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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

#551

Post by eru »

hugmynutus wrote: post #180
shykes wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Commodity hardware and software will continue to drop in price. Enterprise products with sufficient market share and "stickiness", will not. For historical precedent, see the commercial practices of Oracle, Microsoft, Vmware, Salesforce, at the height of their power.

> Commodity hardware and software will continue to drop in price. The software is free (citation: Cuda, nvcc, llvm, olama/llama cpp, linux, etc) The hardware is *not* getting cheaper (unless we're talking a 5+ year time) as most manufacturers are signaling the current shortages will continue ~24 months.

> The hardware is not getting cheaper (unless we're talking a 5+ year time)

Yes, that's the time I'm talking about.

You also had a blip with increasing hard disk prices when Thailand flooded a few years ago.

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

#552

Post by brookst »

amelius wrote: post #464
terminalbraid wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stop giving money to the company that doesn't give you what you want.

It is important that the company knows why they are losing customers, though.

Internal sales data is probably a lot more effective and attended to than HN posts.

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

#553

Post by nerdjon »

rglullis wrote: post #501
Loic wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 onl…

> If they can provide a relatively cheap subscription against the direct API use Except they can't. Their costs are not magically lower when you use claude code vs when you use a third-party client. > For me, this is fair. This is, plain and simple, a tie-in sale of claude code. I am particularly amused by people accepting it as "fair" because in Brazil this is an illegal practice.

> This is, plain and simple, a tie-in sale of claude code. I am particularly amused by people accepting it as "fair" because in Brazil this is an illegal practice

I am very curious what is particularly illegal about this. On the sales page nowhere do they actually talk about the API https://claude.com/pricing

Now we all know obviously the API is being used because that is how things work, but you are not actually paying a subscription for the API. You are paying for access to Claude Code.

Is it also illegal that if you pay for Playstation Plus that you can't play those games on an Xbox?

Is it illegal that you can't use third party netflix apps?

I really don't want to defend and AI company here but this is perfectly normal. In no other situation would we expect access to the API, the only reason this is considered different is because they also have a different service that gives access to the API. But that is irrelevant.

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

#554

Post by bdangubic »

sambull wrote: post #550
fastball wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no monthly limit, it (currently) is a weekly and 5-hourly limit. If they allow anyone to use any tool with their subscription service, you could have a system (like OpenClaw) which involves 0 human interaction and is constantly consuming 100% of your token limit, then waiting until limits reset to do it all over again. It seems fairly clear that Anthropic is probably losing money on such usage patterns. Once…

There are 4 weeks in a month. 4 periods of weekly limits, is a monthly limit.

4 weeks * 12 months = 48 weeks in a year * 7 days in a week = 336 days per year - close enough :)

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

#556

Post by regenschutz »

Xunjin wrote: post #489
narrator wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what most people don't realize is running an agent 24/7 fully automated is burning a huge hole in their profitability. Who even knows how big it is. It could be getting it on the 8/9 figures a day for all we know. There's this pervasive idea left over from the pre-llm days that compute is free. You want to rent your own H200x8 to run your Claude model, that's literally going to cost $24/hour. People are just…

I understand you mean for free in the sense that you don't pay a third party to use it, however let's no forget that you still use the power grid and that's not free. Also worth to note that energy prices have increased worldwide.

Maintaining hardware also isn't free. Time is money.

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

#557

Post by regenschutz »

xvector wrote: post #456
stavros wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even worse, if I'm paying a subscription for the product, and I don't want to use the product, what's it to them?

Do you not understand that they run the regular subscription at a huge loss? In exchange they require you to stick with Claude Code. You are free to use the API.

Why can't they run the API at a huge loss too then??

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

#558

Post by Esophagus4 »

ifwinterco wrote: post #313
andreagrandi wrote: post #273

I'm only waiting for OpenAI to provide an equivalet ~100 USD subscription to entirely ditch Claude. Opus has gone down the hill continously in the last week (and before you start flooding with replies, I've been testing opus/codex in parallel for the last week, I've plenty of examples of Claude going off track, then apologising, then saying "now it's all fixed!" and then only fixing part of it, when codex nailed at t…

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

Huh… I’ve seen this comment a lot in this thread but I’ve really been impressed with both Anthropic’s latest models and latest tooling (plugins like /frontend-design mean it actually designs real front ends instead of the vibe coded purple gradient look). And I see it doing more planning and making fewer mistakes than before. I have to do far less oversight and debugging broken code these days.

But if people really like Codex better, maybe I’ll try it. I’ve been trying not to pay for 2 subscriptions at once but it might be worth a test.

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

#559

Post by bluelightning2k »

Reading these comments aren't we missing the obvious?

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

If the frontend and API are decoupled, they are one benchmark away from losing half their users.

Some other motivations: they want to capture the value. Even if it's unprofitable they can expect it to become vastly profitable as inference cost drops, efficiency improves, competitors die out etc. Or worst case build the dominant brand then reduce the quotas.

Then there's brand - when people talk about OpenCode they will occasionally specify "OpenCode (with Claude)" but frequently won't.

Then platform - at any point they can push any other service.

Look at the Apple comparison. Yes, the hardware and software are tuned and tested together. The analogy here is training the specific harness,caching the system prompt, switching models, etc.

But Apple also gets to charge Google $billions for being the default search engine. They get to sell apps. They get to sell cloud storage, and even somehow a TV. That's all super profitable.

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

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

#560

Post by bbstats »

andreagrandi wrote: post #273

I'm only waiting for OpenAI to provide an equivalet ~100 USD subscription to entirely ditch Claude. Opus has gone down the hill continously in the last week (and before you start flooding with replies, I've been testing opus/codex in parallel for the last week, I've plenty of examples of Claude going off track, then apologising, then saying "now it's all fixed!" and then only fixing part of it, when codex nailed at t…

all this because of a single week?
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