Live data from Hacker News

Anthropic takes legal action against OpenCode

github.com

281–290 of 418 posts

Re: Anthropic takes legal action against OpenCode

#281

Something that usually gets missed in these discussions is that the subscription quotas seem to rely heavily on prompt caching to be economically viable, or at least less unviable. They can and do have permutations of the system prompt, tools, skills, etc. that makes the first 20k or so tokens hit the cache and not use inference resources for that portion. In addition, from my monitoring, Claude Code with Max has abo…

Maybe they could charge API users less if they use the same prefix that Claude Code uses? More coding agents using the same prefix results in better caching, reducing costs.

Re: Anthropic takes legal action against OpenCode

#282
post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And they can ban your account if they think you are doing that. I think someone even commented here on HN they were banned by Anthropic for this.

Why would they have that feature in claude code cli if it goes against the ToS? You can use Claude Code programatically. This is not the issue. The issue is that Anthropic wants to lock you in within their dev ecosystem (like Apple does). Simple as that.

allowed shell pipes doesn't necessarily mean they want loops running them.

One of the economic tuning features of an LLM is to nudge the LLM into reaching conclusions and spending the tokens you want it to spend for the question.

presumably everyone running a form of ralph loop against every single workload is a doomsday situation for LLM providers.

Re: Anthropic takes legal action against OpenCode

#283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Terms or Service

Do you need to accept ToS to vibe code anthropic plugin? Code is one thing. Using API key is entirely different thing.

using API key also has Terms of Service :)

Re: Anthropic takes legal action against OpenCode

#284
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…

> OpenCode is awesome. Claude Code is nothing special at all.

It's weird, my experience is the exact opposite: OpenCode had the weirdest issue of interpreting C:\Users\some-user\Documents\Projects\... as a bunch of escaped characters without \ and created some trash files even with Anthropic models. Before then, OpenCode had the issue of me copying multiple lines of text into it from clipboard somehow quitting the program (crashing?) and then making every following line (of text, notes etc.) be passed to the shell directly. Happened in both Terminal app and also Git Bash on Windows. It might just be that Windows is a shit OS, but Claude Code doesn't really seem to exhibit those problems (and neither does Codex, in their defense). I hope OpenCode has fixed at least some of those since.

> Let the weirdos at Anthropic do what weirdos do, and hopefully one day their name is never mentioned again in polite society.

What an odd thing to say. Maybe I'm out of the loop about some drama (aside from Anthropic having a bit of a spine in regards to govt. while being otherwise flawed still), but pretty happy with my Max subscription, they even fixed the Code GUI mode in their Electron app recently, it finally feels usable and I don't just need to juggle 4 terminal sessions.

Re: Anthropic takes legal action against OpenCode

#285
post #134
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They want lock-in for their UI/X, presumably. If Photoshop ran in the cloud, I doubt Adobe would let you make an alternative front-end either. Not that I'm sympathetic to them.

> If Photoshop ran in the cloud Off topic, but there is something like that: photopea, it's free and it's good enough for my use cases (I need it once a year maybe).

It's served from the cloud but it runs entirely on your PC (except the AI generative tools). It can't run entirely offline though, because the js, webassembly, and assets are served chunked as-needed.

Saying Photopea is good enough is really underselling it. It's so far ahead of anything offered by the open-source community.

I'd be so happy to pay for a fully offline version of Photopea!

Re: Anthropic takes legal action against OpenCode

#286
post #282
post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would they have that feature in claude code cli if it goes against the ToS? You can use Claude Code programatically. This is not the issue. The issue is that Anthropic wants to lock you in within their dev ecosystem (like Apple does). Simple as that.

allowed shell pipes doesn't necessarily mean they want loops running them. One of the economic tuning features of an LLM is to nudge the LLM into reaching conclusions and spending the tokens you want it to spend for the question. presumably everyone running a form of ralph loop against every single workload is a doomsday situation for LLM providers.

> allowed shell pipes doesn't necessarily mean they want loops running them.

insane that people apologize for this at all. we went from FOSS software being standard to a proprietary cli/tui using proprietary models behind a subscription. how quickly we give our freedom away.

Re: Anthropic takes legal action against OpenCode

#287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sorry but you’re demonstrably incorrect. Listen, I want more open weight models in the world. They create entrepreneurial opportunities and support use cases which the foundation labs don’t want to support. But open weight models are consistently three to six months behind on performance compared to closed models, as confirmed by both benchmarks and personal use. They’re closer on coding and much further away on…

> I’m sorry but you’re demonstrably incorrect. Please so demonstrate?

I mean just use them and compare, the gap is obvious.

Re: Anthropic takes legal action against OpenCode

#288
post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what openai does differently than anthropic to allow usage everywhere via chatgpt subscription? Hemorrhaging money more than Anthropic?

If anyone has a better theory I'd love to hear it, but going by Occam's Razor that's the most likely explanation that I would pick.

Here's one possibility: Anthropic understands the value of the brand and the harness and that those two things are connected, specifically because they came from behind. OpenAI almost accidentally launched a global brand overnight. ChatGPT went from nothing to the kind of english word you hear in non-anglophone countries in about a month. Millions and millions have used it (at least once) and more people associate it with AI than use it. OpenAI's problem is managing the big industry links so that by the time the hype cools down, they're already plugged into tools. Their "moat" is that number of companies that matter is actually small and all those companies like predictable, enterprise shaped solutions with contracts and stuff. Unlike developers who might switch their subscriptions quickly and absorb the productivity cost of switching (or minimize that cost), these big companies don't want to be constantly optimizing compute vs rental rate. They want to convert an unruly value (programmer productivity) to something easy, not replace it with a scheduling or optimization problem.

That was working ok until Claude, specifically Claude Code showed up. This was a really useful code-writing harness (that also signed your commits, advertising itself to everyone) that took what are essentially very similar models and made Opus feel like the future of software while GPT 5.2 and friends are just code agents. The performance, ability to handle long term tasks, all of that was basically similar but the harness oriented the model to reason, shell out sub-agents, write scratch code, add console logs, all the sorts of things that 1. seem like science fiction, and 2. improve output a little. Then from fall of last year to no you don't have developers saying "look what I made with LLMs" or "Look what I made with AI" but "Look what I did with Claude". There are not very many blog posts out there about the future of software being re-written due to GPT 5.2 getting autocompaction, but that same feature spawned thousands of "oh shit!" posts in Claude.

That's not a more defensible moat than name recognition + small N for customers. It's a scarier position because if someone else figures out how to deliver the same result (Opus + sonnet + Haiku in a managed ensemble) in a way that was sharp and viral, the same thing they did to OpenAI could happen to them. They still supply the compute but the fact that anyone gives a shit about them is their harness makes it look like more and better code is being written. If that's your situation, you gently write the OpenClaw guy, you threaten to cut off and sue OpenCode for using subscription sign-in. You don't do those things because of a numerator/denominator problem with token cost and monthly fees. You do it because someone using your models in a better harness is a clear brand threat.

Re: Anthropic takes legal action against OpenCode

#289
post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is analogous to when Google launched Gmail with 1GB of storage and then a bunch of third-party apps cropped up that took advantage of it to use it as a generic online file storage drive. There was GMailFS[0] and Gmail Drive[1] - this is before S3, dropbox, and a time where web hosting would give you ~10MB or so of space. Google updated their ToS and shut down accounts using their service in ways they weren't int…

This argument is predicated on Anthropic losing money on the subs, but I'm not sure that's a cut and dried argument. OpenAI have said publicly that they're (very) profitable on inference, and they're much cheaper than Anthropic. I suspect this is just artificially trying to create a moat. The problem is their moat is not as sticky as they think it is - I completely ditched Claude for Codex a while ago, my money now g…

They aren't public companies (yet). They are allowed to just lie about these things. It's also not really reasonable to only count inference compute as a cost since it's not like any of these companies could stop doing R&D without being abandoned for having worse models within a year or 2

Re: Anthropic takes legal action against OpenCode

#290
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…

> 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 Sonnet over Opus when Opus is overloaded, without telling the user.

I have noticed odd behavior when choosing a model, it automatically switches after sometime. Some tasks do not require lots of power, so when I select Haiku, few prompts later, I see Sonnet popping up in the cost/spending. Happened few times.

Post reply on HN