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Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use

code.claude.com

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

#41

Post by baconner »

slopinthebag wrote: post #11

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.

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.

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

#43

Post by itissid »

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…

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.

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

#44

Post by charcircuit »

slopinthebag wrote: post #11

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.

You could tell by the prompt being used.

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

#45

Post by chii »

ddxv wrote: post #40

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.

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

#46

Post by adastra22 »

spullara wrote: post #27
theahura wrote: post #2

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…

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.

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

#47

Post by MillionOClock »

paxys wrote: post #23
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…

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.

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?

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

#48

Post by Someone1234 »

paxys wrote: post #31

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).

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.

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

#50

Post by s-lambert »

MillionOClock wrote: post #16
azuanrb wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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