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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

#211

Post by mirzap »

KingMob wrote: post #197
mirzap wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

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Training frontier models takes months, costs billions, and the model is outdated in six months.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.

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

#212

Post by tappio »

sambull wrote: post #94
vicchenai wrote: post #83

[dead]

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.

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

#213

Post by aydyn »

minimaxir wrote: post #72
aydyn wrote: post #56

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.

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

#215

Post by cmwelsh »

resonious wrote: post #181
kovek wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

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

#216

Post by raffkede »

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #195
vldszn wrote: post #125

At this point, are there decent alternatives to Anthropic models for coding that allow third-party usage?

Kimi is amazing for this. They offer API usage as well iirc if you buy their subscription.

Also the .99c deal has API Access

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

#218

Post by xigoi »

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 want that sweet vendor lock-in.

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

#219

Post by theptip »

techpression wrote: post #163
theptip wrote: post #52

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…

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.

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

#220

Post by hombre_fatal »

dakolli wrote: post #199
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.

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,…

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.

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