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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

#201

Post by blackoil »

croes wrote: post #131
artdigital wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But why does it matter which program consumes the tokens?

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.

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

#202

Post by MikeNotThePope »

mirzap wrote: post #155
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).

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 screwi…

I wonder how many people have a subscription and don’t fully utilize it. That’s free money for them, too.

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

#203

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

Uehreka wrote: post #60
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.

> 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 for…

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

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

#204

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

johnfn wrote: post #194
Uehreka wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

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.

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

#205

Post by edg5000 »

hedora wrote: post #82

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 ta…

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.

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

#206

Post by BoorishBears »

firloop wrote: post #28
paxys wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. [0] https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/agent-sdk/overview

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

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

#207

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

hedora wrote: post #82

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 ta…

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?

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

#208

Post by planckscnst »

akulbe wrote: post #3

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.

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

#209

Post by [deleted] »

firloop wrote: post #28
paxys wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. [0] https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/agent-sdk/overview

[deleted]

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

#210

Post by Bolwin »

serf wrote: post #22
mapontosevenths wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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
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