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Anthropic takes legal action against OpenCode

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Re: Anthropic takes legal action against OpenCode

#181

Post by 827a »

hirako2000 wrote: post #138
827a wrote: post #98

I'm really struggling to understand how Anthropic is benefited by not allowing this. Its bad PR for no good reason. The only thing I can figure is that Claude Code is hemorrhaging money, they're too afraid to actually enforce reasonable token limits, and the only thing that's keeping it from totally bankrupting the company tomorrow is: controlling the harness and having the harness dynamically route toward Haiku or S…

also for economic reason. Anthropic design Claude code so they are in control regarding how token get burned. To a degree. With 3rd party, designers have not incentive to be token consumption conscious. Gemini has a 1M token context, flash can be used for free via the web interface, can't paste more than handful thousands token.

Agreed. What I suspect is: the dynamic model routing on CC is way stronger than people realize, and that "Percent-based usage" is intentionally vague because while it is probably measuring "200M tokens per week" or something, they don't want you asking questions about whether you're getting 200M Haiku tokens or 200M Opus tokens. A token is a token to the usage limit, where it comes from doesn't matter to the usage limit. But, to OpenCode it might, because OpenCode can just fire-and-forget everything at Opus (and probably does).

Re: Anthropic takes legal action against OpenCode

#182

Post by ViewTrick1002 »

paxys wrote: post #68
mellosouls wrote: post #2

This and threatening OpenClaw (now at OpenAI), Anthropic really on a roll making friends in Open Source. Previously discussed I think: Anthropic Explicitly Blocking OpenCode (173 points, 157 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46625918

Anthropic's position has been consistent from the start. Subscription plans are for first-party clients. Everyone else should be on per-token billing. That's really all there is to it. It has nothing to do with open or closed source.

Which means the plans are subsidized, and you pay with your data.

Re: Anthropic takes legal action against OpenCode

#184

Post by 827a »

celestialcheese wrote: post #139
827a wrote: post #98

I'm really struggling to understand how Anthropic is benefited by not allowing this. Its bad PR for no good reason. The only thing I can figure is that Claude Code is hemorrhaging money, they're too afraid to actually enforce reasonable token limits, and the only thing that's keeping it from totally bankrupting the company tomorrow is: controlling the harness and having the harness dynamically route toward Haiku or S…

My guess is that the telemetry data they can collect from interacting with claude code is the "secret sauce" behind a lot of the improvements we're seeing with coding models right now. Look at cursors Composer-2 release today. Clicking "accept" during plan mode, committing changes and pushing to a remote repo, etc. is a really strong reward signal. Can't collect telemetry from applications you don't control.

Yup, agreed with this as well. Probably also why they've been investing so heavily in the desktop Claude Code experience; very hard to gather great telemetry from a terminal app.

Re: Anthropic takes legal action against OpenCode

#185

Post by siva7 »

theshrike79 wrote: post #161
siva7 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is well understood to be 'a loss leader' You have zero proof for this claim. It's like people read somewhere that stuff and keep spitting it out again and again without understanding..

It's not a loss leader - as in they're not making a loss on the subscription. Because they control the harness(es) and the backend, they can optimise caching and thus the costs to them.

I'm giving up. Caching is optimized server-side on a product for which they can't control the client.

Re: Anthropic takes legal action against OpenCode

#186

Post by hirako2000 »

tim-star wrote: post #152
danny_codes wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This exactly. Kimi 2.5 has coding performance hardly discernible from Claude. The only way to maintain a business edge is to crush open source clients to force people into a closed ecosystem. Once there, create context moat where people are not in control of their own context data (cannot export it to open tooling). Maybe we can call it the Oracle play? It’ll be interesting to see if companies get tricked. I think it…

thats only because kimi 2.5 was trained using data stolen from claude. it wouldnt exist without riding claudes coat tails. none of the so called 'open source' models would

That's not true, some open weight models didn't distill Claude or other then frontier models. E.g Llama. Yet achieved comparable performance (back then in llama's case).

If distillation wasn't a thing, they would certainly exist, they would have trained them from scratch or via a decent base models to remain economically viable.

What's for sure is that Claude wouldn't exist if it wasn't for data stolen from millions of creators. As they found themselves admittedly guilty of.

Re: Anthropic takes legal action against OpenCode

#187

Post by ethanrutherford »

pbasista wrote: post #135
anonym29 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The API has a very clear ToS prohibiting third-party client usage with the heavily subsidized Claude.ai subscription plans. Anthropic's right to reject or block that traffic, as well as to ban users who attempt this, is well-protected by the ToS those users neglected to read. Regarding the legal demands here, anyone can issue anyone else a cease and desist order at any time, for anything, in the USA. The demands do n…

> The API has a very clear ToS prohibiting ... What is the relevance? If I understand correctly, OpenCode, i.e. the creator of the tool, does not use Anthropic's API. Their users do. I am unsure where the connection can be made between the users violating some terms of service and a maker of a tool.

... A tool that had code which explicitly enables and advertises the ability to violate those terms of service.

Re: Anthropic takes legal action against OpenCode

#188

Post by malisper »

Since there's a lot of questions about what this means, let me explain.

Anthropic has two different products that are relevant here: the Claude API and Claude Code. The Claude API has usage based pricing. The more you use, the more you pay. With Claude Code, you can get a monthly subscription which gives you a fixed amount of usage. Comparing equivalent token generation between the Claude API and Claude Code, Claude Code with a subscription is much cheaper.

When it comes to third party products such as OpenClaw and OpenCode, Anthropic has made it clear those products should be using the Claude API and not the internal Claude Code APIs. OpenClaw and OpenCode have both been using the internal Claude Code APIs as when a user has a Claude Code subscription, the internal Claude Code API gives you tokens at a much cheaper rate than the Claude API. Presumably Anthropic makes Claude Code cheaper than the Claude API because they are willing to give users a discount for them to use Claude Code vs a competing product such as OpenCode.

It looks like until recently OpenCode tried to get around Anthropic's requirements by offering "plugins" in OpenCode that would allow users to use their Claude Code subscription in OpenCode. This PR mentions as much at[0][1]:

> There are plugins that allow you to use your Claude Pro/Max models with OpenCode. Anthropic explicitly prohibits this.

> Previous versions of OpenCode came bundled with these plugins but that is no longer the case as of 1.3.0

This PR seems to be in response to Anthropic threatening OpenCode with legal action if they keep using the internal Claude Code APIs.

  [0] https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/pull/18186/changes#diff-b5d5affc6941bf7bb19805cc8f556cd1b9ae73ffd99e520120700536b166f8c0L310
  [1] https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/pull/18186/changes#diff-b5d5affc6941bf7bb19805cc8f556cd1b9ae73ffd99e520120700536b166f8c0R321

Re: Anthropic takes legal action against OpenCode

#189

Post by extr »

hirako2000 wrote: post #170
siva7 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is well understood to be 'a loss leader' You have zero proof for this claim. It's like people read somewhere that stuff and keep spitting it out again and again without understanding..

If it wasn't the case, the Claude API pricing would be the same, $200 for unlimited use. But it's metered. We don't know if Claude Code bleeds money for every user that touches it. Probably not. But the different pricing is a strong enough clue that it's an appeal product with subsidized tokens consumption.

> If it wasn't the case, the Claude API pricing would be the same, $200 for unlimited use.

How do you figure? That doesn't make any sense to me.

Re: Anthropic takes legal action against OpenCode

#190

Post by theshrike79 »

pbasista wrote: post #135
anonym29 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The API has a very clear ToS prohibiting third-party client usage with the heavily subsidized Claude.ai subscription plans. Anthropic's right to reject or block that traffic, as well as to ban users who attempt this, is well-protected by the ToS those users neglected to read. Regarding the legal demands here, anyone can issue anyone else a cease and desist order at any time, for anything, in the USA. The demands do n…

> The API has a very clear ToS prohibiting ... What is the relevance? If I understand correctly, OpenCode, i.e. the creator of the tool, does not use Anthropic's API. Their users do. I am unsure where the connection can be made between the users violating some terms of service and a maker of a tool.

They specifically built the tools to do it easily.
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