter for 10-100x cost) or just in general. Because if not, then I can recommend Kimi.
>> there’s a million small scale AI apps that just aren’t worth building because there’s no way to do the billing that makes sense
Maybe they are not worth building at all then. Like MoviePass wasn’t.
From the legal docs:
> Authentication and credential use
> Claude Code authenticates with Anthropic’s servers using OAuth tokens or API keys. These authentication methods serve different purposes:
> OAuth authentication (used with Free, Pro, and Max plans) is intended exclusively for Claude Code and Claude.ai. Using OAuth tokens obtained through Claude Free, Pro, or Max accounts in any other product, tool, or service — including the Agent SDK — is not permitted and constitutes a violation of the Consumer Terms of Service.
> Developers building products or services that interact with Claude’s capabilities, including those using the Agent SDK, should use API key authentication through Claude Console or a supported cloud provider. Anthropic does not permit third-party developers to offer Claude.ai login or to route requests through Free, Pro, or Max plan credentials on behalf of their users.
> Anthropic reserves the right to take measures to enforce these restrictions and may do so without prior notice.
why wouldn't they just make it so the SDK can't use claude subs? like what are they doing here?
When your company happens upon a cash cow, you can either become a milk company or a meat company.
Thariq has clarified that there are no changes to how SDK and max suscriptions work:
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
> 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.
What's wrong with using X?
In the case you are asking in good faith, a) X requires logging in to view most of its content, which means that much of your audience will not see the news because b) much of your audience is not on X, either due to not having social media or have stopped using X due to its degradation to put it generally.
I'm not signed in but I can view the above linked tweet just fine.
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.
You can’t view answers and the tweet threat. You need to know every single tweet. You can’t open the politician‘s feed so you have to know that there is a tweet and which it is to get information.
c) it is controlled by a direct competitor and can bury / promote your customer communication at will.
Elon has enough sense not to cross that particular bridge.
He's few borders behind that bridge now. They've been injecting faults left and right, from hiding tweets and accounts as "unavailable" to sorting replies by spamminess and everything.
He was quick to ban links to Mastodon when it was on the rise, I'm not sure why he'd treat SpaceX/xAI competitors any differently.
Not bad per se but how much legal weight does it actually carry?
I presume zero.. but nonetheless seems like people will take it as valid anyway.
That can be dangerous I think.
That page is... confusing.
> Advertised usage limits for Pro and Max plans assume ordinary, individual usage of Claude Code and the Agent SDK.
This is literally the last sentence of the paragraph before the "Authentication and credential use"
Their moat is evaporating before our eyes. Anthropic is Microsoft's side piece, but Microsoft is married with kids to OpenAI.
And OpenAI just told Microsoft why they shouldn't be seeing Anthropic anymore; Gpt-5.3-codex.
RIP Anthropic.
Is this a direct shot at things like OpenClaw, or am I reading it wrong?
They even block Claude Code of you've modified it via tweakcc. When they blocked OpenCode, I ported a feature I wanted to Claude Code so I could continue using that feature. After a couple days, they started blocking it with the same message that OpenCode gets. I'm going to go down to the $20 plan and shift most of my work to OpenAI/ChatGPT because of this. The harness features matter more to me than model differences in the current generation.
I wonder if it has to do with Grok somehow. They had a suspiciously high reputation until they just binarily didn't, after Anthropic said they did something.
Opencode as well. Folks have been getting banned for abusing the OAuth login method to get around paying for API tokens or whatever. Anthropic seems to prefer people pay them.
its not that innocent.
a 200 dollar a month customer isn't trying to get around paying for tokens, theyre trying to use the tooling they prefer. opencode is better in a lot of ways.
tokens get counted and put against usage limits anyway, unless theyre trying to eat analytics that are CC exclusive they should allow paying customers to consume to the usage limits in however way they want to use the models.
Anthropic is offering a steep discount in their plans. I highly doubt they want you using it in a harness where you can trivially switch away when someone else releases a better model
> 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.
A $200/m max subscriber using OpenCode and not wanting to use API keys with pay-per-token pricing is very clearly trying to get around paying for tokens.
Is there any limits to that users 200/month? Why should they not be able to use the limits to the extent from other tools?
If openclaw chews my 200/month up in 15 days... I don't get more requests for free
There is no monthly limit, it (currently) is a weekly and 5-hourly limit. If they allow anyone to use any tool with their subscription service, you could have a system (like OpenClaw) which involves 0 human interaction and is constantly consuming 100% of your token limit, then waiting until limits reset to do it all over again. It seems fairly clear that Anthropic is probably losing money on such usage patterns.
Once again: you can use API keys and pricing to get UNLIMITED usage whenever you want. If you are choosing to pay for a subscription instead, it is because Anthropic is offering those subscriptions at a much better value-per-token. They are not offering such a subscription out of the goodness of their heart.
There are 4 weeks in a month.
4 periods of weekly limits, is a monthly limit.
4 weeks * 12 months = 48 weeks in a year * 7 days in a week = 336 days per year - close enough :)
Seems fair enough really, not that I like it either, but they could easily not offer the plans and only have API pricing. Makes it make more sense to have the plans be 'the Claude Code pricing' really.
¡Quick reminder! We are in the golden era of big company programming agents. Enjoy it while you can because it is likely going to get worse over time. Hopefully, there were will be competitive open source agents and some benevolent nerds put together a reasonable service. Otherwise I can see companies investing in their own AI infrastructure and developers who build their own systems becoming the top performers.
This is the VC funded startup playbook. It has been repeated many times, but maybe for the younger crowd it is new. Start a new service that is relatively permissive, then gradually restrict APIs and permissions. Finally, start throwing in ads and/or making it more expensive to use. Part of the reason is in the beginning they are trying to get as many users as possible and burning VC money. Then once the honey moon is over, they need to make a profit so they cut back on services, nerf stuff, increase prices and start adding ads.
Why does it matter to Anthropic if my $200 plan usage is coming from Claude Code or a third party?
Doesn’t both count towards my usage limits the same?
If you buy a 'Season's Pass' for Disneyland, you cant 'sublet' it to another kid to use on the days you don't; It's not really buying a 'daily access rate'.
Anthropic subs are not 'bulk tokens'.
It's not an unreasonable policy and it's entirely inevitable that they have to restrict.
I’m not subletting my sub to anyone. I’m the only one using the third party harness.
I’m using their own SDK in my own CLI tool.
Running with the Disney analogy, it's like if Disney didn't let you wear a shirt with a universal or Warner property on it in their parks
Absurd, and not beyond the realm of possibility
It’s not a literal sublet to someone else, it’s subletting your tokens to another tool.
At its core it’s a tragedy of commons situation. Using a third party tool like OpenClaw is augmenting your usage far beyond what was anticipated when the subscription plan was made.
Same deal for unlimited storage on drive until people started abusing it.
My Claude sub isn’t unlimited.
I didn’t set the limits on the plan; change those if it’s a problem, not irritate your customer base.
You have strong dedication towards taking things literally.
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".
Disingenuous analogy.
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.
It's not a disingenuous analogy ... whatever it is.
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.
Any user who is using a third-party client is likely self-selected into being a power user who is less profitable.
They don't get as much visibility into your data, just the actual call to/from the api. There's so much more value to them in that, since you're basically running the reinforcement learning training for them.
Probably because the $20 plan is essentially a paid demo for the higher plans.
Increasing the friction of switching providers as much as possible is part of their strategy to push users to higher subscription tiers and deny even scraps to their competitors.
They're losing money on this $200 plan and they're essentially paying you to make you dependent on Claude Code so they can exploit this (somehow) in the future.
It's a bizarre plan because nobody is 'dependent' on Claude Code; we're begging to use alternatives. It's the model we want!
You’re not really paying for the model, you’re paying for the tool, the ecosystem, and the application layer around it.
Sonnet 4.6 in CC doesn’t behave the same way as Sonnet 4.6 in Antigravity.
Skills is a generic construct. System prompt is generic as well. Subagents, AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md etc. these are generic, "please care for my instruction" kind of constructs without any real guarantee to close gaps.
Tool is generic (CC vs OpenCode) Ecosystem is already same everywhere.
I don't understand what's the point.
When using Claude Code, it's possible to opt out of having one's sessions be used for training. But is that opt out for everything? Or only message content, such that there could remain sufficient metadata to derive useful insight from?
It's a bit unclear to me. I'm building a system around the Claude Agent SDK. Am I allowed to use it or not? Apparently not.
This article is somewhat reassuring to me, someone experimenting with openclaw on a Max subscription. But idk anything about the blog so would love to hear thoughts.
https://thenewstack.io/anthropic-agent-sdk-confusion/
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).
What is the point of developing against the Agent SDK after this change.
how can they even enforce this? can't you just spoof all your network requests to appear like it's coming from claude code?
in any case Codex is a better SOTA anyways and they let you do this. and if you aren't interested in the best models, Mistral lets you use both Vibe and their API through your vibe subscription api key which is incredible.
> how can they even enforce this?
Many ways, and they’re under no obligation to play fair and tell you which way they’re using at any given time. They’ve said what the rules are, they’ve said they’ll ban you if they catch you.
So let’s say they enforce it by adding an extra nonstandard challenge-response handshake at the beginning of the exchange, which generates a token which they’ll expect on all requests going forward. You decompile the minified JS code, figure out the protocol, try it from your own code but accidentally mess up a small detail (you didn’t realize the nonce has a special suffix). Detected. Banned.
You’ll need a new credit card to open a new account and try again. Better get the protocol right on the first try this time, because debugging is going to get expensive.
Let’s say you get frustrated and post on Twitter about what you know so far. If you share info, they’ll probably see it eventually and change their method. They’ll probably change it once a month anyway and see who they catch that way (and presumably add a minimum Claude Code version needed to reach their servers).
They’ve got hundreds of super smart coders and one of the most powerful AI models, they can do this all day.
the internet has hundreds of thousands of super smart coders with the most powerful ai models as well, I think it's a bit harder than you're assuming.
you just need to inspect the network traffic with Claude code and mimic that
OK sure, but you’d better hope Claude Code gets it right on the first try, or that’s $200 down the drain. Also, what if the detection mechanism involves a challenge-response that happens once a week? Or randomly a couple times a month? Or after 15 minutes of use from a new public IP? Or arbitrarily if you ask it to code something with a particular topic?
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.
Then just run Claude Code in a PTY and proxy requests in and out?
> Then just run Claude Code in a PTY and proxy requests in and out?
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.
When they blocked OpenCode, I was in the middle of adding a feature. I don't think it's possible to mimic CC in an undetectable way and have the feature work.
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.
If your service's traffic is literally indistinguishable from Claude Code, then all it can do is what Claude Code does. Then why are the users going to choose your service instead of Claude Code?
Maybe because the UI doesn't flicker? There's a lot you can do to improve the UI for starters, and then the harness around the agent could also be improved upon, as long as the prompts are the same.
see my comment here but I think instead of worrying about the decompile minified JS code etc., you can just essentially use claude code in the background and still do it even using opencode/its SDK thus giving sort of API access over CC subscription https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47069299#47070204
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
Pretty easy to enforce it - rather than make raw queries to the LLM Claude Code can proxy through Anthropic's servers. The server can then enforce query patterns, system prompts and other stuff that outside apps cannot override.
And once all the Claude subscribers move over to Codex subscriptions, I'd bet a large sum that OpenAI will make their own ToS update preventing automated/scripted usage.
They can't catch everything but they can make your product you're building on top of it non viable when it gets popular enough to look for, like they did with opencode.
at least with open code you can just use a third party plugin to authenticate
> how can they even enforce this?
I would think that different tools would probably have different templates for their prompts?
We don’t enforce speed limits, but it sucks when you get caught.
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.
Does this mean that in an absurd way you can get banned if you use CodexBar https://github.com/steipete/CodexBar to keep track of your usage? It does use your credentials to fetch the usage, could they be so extreme that this would be an issue?
I think that their main problem is that they don't have enough resources to serve too many users, so they resort to this kind of limitations to keep Claude usage under control. Otherwise I wouldn't be able to explain a commercial move that limits their offer so strongly in comparison to competitors.
That's it. That's all the moat they have.
I wrote a mcp bridge so that I don't have to copy and paste prompt back and forth between CLI and claude, chatgpt, grok, gemini
https://github.com/agentify-sh/desktop
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 ?
This month was the first month i spent >$100 on it and it didn't feel like it was money well spent. I feel borderline scammed.
I'm just going to accept that my €15 (which with vat becomes €21) is just enough usage to automate some boring tasks.
In the old days, think Gmail, or before the "unlimited" marketing scam. People genuinely are smart enough to know they are doing something that they are not suppose to be doing. Even Pirating software, say Windows or Adobe. I mean who can afford those when they were young?
Things get banned, but that is OK along as they give us weeks or days to prep for alternative solution. Users ( Not Customers ) are happy with it. Too bad, the good days are over.
Somewhere along the line, no just in software but even in politics, the whole world on entitlement. They somehow believe they deserve this, what they were doing were wrong but if it is allowed in the first place they should remain allowed to do so.
Judging from account opening time and comments we can also tell the age group and which camp they are on.
I don’t understand which camp are you on?
You guys are acting like coke addicts... dont you see?
OpenAI has endorsed OAuth from 3rd party harnesses, and their limits are way higher. Use better tools (OpenCode, pi) with an arguably better model (xhigh reasoning) for longer …
I am looking forward to switching to OpenAI once my claude max account is banned for using pi....
Honestly seeing throttling of AI usuage across all providers:
- Google reduced AI Studio's free rate limits by 1/10th
- Perplexity imposing rate limits, card filing to continue free subscriptions
- Now Anthropic as well
There has been a false narrative that AI will get cheaper and more ubiquitous, but model providers have been stuck in a race for ever more capabilities and performance at higher costs.
Their model actually doesn't have that much of a moat if at all. Their agent harness also doesn't, at least not for long. Writing an agent harness isn't that difficult. They are desperately trying to stay in power. I don´t like being a customer of this company and am investing lots of my time in moving away from them completely.
They are obviously losing money on these plans, just like all of the other companies in the space.
They are all desperately trying to stay in power, and this policy change (or clarification) is a fart in the wind in the grand scheme of what's going on in this industry.
Not surprised, its the official stance by Anthropic.
I'm more surprised by people using subscription auth for OpenClaw when its officially not allowed.
At this point, are there decent alternatives to Anthropic models for coding that allow third-party usage?
OpenAI have been very generous in their plans in terms of token and what you use it with. Is Codex better or as good as Opus for coding? No. Is it a decent alternative? Very.
Kimi is amazing for this. They offer API usage as well iirc if you buy their subscription.
Not regular api usage, just the kimi coding plan, which you can only use in some coding agents
Too bad will stick with codex as thinker and glm5 as hands, at a fraction of the cost.
I'm a bit lost on this one.
I can get a ridiculous amount of tokens in and out of something like gpt-5.2 via the API for $100.
Is this primarily about gas town and friends?
What about using claude -p as an api interface?
The reason I find this so egregious is because I don’t want to use Claude Code! It’s complete rubbish, completely sidelines security, and nobody seems to care. So I’m forced to use their slop if I want to use Claude models without getting a wallet emptying API bill? Forget it, I will use Codex or Gemini.
Claude Code is not the apex. We’re still collectively figuring out the best way to use models in software, this TOS change kills innovation.
So even simple apps that are just code usage monitors are banned?
Always have been, unless you're using the API meant for apps.
But if you're doing something very basic, you might be able to slop together a tool that does local inferencing based on a small, local model instead, alleviating the need to call Claude entirely.
This confirms they're selling those subscriptions at a loss which is simply not sustainable.
They probably are but I don’t think that’s what this confirms. Most consumer flat rate priced services restrict usage outside of the first party apps, because 3rd party and scripted users can generate orders of magnitude more usage than a single user using the app can.
So it makes sense to offer simple flat pricing for first party apps, and usage priced apis for other usage. It’s like the difference between Google Drive and S3.
I get your point - they might count on the user not using their full quota they're officially allowed to use (and if that's the case, Anthropic is not losing money). But then still - IF the user used the whole quota, Anthropic loses.. so what's advertised is not actually honest.
For me, flat rates are simply unfair either ways - if I'm not using the product much, I'm overpaying (and they're ok with that), otherwise it magically turns out that it's no longer ok when I actually want to utilize what I paid for :)
At any rate, they offer the option to be billed exactly on your usage via the API. But if you tell the average person the service costs $x/million tokens they will have no idea how much that actually costs, they won't know what a token is or how much their employees are likely to use. While $30/user/month is something they can easily budget for and get approved.
My alt Google accounts were all banned from Gemini access. Luckily Google left my main account alone. They are all cracking down.
Anthropic is just doing this out of spite. They had a real scenario to win mindshare and marketshare and they fucked up instead. They could have done what Open AI did - hired the OpenClaw/d founder. Instead, they sent him a legal notice for trademark violation. And now they're just pissed he works for their biggest competitor. Throw all tantrums you want, you're on the wrong side of this one, Anthropic.
Agreed! I don't understand how so many people on here seem to think it is completely reasonable for Anthropic to act like this.
Apple/OpenAI = god
Anthropic = good
Google = evil
That's pretty much HN crowd logic to be honest
important they have clarified that it's OK to use it for personal experimentation if you don't build a business out of it!
Cancelled my Claude and bought GLM coding plan + Codex.
This is something I think Anthropic does not get. They want to be Microsoft of AI, make people their solution, so they will not to move to the other provided. Thing is, giving access to a text prompt is not something that you can monopolize easily. Even if you provide some stuff like skills, MCP server integration, that is not a big deal.
at least there seems to be some clarification regarding Agent SDK ... unclear whats happening with OpenClaw https://x.com/atla_/status/2024399329310511426
How does this impact open router?
Can’t this restriction for the time being be bypassed via -p command line flag?
You can use Claude CLI as a relay - yes, it needs to be there -but its not that different than use the API
They really ficked up by not embracing openclaw now I use codex 5.3
People on here are acting like school children over this. It’s their product that they spent billions to make. Yet here we are complaining about why they should let you use third party products specifically made to compete against Anthropic.
You can still simply pay for API.
Sonnet literally just recommended using a subscription token for openclaw. Even anthropic's own AI doesn't understand its own TOS.
Sonnet was not trained with this information and extremely-recent-information-without-access-to-a-Web-Search-tool is the core case of hallucination.
Sonnet does have search available FYI.
LLMs are lazy about using Search unless explicitly prompted to do so (either explicitly or by implying it with phrases such as "recent").
In the OP's case, there is no motivation for the LLM to perform a Search.
So here goes my OpenClaw integration with Anthropic via OAuth… While I see their business risk I also see the onboarding path for new paying customers. I just upgraded to Max and would even consider the API if cost were controllable. I hope that Anthropic finds a smart way to communicate with customers in a constructive way and offers advice for the not so skilled OpenClaw homelabbers instead of terminating their accounts… Is anybody here from Anthropic that could pick up that message before a PR nightmare happens?
Oh crap. I just logged into HN to ask if anyone knew of a working alternative to the Claude Code client. It's lost Claude's work multiple times in the last few days, and I'm ready to switch to a different provider. (4.6 is mildly better than 4.5, but the TUI is a deal breaker.)
So, I guess it's time to look into OpenAI Codex. Any other viable options? I have a 128GB iGPU, so maybe a local model would work for some tasks?
QWEN models are quite nice for local use. Gemini 3 Pro is much better than Codex IMO.
Local? No, not currently. You need about 1TB VRAM. There are many harnesses in development at the time, keep a good look out. Just try many of them, look at the system prompts in particular. Consider DeepSeek using the official API. Consider also tweaking system prompts for whatever tool you end up using. And agree that TUI is meh; we need GUI.
Zed with CC using ACP?
Opencode with CC underneath using Gigacode?
OpenAI codex is also another viable path for what its worth.
I think the best model to my liking open source is kimi k2.5, so maybe you can run that?
Qwen is releasing some new models so I assume keep an eye on those and maybe some model can fit your use case as well?
Zed's ACP client is a wrapper around Agents SDK. So that will be a TOS violation.
May we still use the agent sdk for our own private use with the max account? I’m a bit confused.
I have no issues with this. Anthropic did a great job with Claude Code.
It's a little bit sleazy as a business model to try to wedge one's self between Claude and its users.
OpenAI acquiring OpenClaw gives me bad vibes. How did OpenClaw gain so much traction so quickly? It doesn't seem organic.
I definitely feel much more aligned with Anthropic as a company. What they do seems more focused, meritocratic, organic and genuine.
OpenAI essentially appropriated all their current IP from the people... They basically gutted the non-profit and stole its IP. Then sold a huge chunk to Microsoft... Yes, they literally sold the IP they stole to Microsoft, in broad daylight. Then they used media spin to make it sound like they appropriated it from Elon because Elon donated a few millions... But Elon got his tax deduction! The public footed the bill for those deductions... The IP belonged to the non-profit; to the public, not Elon, nor any of the donors. I mean let's not even mention Suchir Balaji, the OpenAI researcher who supposedly "committed suicide" after trying to warn everyone about the stolen IP.
OpenAI is clearly trying to slander Anthropic, trying to present themselves as the good guys after their OpenClaw acquisition and really rubbing it in all over HN... Over which they have much influence.
Codex has now caught up to Claude Opus and this is a defensive move by Anthropic
Just a friendly reminder also to anyone outside the US that these subscriptions cannot be used for commercial work. Check the consumer ToS when you sign up. It’s quite clear.
Yeah for context the TOS outside the US has:
Non-commercial use only. You agree not to use our Services for any commercial or business purposes and we (and our Providers) have no liability to you for any loss of profit, loss of business, business interruption, or loss of business opportunity.
That's too bad, in a way it was a bit of an unofficial app store for Anthropic - I am sure they've probably looked at that and hopefully this means there's something on it's way.
Not really sure if its even feasible to enforce it unless the idea is to discourage the big players from doing it.
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The number one thing we need is cheap abundant decentralized clean energy, and these things are laughable.
Unfortunately neither political party can get all of the above.
Are you implying that no one would use LLM SaaSes and everyone would self-host if energy costs were negligible?
That is...not how it works. People self-hosting don't look at their electricity bill.
I was stuck on the part where they said neither party could provide cheap abundant decentralized clean energy. Biden / Obama did a great job of providing those things, to the point where dirty coal and natural gas are both more expensive than solar or wind.
So, which two parties could they be referring to? The Republicans and the Freedom Caucus?
And I just bought my mac mini this morning... Sorry everyone
You know that if you are just using a cloud service and not running local models, you could have just bought a raspberry pi.
Yeah. I know it’s dumb but it’s also a very expensive machine to run BlueBubbles, because iMessage requires a real Mac signed into an Apple ID, and I want a persistent macOS automation host with native Messages, AppleScript, and direct access to my local dev environment, not just a headless Linux box calling APIs.
Harder to get at the Apple ecosystem. I have an old Macbook that just serves my reminders over the internet.
who knows when Apple decides to enter the game, but they will absolutely crush the personal agent market when they do.
Apple has been doing personal agents for a while. They're crushing it so hard they must be tired of winning at this point.
For instance, the other day, the Siri button in maps told me it couldn't start navigation because it didn't know where it was. It was animating a blue dot with my real time position at the same time.
Don't get me started about the new iOS 26 notification and messaging filters. Those are causing real harm multiple times a day.
I think this is shortsighted.
The markets value recurring subscription revenue at something like 10x “one-off” revenue, Anthropic is leaving a lot of enterprise value on the table with this approach.
In practice this approach forces AI apps to pay Anthropic for tokens, and then bill their customers a subscription. Customers could bring their own API key but it’s sketchy to put that into every app you want to try, and consumers aren’t going to use developer tools. And many categories of free app are simply excluded, which could in aggregate drive a lot more demand for subscriptions.
If Anthropic is worried about quota, seems they could set lower caps for third-party subscription usage? Still better than forcing API keys.
(Maybe this is purely about displacing other IDE products, rather than a broader market play.)
I think they are smart making a distinction between a D2C subscription which they control the interface to and eat the losses for vs B2B use where they pay for what they use.
Allows them to optimize their clients and use private APIs for exclusive features etc. and there’s really no reason to bootstrap other wannabe AI companies who just stick a facade experience in front of Anthropic’s paying customer.
> eat the losses
Look at your token usage of the last 30 days in one of the JSON files generated by Claude Code. Compare that against API costs for Opus. Tell me if they are eating losses or not. I'm not making a point, actually do it and let me know. I was at 1 million. I'm paying 90 EUR/m. That means I'm subsidizing them (paying 3-4 times what it would cost with the API)! And I feel like I'm a pretty heavy user. Although people running it in a loop or using Gas Town will be using much more.
I just ran some numbers and it works out if you're a prolific user.
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.
My hopes are on harness engineering allowing cheaper (but still large) models to shine. I'm evaluating DeepSeek because it would allow insane agent armies. Although DeepSeek charges for thinking tokens, something easy to overlook.
DeepSeek has the tendency to think... a lot!. Without a good harness I can't evaluate it well; time will tell.
OpenAI doesn't; it's embedded into the price, I think.
Cheap = we can run 10x the workloads, bigger imagination = innovation. Maybe 10 dumb agents in a loop can beat 1 Opus? Haha.
There's no decision to be made here, it's just way too expensive to have 3rd parties soak up the excess tokens, that's not the product being sold.
Especially as they are subsidized.
That’s not true, the market loves pay per use, see ”cloud”. It outperforms subscriptions by a lot, it’s not ”one-off”. And your example is not how companies building on top tend to charge, you either have your own infrastructure (key) or get charged at-cost + fees and service costs.
I don’t think Anthropic has any desire to be some B2C platform, they want high paying reliable customers (B2B, Enterprise).
> the market loves pay per use, see ”cloud”.
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.
Sure, but even if a subscription and per per use are both recurring revenue, pay per use is not a subscription. The point I was trying to make is that there’s a lot of money to be made in the model Anthropic seems to be going for, more than a monthly subscription fee would allow for.