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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

#291

Post by dannersy »

andreagrandi wrote: post #273

I'm only waiting for OpenAI to provide an equivalet ~100 USD subscription to entirely ditch Claude. Opus has gone down the hill continously in the last week (and before you start flooding with replies, I've been testing opus/codex in parallel for the last week, I've plenty of examples of Claude going off track, then apologising, then saying "now it's all fixed!" and then only fixing part of it, when codex nailed at t…

No offense, but this is the most predicable outcome ever. The software industry at large does this over and over again and somehow we're surprised. Provide thing for free or for cheap, and then slowly draw back availability once you have dominant market share or find yourself needing money (ahem).

The providers want to control what AI does to make money or dominate an industry so they don't have to make their money back right away. This was inevitable, I do not understand why we trust these companies, ever.

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

#292

Post by xyzsparetimexyz »

phyrex wrote: post #280
andersmurphy wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except all those GPUs running inference need to be replaced every 2 years.

Why?

They wear down being run at 100% all the time. Support slowly drops off, the architecture and even the rack format become deprecated.

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

#293

Post by illiac786 »

harrall wrote: post #239
rjh29 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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.

I agree that the TPUs are one of the things that are underestimated (based on my personal reading of HN).

Google already has a huge competitive advantage because they have more data than anyone else, bundle Gemini in each android to siphon even more data, and the android platform. The TPUs truly make me believe there actually could be a sort of monopoly on LLMs in the end, even though there are so many good models with open weights, so little (technical) reasons to create software that only integrates with Gemini, etc.

Google will have a lion‘s share of inferring I believe. OpenAI and Claude will have a very hard time fighting this.

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

#294

Post by bambax »

nostromo wrote: post #268
bambax wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unstoppable monopoly will be extremely hard to pull off given the number of quality open (weights) alternatives. I only use LLMs through OpenRouter and switch somewhat randomly between frontier models; they each have some amount of personality but I wouldn't mind much if half of them disappeared overnight, as long as the other half remained available.

I'm old, so I remember saying the same thing about Google and search. I hope you're right!

I too am old. Google search is free, hard to replicate, and while there used to be lots of search engines, Google was (and arguably still is) miles ahead of all the others in terms of quality and performance.

A model is hard to train but it doesn't need to be hyper up to date / have a new version come out every day. Inference is cheap (it seems?) and quality is comparable. So it's unclear how expensive offerings could win over free alternatives.

I could be wrong of course. I don't have a crystal ball. I just don't think this is the same as Google.

Of course I could be entirely mistaken and there could emerge a single winner

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

#295

Post by bambax »

juliendorra wrote: post #278
nostromo wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm old, so I remember saying the same thing about Google and search. I hope you're right!

In the first years, I remember no other search engine was close to Google quality. We all ditched AltaVista because Google was incredibly better. It would have been awful to switch back to any other options. We can already switch between the 3 big proprietary models without feeling too much differences, so it’s quite a different landscape.

Yes, my point exactly.

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

#296

Post by nl »

ai-x wrote: post #277
bambax wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unstoppable monopoly will be extremely hard to pull off given the number of quality open (weights) alternatives. I only use LLMs through OpenRouter and switch somewhat randomly between frontier models; they each have some amount of personality but I wouldn't mind much if half of them disappeared overnight, as long as the other half remained available.

This is saying we have hundreds of open source OSes and Windows will never be a monopoly. Software always gets monopoly simply by usage. Every time a model gets used by esoteric use cases, it gets more training data (that a decentralized open weight model doesn't get) and it starts developing its moat.

It's more like saying AWS has a monopoly on virtual machine hosting.

(For those unaware, AWS doesn't have a VM monopoly, and the market dynamics seem similar)

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

#297

Post by dakolli »

gbear605 wrote: post #245
hombre_fatal wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the subscription pricing exists because it’s a far more palatable way to bill people for day to day personal use. I used Claude back when API per token pricing was the only option and it was bad for all the usual reasons pay-per-use sucks compared to flat billing: you’re constantly thinking about cost. Like trying to watch a Netflix video with a ticker in the corner counting up the cents you owe them. I don’t…

The bundle only works if it’s +EV for them. A lot of analyses (though not all - it’s complicated) say that the $200/mo bundle (and certainly the $20/mo bundle) costs more than that for most users, and the bundle is currently a loss leader. If so, then eventually prices will need to go up, and API per usage pricing will seem much more attractive.

I'm not going to say what platform but it's an agentic coding tool, I know for a fact the platform loses in the mid $200.00s on a $20.00 plan. 10:1 loss leader for customer acquisition is crazy, and they'll have to make that up in the future somehow, they're all fumbling on how to vendor lock their customers, and its not necessarily clear they're going to be able to.

I expect some big falls from 10 figure businesses in the next year or two as they realize this is impossible. They've built an industry on the backs of gambling addicts and dopamine feins (I'm generalizing but this is a thing with LLM users (just read vibe coders posts on twitter, they're slot machine users). Ask sports betting operators from back in 2019-2022 how it worked out for them when they tried to give out 1-2k a year to attract new customers, and then realized their customers will switch platforms in an instant they see a new shiny offer. Look up the Fanduel Founders "exit" for an insight into this.

They have to eventually stop catering to the slot machine users, which are generally paying for these hugely lossy flat rate subscriptions, and somehow get them used to a different type of payment model, or cater strictly to enterprise... Which also aren't going to tolerate paying 20k a month in tokens per developer, is my guess.... Lots of delicate pricing problems to figure out for all these companies.

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

#298

Post by Barrin92 »

ai-x wrote: post #277
bambax wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unstoppable monopoly will be extremely hard to pull off given the number of quality open (weights) alternatives. I only use LLMs through OpenRouter and switch somewhat randomly between frontier models; they each have some amount of personality but I wouldn't mind much if half of them disappeared overnight, as long as the other half remained available.

This is saying we have hundreds of open source OSes and Windows will never be a monopoly. Software always gets monopoly simply by usage. Every time a model gets used by esoteric use cases, it gets more training data (that a decentralized open weight model doesn't get) and it starts developing its moat.

>This is saying we have hundreds of open source OSes

we don't, we have about 3 operating systems that have the decades of hardware and software compatibility that makes them widely usable. They're the most complex and complicated things we've built. LLMs are a few thousand lines of python hooked up to a power plant and graphics cards. This is the least defensible piece of software there ever has been.

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

#299

Post by ar0 »

nostromo wrote: post #268
bambax wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unstoppable monopoly will be extremely hard to pull off given the number of quality open (weights) alternatives. I only use LLMs through OpenRouter and switch somewhat randomly between frontier models; they each have some amount of personality but I wouldn't mind much if half of them disappeared overnight, as long as the other half remained available.

I'm old, so I remember saying the same thing about Google and search. I hope you're right!

I think the big difference is that Google is free: everyone is using Google because it doesn’t cost anything and for a long time was the best search engine out there. I am sure that if Google would suddenly charge a few dollars per month for access, Bing market share would explode overnight, because it would become “good enough but cheaper”.

With the AI models, using a model that is “good enough but cheaper” is already an option.

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