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Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use
151–160 of 827 posts
Re: Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Disingenuous analogy. It's more buying a season pass for Disneyland, then getting told you can't park for free if you're entering the park even though free parking is included with the pass. Still not unreasonable, but brings to light the intention of the tool is to force the user into an ecosystem rather.
It's not a disingenuous analogy ... whatever it is.
But 'you can't park even though the ticket includes parking' is not an appropriate analogy because 3rd party use is definitely not intended. They did not 'state one thing' and the 'disallow it'.
This is a pretty straight forward case of people using their subscription for 'adjacent' use, and Anthropic being more explicit about it.
There's nothing fancy going on here.
Re: Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use
#153I 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).
Honestly I think I am already sold on AI, who is the first company that is going to show us all how much it really costs and start enshitification? First to market wins right?
Re: Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
The secret is there is no path on making that back.
My crude metaphor to explain to my family is gasoline has just been invented and we're all being lent Bentley's to get us addicted to driving everywhere. Eventually we won't be given free Bentley's, and someone is going to be holding the bag when the infinite money machine finally has a hiccup. The tech giants are hoping their gasoline is the one that we all crave when we're left depending on driving everywhere and t…
I like this analogy.
I also think we're, as ICs, being given Bentleys meanwhile they're trying to invent Waymos to put us all out of work.
Humans are the cost center in their world model.
Re: Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use
#155I 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).
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 screwing developers is not a good strategy.
They are not 10× better than Codex; on the contrary, in my opinion Codex produces much better code. Even Kimi K2.5 is a very capable model I find on par with Sonnet at least, very close to Opus. Forcing people to use ONLY a broken Claude Code UX with a subscription only ensures they loose advantage they had.
Re: Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
the internet has hundreds of thousands of super smart coders with the most powerful ai models as well, I think it's a bit harder than you're assuming. you just need to inspect the network traffic with Claude code and mimic that
OK sure, but you’d better hope Claude Code gets it right on the first try, or that’s $200 down the drain. Also, what if the detection mechanism involves a challenge-response that happens once a week? Or randomly a couple times a month? Or after 15 minutes of use from a new public IP? Or arbitrarily if you ask it to code something with a particular topic?
There are lots of ways they could be doing this. And remember again, if they get you, they don’t have to tell you how they got you (so you might not be able to even glean information in return for the $200 you’d be losing).
Sure the internet has hundreds of thousands of super smart coders, but the subset who are willing to throw money and credit cards down the drain in order to maintain a circumvention strategy for something like this is pretty low. I’m sure a few people will figure it out, but they won’t want to tell anyone lest Anthropic nerf their workaround, so I doubt that exploits of this will become widespread.
And if you’re Anthropic, that’s probably good enough.
Re: Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use
#157Re: Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use
#158That page is... confusing.
> Advertised usage limits for Pro and Max plans assume ordinary, individual usage of Claude Code and the Agent SDK.
This is literally the last sentence of the paragraph before the "Authentication and credential use"
Re: Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use
#159Re: Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use
#160Why 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.
When using Claude Code, it's possible to opt out of having one's sessions be used for training. But is that opt out for everything? Or only message content, such that there could remain sufficient metadata to derive useful insight from?