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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

#231

Post by chickensong »

Your core customers are clearly having a blast building their own custom interfaces, so obviously the thing to do is update TOS and put a stop to it! Good job lol.

I know, I know, customer experience, ecosystem, gardens, moats, CC isn't fat, just big boned, I get it. Still a dick move. This policy is souring the relationship, and basically saying that Claude isn't a keeper.

I'll keep my eye-watering sub for now because it's still working out, but this ensures I won't feel bad about leaving when the time comes.

Update: yes yes, API, I know. No, I don't want that. I just want the expensive predictable bill, not metered corporate pricing just to hack on my client.

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

#232

Post by direwolf20 »

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…

Not allowed. They've already banned people for this.

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

#233

Post by brothrock »

This article is somewhat reassuring to me, someone experimenting with openclaw on a Max subscription. But idk anything about the blog so would love to hear thoughts.

https://thenewstack.io/anthropic-agent-sdk-confusion/

In my opinion (which means nothing). If you are using your own hardware and not profiting directly from Claude’s use (as in building a service powered by your subscription). I don’t see how this is a problem. I am by no means blowing through my usage (usually <50% weekly with max x5).

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

#234

Post by Wobbles42 »

eru wrote: post #105
JimmaDaRustla wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why? Computers and anything computer related have historically been dropping in prices like crazy year after year (with only very occasional hiccups). What makes you think this will stop now?

It has stopped. Demand is now rising faster than supply in memory, storage and GPUs.

We see vendors reducing memory in new smart phones in 2026 vs 2025 for example.

At least for the moment falling consumer tech hardware prices are over.

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

#235

Post by redox99 »

petesergeant wrote: post #226
atlgator wrote: post #184

AI is the new high-end gym membership. They want you to pay the big fee and then not use what you paid for. We'll see more and more roadblocks to usage as time goes on.

This feels more like the gym owner clarifying it doesn't want you using their 24-hour gym as a hotel just because you find their benches comfortable to lie down on, rather than a "roadblock to usage"

Not really, these subscriptions have a clear and enforced 5h and weekly limit.

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

#236

Post by Wobbles42 »

adrianN wrote: post #115
eru wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Computers and anything computer related have historically been dropping in prices like crazy year after year (with only very occasional hiccups). What makes you think this will stop now?

Cars have also been dropping in price.

And knives apparently.

I recently encountered this randomly -- knives are apparently one of the few products that nearly every household has needed since antiquity, and they have changed fairly little since the bronze age, so they are used by economists as a benchmark that can span centuries.

Source: it was an aside in a random economics conversation with charGPT (grain of salt?).

There is no practical upshot here, but I thought it was cool.

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

#237

Post by Wobbles42 »

mikeg8 wrote: post #177
Yossarrian22 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they're not saying they are making a profit

That doesn’t mean that the subscription itself is losing money. The margin on the subscription could be fine, but by using that margin to R&D the next model, the org may still be intentionally unprofitable. It’s their investment/growth strategy, not an indictment of their pricing strategy.

They have investors that paid for training of these models too. It could be argued that R&D for the next generation is a separate issue, but they need to provide a return on the R&D in this generation to stay in business.

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

#238

Post by g-mork »

chickensong wrote: post #231

Your core customers are clearly having a blast building their own custom interfaces, so obviously the thing to do is update TOS and put a stop to it! Good job lol. I know, I know, customer experience, ecosystem, gardens, moats, CC isn't fat, just big boned, I get it. Still a dick move. This policy is souring the relationship, and basically saying that Claude isn't a keeper. I'll keep my eye-watering sub for now becau…

Imagine having a finite pool of GPUs worth more than their weight in gold, and an infinite pool of users obsessed with running as many queries against those GPUs in parallel as possible, mostly to review and generate copious amounts of spam content primarily for the purposes of feeling modern, and all in return for which they offer you $20 per month. If you let them, you must incur as much credit liability as OpenAI. If you don't, you get destroyed online.

It almost makes me feel sorry for Dario despite fundamentally disliking him as a person.

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

#239

Post by harrall »

rjh29 wrote: post #185
mirzap wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 screwi…

> "just a few dollars per million tokens" Google AI Pro is like $15/month for practically unlimited Pro requests, each of which take million tokens of context (and then also perform thinking, free Google search for grounding, inline image generation if needed). This includes Gemini CLI, Gemini Code Assist (VS Code), the main chatbot, and a bunch of other vibe-coding projects which have their own rate limits or no rat…

OpenAI only released ChatGPT 4 years ago but…

Google has made custom AI chips for 11 years — since 2015 — and inference costs them 2-5x less than it does for every other competitor.

The landmark paper that invented the techniques behind ChatGPT, Claude and modern AI was also published by Google scientists 9 years ago.

That’s probably how they can afford it.

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

#240

Post by merb »

ashikns wrote: post #13
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…

> OAuth authentication (used with Free, Pro, and Max plans) is intended exclusively for Claude Code and Claude.ai. I think this is pretty clear - No.

So it’s forbidden to use the Claude Mac app. I would say the ToS as it is, can’t be enforced
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