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Anthropic made a mistake in cutting off third-party clients

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Re: Anthropic made a mistake in cutting off third-party clients

#141

Post by gpm »

shepherdjerred wrote: post #139
gpm wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem the second you stop subsidizing Claude Code and start making money on it the incentive to use it over opencode disappears. If opencode is the better tool than claude code - and that's the reason people are using their claude subscription with it instead of claude code - people will end up switching to it. Maybe they can hope to murder opencode in the meantime with predatory pricing and build an advantage…

It’s possible that tokens become cheap enough that they don’t need to raise prices to make a profit. The latest opus is 3x less expensive than the previous.

Then the competitors drop prices though. The current justification for claude code is just that it's an order of magnitude (or more) cheaper per token than comparable alternatives. That's a terrible business model to be stuck in.

Re: Anthropic made a mistake in cutting off third-party clients

#142

Post by shepherdjerred »

gpm wrote: post #141
shepherdjerred wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s possible that tokens become cheap enough that they don’t need to raise prices to make a profit. The latest opus is 3x less expensive than the previous.

Then the competitors drop prices though. The current justification for claude code is just that it's an order of magnitude (or more) cheaper per token than comparable alternatives. That's a terrible business model to be stuck in.

If everyone is dropping prices in this scenario then I don’t see how the user eventually gets squeezed.

I mean I guess they could do a bait and switch (drop prices so low that Anthropic goes bankrupt, then raises price) but that’s possible in literally any industry, and sees unlikely given the current number of competitors

Re: Anthropic made a mistake in cutting off third-party clients

#143

Post by gpm »

shepherdjerred wrote: post #142
gpm wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then the competitors drop prices though. The current justification for claude code is just that it's an order of magnitude (or more) cheaper per token than comparable alternatives. That's a terrible business model to be stuck in.

If everyone is dropping prices in this scenario then I don’t see how the user eventually gets squeezed. I mean I guess they could do a bait and switch (drop prices so low that Anthropic goes bankrupt, then raises price) but that’s possible in literally any industry, and sees unlikely given the current number of competitors

Terrible for Anthropic I mean, not the user.

Re: Anthropic made a mistake in cutting off third-party clients

#144

Post by mcintyre1994 »

anon84873628 wrote: post #104
pizlonator wrote: post #90

It seems that Anthropic's thesis is that vertical integration wins. It's too soon to tell if that's true or not. One of the features of vertical integration is that there will be folks complaining about it. Like the way folks would complain that it's impossible or hard to install macOS on anything other than a Mac, and impossible or hard to install anything other than macOS on a Mac. Yet, despite those complains, the…

Interestingly, another front page article today is about Apple choosing to use Gemini for Siri. A lot of the comments revolve around how much they will be locked in and how much the base models are commoditized. Google is pretty clearly ok with being an infrastructure/service provider for all comers. Same is true for Open AI (especially via Azure?) I guess Anthropic does not want to compete like that.

Anthropic offer their API, including for tools like Opencode. It’s more expensive than Claude Code, but I don’t think it’s priced significantly differently to competitors. Obviously Apple aren’t paying API prices, and Google have a lot more to offer them, but I don’t think Anthropic would turn down that deal if they could have it. They have their models in AWS Bedrock too, and that is an option to auth with Claude Code.

I think they do see vertical integration opportunities on product, but they definitely want to compete to power everything else too.

Re: Anthropic made a mistake in cutting off third-party clients

#147

Post by [deleted] »

stefan_ wrote: post #137
sergiotapia wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The model is the best. The CLI tool is terrible compared to opencode. That is the unfortunate reality, we are now being foisted claude code. :( I wish they just fork opencode.

It's crazy how bad the interface it is. I'm generally a fan of the model performance but there is not a day where their CLI will not flash random parts of scrollback or have a second of input lag just typing in the initial prompt (how is that even possible? you are not doing anything?). If this is their "premier tool" no vending machine business can save them.

[deleted]

Re: Anthropic made a mistake in cutting off third-party clients

#148

Post by dpark »

Have any of these sorts of proclamations ever actually come true? I recall when Reddit effectively cut off all the clients from their API, there were similar loud proclamations that they had ruined their business and everyone would defect. I remember something similar with Twitter. These businesses both have their problems, but blocking third-party apps doesn’t seem to be one of them.

I think Anthropic took a look at the market, realized they had a strong position with Claude Code, and decided to capitalize on that rather than joining the race to the bottom and becoming just another option for OpenCode. OpenAI looked at the market and decided the opposite, because they don’t have strong market share with Codex and they would rather undercut Claude, which is a legitimate strategy. Don’t know who wins.

I feel like Anthropic is probably making the right choice here. What do they have to gain by helping competitors undercut them? I don’t think Anthropic wants to be just another model that you could use. They want to be the ecosystem you use to code. Probably better to try to win a profitable market than to try to compete to be the cheapest commodity model.

Re: Anthropic made a mistake in cutting off third-party clients

#149

Post by 8note »

this feels anti-trust-y to me.

when i signed up for a subscription it was with the understanding that id be able to use those tokens on which ever agent i wanted to play with, and that as i got to something i want to have persistently running, id switch that to be an api client. i quickly figured out that claude code was the current best coding agent for the model, but seeing other folks calling opus now im not actually sure thats true, in which case that subsidized token might be more expensive to both me and anthropic, because its not the most token efficient route over their model.

i dislike that now i wont be able to feed them training data using many different starting points and paths, which i think over time will have a bad impact on their models making them worse over time

Re: Anthropic made a mistake in cutting off third-party clients

#150

Post by adw »

jrsj wrote: post #30
ojosilva wrote: post #28

They did not. Anthropic is protecting its huge asset: the Claude Code value chain, which has proven itself to be a winner among devs (me included, after trying everything under the sun in 2025). If anything, Anthropic's mistake is that they are incapable of monetizing their great models in the chat market, where ChatGPT reigns: ie. Anthropic did not invest in image generation, Google did and Gemini has a shot at the…

It might make sense from Anthropics perspective but as a user of these tools I think it would be a huge mistake to build your workflow around Claude Code when they are pushing vendor lock in this aggressively. Making this mistake could end up being the AI equivalent of choosing Oracle over Postgres

Switching tools is _very easy_.
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