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Anthropic blocks third-party use of Claude Code subscriptions

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Re: Anthropic blocks third-party use of Claude Code subscriptions

#301

For folks not following the drama: Anthropic's $200/month subscription for Claude Code is much cheaper than Anthropic's pay-as-you-go API. In a month of Claude Code, it's easy to use so many LLM tokens that it would have cost you more than $1,000 if you'd paid via the API. Why is Anthropic offering such favorable pricing to subscribers? I dunno. But they really want you to use the Claude Code™ CLI with that subscript…

It is and was open source from the start?

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code

Re: Anthropic blocks third-party use of Claude Code subscriptions

#302
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't you happy that you can use claude code unlimited for only 200/month? I don't really get your point tbh

It is not unlimited, being not careful with your context management, you hit the limits quickly.

Isn't the context window the same for all plans, 200k? You would hit usage limits?

Re: Anthropic blocks third-party use of Claude Code subscriptions

#303
post #254

For folks not following the drama: Anthropic's $200/month subscription for Claude Code is much cheaper than Anthropic's pay-as-you-go API. In a month of Claude Code, it's easy to use so many LLM tokens that it would have cost you more than $1,000 if you'd paid via the API. Why is Anthropic offering such favorable pricing to subscribers? I dunno. But they really want you to use the Claude Code™ CLI with that subscript…

To extend your all you can eat analogy. It’s similar to how all you can eat restaurants allow you to eat all you can within the bounds of the restaurant, but you aren’t allowed to bring the food out with you.

Another analogy is that it’s a takeout but anthropic is insisting you only eat at home with the plastic utensils they’ve provided rather than the nice metal utensils you have at home.

Another analogy is that it’s a restaurant that offers delivery and they’re insisting you use their own in house delivery service instead of placing a pickup order and asking your friendly neighbor to pick it up for you on their way back from the office.

Re: Anthropic blocks third-party use of Claude Code subscriptions

#304

For folks not following the drama: Anthropic's $200/month subscription for Claude Code is much cheaper than Anthropic's pay-as-you-go API. In a month of Claude Code, it's easy to use so many LLM tokens that it would have cost you more than $1,000 if you'd paid via the API. Why is Anthropic offering such favorable pricing to subscribers? I dunno. But they really want you to use the Claude Code™ CLI with that subscript…

It is and was open source from the start? https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code

Unless I'm severely mistaken that's not the source code for claude-code. It's a few official plugins and some helper scripts

Re: Anthropic blocks third-party use of Claude Code subscriptions

#305
post #254

For folks not following the drama: Anthropic's $200/month subscription for Claude Code is much cheaper than Anthropic's pay-as-you-go API. In a month of Claude Code, it's easy to use so many LLM tokens that it would have cost you more than $1,000 if you'd paid via the API. Why is Anthropic offering such favorable pricing to subscribers? I dunno. But they really want you to use the Claude Code™ CLI with that subscript…

To extend your all you can eat analogy. It’s similar to how all you can eat restaurants allow you to eat all you can within the bounds of the restaurant, but you aren’t allowed to bring the food out with you.

anthropic should not be criticizing the gluttony of others whilst licking its fingers surrounded by buckets full of fried chicken

Re: Anthropic blocks third-party use of Claude Code subscriptions

#306

For folks not following the drama: Anthropic's $200/month subscription for Claude Code is much cheaper than Anthropic's pay-as-you-go API. In a month of Claude Code, it's easy to use so many LLM tokens that it would have cost you more than $1,000 if you'd paid via the API. Why is Anthropic offering such favorable pricing to subscribers? I dunno. But they really want you to use the Claude Code™ CLI with that subscript…

> More importantly, Anthropic should have open sourced their Claude Code CLI a year ago. (They can and should just open source it now.) "Should have" for what reason? I would be happy if they open sourced Claude Code, but the reality is that Claude Code is what makes Anthropic so relevant in the programming more, much more than the Claude models themselves. Asking them to give it away for free to their competitors se…

Well OpenCode already exists and you can connect it to multiple providers, so you could just say that the agentic CLI harness business model as a service/billable feature is no more. In hindsight I would say it never made sense in the first place.

Re: Anthropic blocks third-party use of Claude Code subscriptions

#307
post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess one issue is that you pay $200/month whether you use it or not. Potentially this could be better for Anthropic. What was not necessarily foreseeable (ok maybe it was) back when that started was that users have invented all kinds of ways to supervise their agents to be as efficient as possible. If they control the client, you can't do that.

I can easily get Claude Code to run for 8-10 hours unsupervised without stopping with sub-agents entirely within Claude Code. I think it is more likely that if you stick with Claude Code, then you are more likely to stick with Opus/Sonnet, whereas if you use a third party CLI you might be more likely to mix and match or switch away entirely. It's in their interest to get you invested in their tooling.

On the flip side I started using Claude with other LLMs (openai) because my Pro sub gets maxed out quickly and I want a cheaper alternative to finish a project.

I just use claude code proxy or litellm and set the ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL to my proxy and chose another LLM.

Re: Anthropic blocks third-party use of Claude Code subscriptions

#308
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More evidence the EU solved the wrong problem. Instead of mandating cookie banners, mandate a single global “fuck off” switch: one-click, automatic opt-out from any feature/setting/telemetry/tracking/training that isn’t strictly required or clearly beneficial to the user as an individual. If it’s mainly there for data collection, ads, attribution, “product improvement”, or monetization, it should be off by default an…

Remember what happened do the DNT flag in the browser? They just ignored until it was gone. If you don’t give them a way to trick and annoy you into accept tracking they ignore completely what you want

DNT was useless because it didn't have a legal basis. It would have been amazing if they had mandated something like this instead of the cookie walls.

Advertisers ignored it because they could. And complained that it defaulted to on, however cookies are supposed to be opt-in so this is how it's supposed to work anyway.

Re: Anthropic blocks third-party use of Claude Code subscriptions

#309
post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatever you say lol.

The usage of the word "reasoning" in the context of LLMs, just like the "I" in "AI", that's more marketing than a technical reality. I know it can be confusing.

Regardless of semanthics, LLMs + tooling can do impressive things.

For example I can tell LLMs to scan my database schema and compare to code to detect drift or inconsistencies.

And while doing that it has enough condensed world knowledge to point to me that the code is probably right when declaring person.name a non-nullable string despite the database column being nullable.

And it can infer that date_of_birth column is correct in being nullable on the database schema and wrong in code where the type is a non-nullable date because, in my system, it knows date_of_birth is an optional field.

This is a simple example that can be solved by non-LLMs tooling also. In practice it can do much more advanced reasoning with regards to business rules.

We can argue semanthics all day but this is reason enough to be useful for me.

There are many examples I could give. But to the skeptics I recommend trying to use LLMs for understanding large systems. But take your time to give it read only access to data base schema.

Re: Anthropic blocks third-party use of Claude Code subscriptions

#310

FWIW this isn’t new, using a Claude/Max subscription auth token as a general-purpose “API key” has been known (and blocked) for ages. OpenCode basically had to impersonate the official Claude Code client to make that work, and it always felt like a loophole that would get patched eventually. This is exactly why (when OpenCode and Charm/Crush started diverging) Charm chose not to support “use your Claude subscription”…

Yea exactly, I’m surprised people are calling this “drama”. It was from the beginning against the ToS, all the stuff supporting it just reverse engineered what Claude Code is doing and spoof being a client.

I tried something similar few months back and Claude already has restrictions against this in place. You had to very specifically pretend to be real Claude Code (through copying system prompts etc) to get around it, not just a header.

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