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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

#131

Post by croes »

artdigital wrote: post #10
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…

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?

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

#132

Post by MillionOClock »

jes5199 wrote: post #64

there’s a million small scale AI apps that just aren’t worth building because there’s no way to do the billing that makes sense. If anthropic wanted to own that market, they could introduce a bring-your-own-Claude metaphor, where you login with Claude and token costs get billed to your personal account (after some reasonable monthly freebies from your subscription). But the big guys don’t seem interested in this, may…

I am a bit worried that this is the situation I am in with my (unpublished) commercial app right now: one of the major pain points I have is that while I have no doubt the app provides value in itself, I am worried about how many potential users will actually accept paying inference per token...

As an independent dev I also unfortunately don't have investors backing me to subsidize inference for my subscription plan.

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

#134

Post by croes »

bluegatty wrote: post #89
scwoodal wrote: post #79

Why does it matter to Anthropic if my $200 plan usage is coming from Claude Code or a third party? Doesn’t both count towards my usage limits the same?

If you buy a 'Season's Pass' for Disneyland, you cant 'sublet' it to another kid to use on the days you don't; It's not really buying a 'daily access rate'. Anthropic subs are not 'bulk tokens'. It's not an unreasonable policy and it's entirely inevitable that they have to restrict.

It’s still me going to Disneyland, I just take a different route

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

#135

Post by eclipxe »

adastra22 wrote: post #32
MillionOClock wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you look at this tweet [1] and in particular responses under it, it still seems to me like some parts of it need additional clarification. For instance, I have seen some people interpret the tweet as meaning using the OAuth token is actually ok for personal experimentation with the Agent SDK, which can be seen as a slight contradiction with what you quoted. A parent tweet also mentioned the docs clean up causing s…

Read the actual ToS. What you describe is NOT allowed.

That tweet is from a product leader on Claude Code itself...

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

#136

Post by stanguc »

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…

easily "bypassable", trust me :)

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

#137

Post by mkw5053 »

hedora wrote: post #113
mkw5053 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. I know it’s dumb but it’s also a very expensive machine to run BlueBubbles, because iMessage requires a real Mac signed into an Apple ID, and I want a persistent macOS automation host with native Messages, AppleScript, and direct access to my local dev environment, not just a headless Linux box calling APIs.

My M2 macbook pro runs qwen fine, and so will any mac mini with maxed out ram.

The only immediately available was the base 16GB version

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

#138

Post by zb3 »

scwoodal wrote: post #79

Why does it matter to Anthropic if my $200 plan usage is coming from Claude Code or a third party? Doesn’t both count towards my usage limits the same?

They're losing money on this $200 plan and they're essentially paying you to make you dependent on Claude Code so they can exploit this (somehow) in the future.

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

#139

Post by imachine1980_ »

mattas wrote: post #108
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).

The question I have: how much are they _also_ losing on per-token billing?

From what I understand, they make money per-token billing. Not enough for how much it costs to train, not accounting for marketing, subscription services, and research for new models, but if they are used, they lose less money.

Finance 101 tldr explanation: The contribution margin (= price per token -variable cost per token ) this is positive

Profit (= contribution margin x cuantity- fix cost)

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

#140

Post by airstrike »

croes wrote: post #128
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).

But why does it matter which program you use to consume the tokens? The sounds like a confession that claude code is somewhat wasteful at token use.

No, it's a confession they have no moat other than trying to hold onto the best model for a given use case.

I find that competitive edge unlikely to last meaningfully in the long term, but this is still a contrarian view.

More recently, people have started to wise up to the view that the value is in the application layer

https://www.iconiqcapital.com/growth/reports/2026-state-of-a...

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