Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use • Hacker News Board

Re: Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use

#11

Post by slopinthebag » Thu, Feb 19, 2026, 3:27 AM UTC

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.

Re: Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use

#12

Post by mapontosevenths » Thu, Feb 19, 2026, 3:27 AM UTC

akulbe wrote: post #3

Is this a direct shot at things like OpenClaw, or am I reading it wrong?

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.

Re: Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use

#13

Post by ashikns » Thu, Feb 19, 2026, 3:28 AM UTC

MillionOClock wrote: post #4

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 other…

> 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.

Re: Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use

#14

Post by laksjhdlka » Thu, Feb 19, 2026, 3:29 AM UTC

MillionOClock wrote: post #4

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 other…

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

Re: Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use

#15

Post by eleventyseven » Thu, Feb 19, 2026, 3:30 AM UTC

mkw5053 wrote: post #6

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.

Re: Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use

#16

Post by MillionOClock » Thu, Feb 19, 2026, 3:31 AM UTC

azuanrb wrote: post #8

MillionOClock wrote: post #4

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 other…

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

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.

Re: Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use

#17

Post by tiffanyh » Thu, Feb 19, 2026, 3:31 AM UTC

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?

Re: Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use

#18

Post by j45 » Thu, Feb 19, 2026, 3:32 AM UTC

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.

Re: Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use

#19

Post by drivebyhooting » Thu, Feb 19, 2026, 3:33 AM UTC

How does this impact open router?

Can’t this restriction for the time being be bypassed via -p command line flag?

Re: Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use

#20

Post by mkw5053 » Thu, Feb 19, 2026, 3:34 AM UTC

eleventyseven wrote: post #15

mkw5053 wrote: post #6

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.