Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use (code.claude.com)

Anthropic is going to be on the losing side with this. Models are too fungible, it's really about vibes, and Claude Code is far too fat and opinionated. Ironically, they're holding back innovation, and it's burning the loyalty the model team is earning.

I don't think many are confused about why Anthropic wants to do this. The crux is that they appear to be making these changes solely for their own benefit at the expense of their users and people are upset.

There are parallels to the silly Metaverse hype wave from a few years ago. At the time I saw a surprising number of people defending the investment saying it was important for Facebook to control their own platform. Well sure it's beneficial for Facebook to control a platform, but that benefit is purely for the company and if anything it would harm current and future users. Unsurprisingly, the pitch to please think of this giant corporation's needs wasn't a compelling pitch in the end.

"Training the specific harness" is marginal -- it's obvious if you've used anything else. pi with Claude is as good as (even better! given the obvious care to context management in pi) as Claude Code with Claude.

This whole game is a bizarre battle.

In the future, many companies will have slightly different secret RL sauces. I'd want to use Gemini for documentation, Claude for design, Codex for planning, yada yada ... there will be no generalist take-all model, I just don't believe RL scaling works like that.

I'm not convinced that a single company can own the best performing model in all categories, I'm not even sure the economics make it feasible.

Good for us, of course.

Don't think that's a valid comparison.

Apple can do those things because they control the hardware device, which has physical distribution, and they lock down the ecosystem. There is no third party app store, and you can't get the Photos app to save to Google Drive.

With Claude Code, just export an env variable or use a MITM proxy + some middleware to forward requests to OpenAI instead. It's impossible to have lock in. Also, coding agent CLIs are a commodity.

> At some point Claude Code will become an ecosystem with preferred cloud and database vendors, observability, code review agents, etc.

i've been wondering how anthropic is going to survive long term. If they could build out an infrastructure and services to complete with the hyperscalers but surfaced as a tool for claude to use then maybe. You pay Anthropic $20/user/month for ClaudeCode but also $100k/month to run your applications.

>Claude Code is a lock in, where Anthropic takes all the value.

I wouldn't all the value, but how else are you going to run the business? Allow other to take all the value you provide?

> Reading these comments aren't we missing the obvious?

AI companies: "You think you own that code?"

???

Use an API Key and there's no problem.

They literally put that in plain words in the ToS.

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.

Every garden eventually becomes a walled garden once enough people are inside.

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

See [1] for a solution.

[1] https://i.programmerhumor.io/2025/03/778c56a79115a582edb9949...

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.

"Are becoming", you sweet summer child.

It all started with Facebook closing pretty much everything and making FB Messenger a custom protocol instead of XMPP.

And whatever API access is still available is so shit and badly managed that even a household name billion dollar gaming company couldn't get a fast-lane for approval to use specific API endpoints.

The final straw was Twitter effectively closing up their API "to protect from bots", which in fact did NOT protect anyone from bots. All it did was prevent legitimate entertaining and silly bots from acting on the platform, the actual state-controlled trolls just bought the blue checkmark and continued as-is.

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

It's just the continued slow death of the open internet

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.

You're correct in your observations. In the age of agents, the walls are going up. APIs are no longer a value-add; they're a liability. MCP and the equivalent will be the norm interface. IMO.

What is given can be taken away. Despite the extra difficult this is why unofficial methods (e.g. scraping) are often superior. Soon we'll see more fully independent data scraping done by cameras and microphones.

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.

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.

„Open Access APIs are like a subway. You use them to capture a market and then you get out.“

— Erdogan, probably.

Given the Cambridge Analytica scandal, I don’t take too much issue to FB making their APIs a little tougher to use

Not sure how relevant this comment is

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.

[0] https://www.mcdbooks.com/books/enshittification

That is not new, just new with APIs.

The usual cycle with startups is to:

- Start being very open, as this brings people developing over the platforms and generates growth

- As long as they are growing, VC money will come to pay for everything. This is the scale up phase

- Then comes the VC exit, IPO or whatever

- Now the new owners don't want user growth, they want margin growth. This is the company phase

- Companies then have monetize their users (why not ads?), close up free, or high-maintenance stuff that do not bring margin

- and report that sweet $$$ growth quarter after quarter

...until a new startup comes in and starts the cycle over again, destroying all the value the old company had.

A mix of Enshittification and Innovators Dilemma theories

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.

Google now wants $30,000 a month for customsearch (minimum charge), up from 1c per search or thereabouts in January 2026...

There is no moat except market saturation and gate keeping for most platforms.

It's because AI is being trained on all of these APIs and the platforms are at risk of losing what makes them valuable (their data). So they have to take the API down or charge enough that it wouldn't be worth it for an AI.

But this ban is precisely on circumventing the API.

You're not wrong. Reddit & Elon started it and everyone laughed at them and made a stink. But my guess is the "last dying gasp of the freeloader" /s wasn't enough to dissuade other companies from jumping on the bandwagon, cause fiduciary responsibility to shareholders reigns supreme at the end of the day.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

Anthropic has published a very clear statement. It's "no".

Does https://happy.engineering/ need to use the API keys or can use oauth? It's basically a frontend for claude-cli.

Usually, it is already stated in their documentation (auth section). If a statement is vague, treat it as a no. It is not worth the risk when they can ban you at any time. For example, ChatGPT allows it, but Claude and Gemini do not.

https://developers.openai.com/codex/auth

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.

Not allowed. They've already banned people for this.

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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?

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

The rate limit for my $20 OpenAI / Codex account feels 10x larger than the $20 claude account.

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.

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.

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.

> I’m only waiting for OpenAI to provide an equivalet ~100 USD subscription to entirely ditch Claude.

I have a feeling Anthropic might be in for an extremely rude awakening when that happens, and I don’t think it’s a matter of “if” anymore.

> And don't even let me get started on how bad Claude client has become

The latest versions of claude code have been freezing and then crashing while waiting on long running commands. It's pretty frustrating.

My favorite conspiracy explanation:

Claude has gotten a lot of popular media attention in the last few weeks, and the influx of users is constraining compute/memory on an already compute heavy model. So you get all the suspected "tricks" like quantization, shorter thinking, KV cache optimizations.

It feels like the same thing that happened to Gemini 3, and what you can even feel throughout the day (the models seem smartest at 12am).

Dario in his interview with dwarkesh last week also lamented the same refrain that other lab leaders have: compute is constrained and there are big tradeoffs in how you allocate it. It feels safe to reason then that they will use any trick they can to free up compute.

all this because of a single week?

No developer writes the same prompt twice. How can you be sure something has changed?

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?)

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.

The secret is there is no path on making that back.

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?

Why do you think they're losing money on subscriptions?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

>I'm not going to pay 500 USD of API credits every months, no way. I have to move to a different provider

It's funny, you are probably in the cohort that made Antropic have to pursue this type of decision so aggressively.

> Claude Code is buggy has hell and I think I've never used a CLI tool that consume so much memory and CPU

FWIW this aligns completely with the LLM ethos. Inefficiency is a virtue.

I had a Claude code instance using 55 GB of RAM yesterday.

I got so tired of cursor that I started writing down every bug I encountered. The list is currently at 30 entries, some of them major bugs such as pressing "apply" on changes not actually applying changes or models getting stuck in infinite loops and burning 50 million tokens.

I regret ever promoting that Claude Code crap. I remember when it was nothing but glowing reviews everywhere. Honestly AI companies should stick to what they are good at: direct API interface to powerful models.

We are heading toward a $1000/month model just to use LLMs in the cloud.

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.

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.

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.

They offer an API for people who want to build their own clients. They didn't stop people from being able to use Claude.

That's what the API is for.

So basically you are saying Anthropic models are indispensable but you are too cheap to pay for it.

Sure they are having a blast, they are paying 20$ instead of getting charged hundreds for forr tokens.

It's simple, follow the ToS

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"

Sorry but if you're not paying the big fee there's no way you're going to have a job by the late-2020s.

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.

They're too small to screw you over. But you've got more time until they do at least.

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The good enough alternative models are here or will be soon, depending on your definition of good enough. MiniMax-M2.5 looks really competitive and its a tenth of the cost of Sonnet-4.6 (they also have subscriptions).

Running locally is going to require a lot of memory, compute, and energy for the foreseeable future which makes it really hard to compete with ~$20/mo subscriptions.

Personally I am already there- I go to Qwen and Deepseek locally via ollama for my dumb questions and small tasks, and only go to Claude if they fail. I do this partially because I am just so tired of everything I do over a network being logged, tracked, mined and monetized, and also partially because I would like my end state to be using all local tools, at least for personal stuff.

People running models locally has always been the scare for the sama's of the world. "Wait, I don't need you to generate these responses for me? I can get the same results myself?"

introducing moderation, steerage and censorship in your LLM is a great way to not even show up to the table with a competitive product. builders have woken up to this reality and are demanding local models

Is that on the $20 sub?

> 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.

FYI a Twitter post that contradicts the ToS is NOT a clarification.

What's wrong with using X?

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.

>> 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.

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

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.

why wouldn't they just make it so the SDK can't use claude subs? like what are they doing here?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Probably because the $20 plan is essentially a paid demo for the higher plans.

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.

Any user who is using a third-party client is likely self-selected into being a power user who is less profitable.

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.

Openclaw is unaffected by this as the Claude Code CLI is called directly

how comparable are the usage limits?

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.

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.

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.

For sure, yes. They already added attempts to block opencode, etc.

is the tooling moat and secret sauce in Claude Code the client? That's super risky given the language it was written in ( javascript ). I bet Claude Code itself can probably reverse engineer the minimized javascript, trace the logic, and then name variables something sensible for readability. Then the secret sauce is exposed for all to see.

Also, can you not setup a proxy for the cert and a packet sniffer to watch whatever ClaudeCode is doing with respect to API access? To me, if you have "secret sauce" you have to keep it server side and make the client as dumb as possible. Especially if your client is executes as Javascript.

Could you think of it as ClaudeCode is just a tool used by another agent and that other agent is instructed to use the ClaudeCode tool for everything? Makes sense, i don't see why we can't have agents use these agents for us, just like the AI companies are proposing to use their agents in place of everything else we currently use.

Also, why not distribute implementation documentation so claudecode can write OpenCode itself and use your oauth token. Now you have opencode for personal use, you didn't get it from anywhere your agent created it for you and only you.

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?

> 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.

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.

> how can they even enforce this?

I would think that different tools would probably have different templates for their prompts?

You could tell by the prompt being used.

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.

I am looking forward to switching to OpenAI once my claude max account is banned for using pi....

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.

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.

Especially how generous Anthropic has been recently with subscribers - extra usage in December, $50 credit earlier this month, $20 subscription getting access to Opus.

It suggests to me Anthropic is less concerned with the financial impact of letting subscribers use alternative tools and more concerned with creating lock in to their products and subscriptions. It very well might backfire though, I was not considering alternative models yesterday, but today I am actively exploring other options and considering cancelling my sub. I've been using my subscription primarily through pi recently, so if they aren't interested in me as a customer, pretty much everyone else is.

I don’t understand which camp are you on?

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.

From 3rd party AI app use?

OpenRouter uses the API and does not use any subscription auth.

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 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.

Sonnet was not trained with this information and extremely-recent-information-without-access-to-a-Web-Search-tool is the core case of hallucination.

Agreed! I don't understand how so many people on here seem to think it is completely reasonable for Anthropic to act like this.

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?

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.

> The real value in these tools is not the model, it is the harness... And that is the part that is easiest to replicate.

> The companies that will win long-term are the ones building open protocols and letting users bring their own model.

These seem contradictory. It sounds like you're saying that the long term winners are the ones who do the easy part. The future I see is open source harnesses talking to commodity models.

More than just the real value: the real intelligence is in the harness.

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.

You know that if you are just using a cloud service and not running local models, you could have just bought a raspberry pi.

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.

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).