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Anthropic: Developing a Claude Code competitor using Claude Code is banned

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Re: Anthropic: Developing a Claude Code competitor using Claude Code is banned

#121

Post by ankit219 »

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #114
ankit219 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because your subscription depends on the very API business. Anthropic's cogs is rent of buying x amount of h100s. cost of a marginal query for them is almost zero until the batch fills up and they need a new cluster. So, API clusters are usually built for peak load with low utilization (filled batch) at any given time. Given AI's peak demand is extremely spiky they end up with low utilization numbers for API support.…

> Your subscription is supposed to use that free capacity. Hence, the token costs are not that high, hence you could buy that. But it needs careful management that you dont overload the system. There is a claude code telemetry which identifies the request as lower priority than API (and probably decide on queueing + caching too). If your harness makes 10 parallel calls everytime you query, and not manage context as w…

From what i have read on twitter. People were purchasing max subs and using it as a substitute for API keys for their startups. Typical scrappy startup story but this has the same bursty nature as API in temrs of concurrency and parallel requests. They used the Opencode implementation. This is probably one of the triggers because it screws up everything.

Telemetry is a reason. And its also the mentioned reason. Marketing is a plausible thing and likely part of the reason too, but lock-in etc. would have meant this would have come way sooner than now. They would not even be offering an API in that case if they really want to lock people in. That is not consistent with other actions.

At the same time, the balance is delicate. if you get too many subs users and not enough API users, then suddenly the setup is not profitable anymore. Because there is less underused capacity available to direct subs users to. This probably explains a part of their stance too, and why they havent done it till now. Openai never allowed it, and now when they do, they will make more changes to the auth setup which claude did not. (This episode tells you how duct taped whole system was at ant. They used the auth key to generate a claude code token, and just used that to hit the API servers).

Re: Anthropic: Developing a Claude Code competitor using Claude Code is banned

#122

Post by aw123 »

falloutx wrote: post #105
aw123 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

source: pulled out of your a**

he may not be entirely correct, but Claude Code plans are significantly better than the API plan, 100$ plan may not be as cost effective but for 18$ you can get like 5x usage of the API plan.

I've seen dozens of "experts" all over the internet claim that they're "subsidizing costs" with the coding plans despite no evidence whatsoever. Despite the fact that various sources from OpenAI, Deepseek, model inference providers have suggested the contrary, that inference is very profitable with very high margins.

Re: Anthropic: Developing a Claude Code competitor using Claude Code is banned

#124

Post by FootballMuse »

oblio wrote: post #59
zingar wrote: post #10

Is this a standard tech ToU item? Is this them saying that their human developers don’t add much to their product beyond what the AI does for them?

Imagine if Visual Studio said "you can't use VS to build another IDE".

Imagine if Visual Studio said "you can't use VS to build any product or service which may compete with a Microsoft product or service"

Re: Anthropic: Developing a Claude Code competitor using Claude Code is banned

#125

Post by falloutx »

aw123 wrote: post #122
falloutx wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

he may not be entirely correct, but Claude Code plans are significantly better than the API plan, 100$ plan may not be as cost effective but for 18$ you can get like 5x usage of the API plan.

I've seen dozens of "experts" all over the internet claim that they're "subsidizing costs" with the coding plans despite no evidence whatsoever. Despite the fact that various sources from OpenAI, Deepseek, model inference providers have suggested the contrary, that inference is very profitable with very high margins.

How am I gonna give you exact price savings, when on $18 amount of work you can do it is variable, while $100 on API only goes a limited amount. You can exhaust $100 on API in one work day easily. On $18 plan the limit resets daily or 12hrs, so you can keep coming back. If API pricing is correct, which it looks like because all top models have similar costs, then it is to believe that monthly plans are subsidised.

And if inference is so profitable why is OpenAI losing 100B a year

Re: Anthropic: Developing a Claude Code competitor using Claude Code is banned

#126

Post by [deleted] »

behnamoh wrote: post #73
behnamoh wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can use Claude Code to write code to make a competitor for Claude Code. No, the ToS literally says you cannot.

What's worse is that Anthropic also goes after customers who bought their services through intermediaries, even if the service was API (not subscription). If you use Claude models through CURSOR, Anthropic still applies its own policies on usage. Just recently they cut off xAI employees' access to Claude models on Cursor [0]. X has threatened to ban Anthropic from X. [0]: https://x.com/kyliebytes/status/2009686466746…

[deleted]

Re: Anthropic: Developing a Claude Code competitor using Claude Code is banned

#127

Post by AstroBen »

Robdel12 wrote: post #108
dathinab wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

my guess? they lose money on 200/month plan, maybe even quite a bit. So that plan only exist to subsidize their editor. Could be about the typical "all must be under our control" power fantasies companies have. But if there really is "no moat" and open model will be competitive just in a matter of time then having "the" coding editor might be majorly relevant for driving sales. Ironically they seem to already have ki…

I'd say _yes_. This is my `npx ccusage` (reads the .claude folder) since nov 20th: │ Total │ │ 3,884,609 │ 3,723,258 │ 215,832,272 │ 3,956,313,197 │ 4,179,753,336 │ $3150.99 │ It calculates tokens & public API pricing. But also Anthropic models are generally more expensive than others, so I guess its sort of 'self made' value? Some of it?

Only Anthropic knows but I imagine you're a significant outlier

Re: Anthropic: Developing a Claude Code competitor using Claude Code is banned

#128

Post by bastawhiz »

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #113
bastawhiz wrote: post #99

I think this is kind of a nothingburger. This reads like a standard clause in any services contract. I also cannot (without a license): 1. Pay for a stock photo library and train an image model with it that I then sell. 2. Use a spam detection service, train a model on its output, then sell that model as a competitor. 3. Hire a voice actor to read some copy, train a text to speech model on their voice, then sell that…

> I don't even think they care about the CLI No they actually do, basically they provide claude code subscription model for 200$ which is a loss making leader and you can realistically get value of even around 300-400$ per month or even more (close to 1000$) if you were using API So why do they bear the loss, I hear you ask? Because it acts as a marketing expensive for them. They get so much free advertising in sense…

That's not at all what they're saying, though. It's just nonsense to say "you can't recreate our CLI with Claude Code" because you can get literally any other competent AI to do it with a roughly comparable result. You don't need to add this clause to the TOS to protect a CLI that doesn't do anything other than calling some back-end—there's no moat here.

Re: Anthropic: Developing a Claude Code competitor using Claude Code is banned

#129

Post by YetAnotherNick »

dathinab wrote: post #90
airstrike wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trick is to use Codex to write a Claude Code clone, Claude Code to write an Antigravity clone, and Antigravity to write a Codex clone. Good luck catching me, I'm behind 7 proxies.

or you just do it and be in the EU it's a clear anti-competive clause by a dominant market leader, such clauses tend to be void AFIK

What do you mean by void? Sure you cannot be sued for writing clone, in any country. All they can do is ban account and I think they can ban any account in EU.

Re: Anthropic: Developing a Claude Code competitor using Claude Code is banned

#130

Post by hdra »

exitb wrote: post #32
rglullis wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I signed up to Claude Pro when I figured out I could use it on opencode, so I could start things on Sonnet/Opus on plan mode and switch to cheaper models on build mode. Now that I can't do that, I will probably just cancel my subscription and do the dance between different hosted providers during plan phase and ask for a prompt to feed into opencode afterwards.

As of yesterday OpenAI seems to explicitly allow opencode on their subscription plans.

can you point me to this claim? also last i checked trying to connect to OpenAI seems to prompt for an API key, does openAI's API key make use of the subscription quota?

just wanted to make sure before I sign up for a openAI sub

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