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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

#301

Post by xyzsparetimexyz »

chii wrote: post #45
ddxv wrote: post #40

The pressure is to boost revenue by forcing more people to use the API to generate huge numbers of tokens they can charge more for. LLMs are becoming common commodities as open weight models keep catching up. There are similarities with pirating in the 90s when users realize they can ctrl+c ctrl+v to copy a file/model and you don't need to buy a cd/use their paid API.

And that is how it should be - the knowledge that the LLM trained on should be free, and cannot (and should never be) gatekept behind money. It's merely the hardware that should be charged for - which ought to drop in price if/when the demand for it rises. However, this is a bottleneck at the moment, and hard to see how it gets resolved amidst the current US environment on sanctioning anyone who would try.

No, a lot of the data they were trained on was pirated.

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

#302

Post by mentalgear »

bambax wrote: post #294
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!

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 coul…

I would say Google's monopoly mainly comes from its name recognition, definitely not because its still ahead in core search as I have been using DuckDuckGo for 2 years once I noticed search results are the same or better than Google.

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

#303

Post by ed_mercer »

bothlabs wrote: post #276

I would expect, it still is only enforced in a semi-strict way. I think what they want to achieve here is less "kill openclaw" or similar and more "keep our losses under control in general". And now they have a clear criteria to refer when they take action and a good bisection on whom to act on. In case your usage is high they would block / take action. Because if you have your max subscription and not really losing…

Openclaw is unaffected by this as the Claude Code CLI is called directly

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

#304

Post by chickensong »

g-mork wrote: post #238
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.…

Hello old friend, I've been expecting you.

First of all, custom harness parallel agent people are so far from the norm, and certainly not on the $20 plan, which doesn't even make sense because you'd hit token limit in about 90 seconds.

Second, token limits. Does Anthropic secretly have over-subscription issues? Don't know, don't care. If I'm paying a blistering monthly fee, I should be able to use up to the limit.

Now I know you've got a clear view of the typical user, but FWIW, I'm just an aging hacker using CC to build some personal projects (feeling modern ofc) but still driving, no yolo or gas town style. I've reached the point where I have a nice workflow, and CC is pretty decent, but it feels like it's putting on weight and adding things I don't want or need.

I think LLMs are an exciting new interface to computers, but I don't want to be tied to someone else's idea of a client, especially not one that's changing so rapidly. I'd like to roll my own client to interface with the model, or maybe try out some other alternatives, but that's against the TOS, because: reasons.

And no, I'm not interested in paying metered corporate rates for API access. I pay for a Max account, it's expensive, but predictable.

The issue is Anthropic is trying for force users into using their tool, but that's not going to work for something so generic as interfacing with an LLM. Some folks want emacs while others want vim, and there will never be a consensus on the best editor (it's nvim btw), because developers are opinionated and have strong preferences for how they interface with computers. I switched to CC maybe a year ago and haven't looked back, but this is a major disappointment. I don't give a shit about Anthropic's credit liability, I just want the freedom to hack on my own client.

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

#305

Post by mentalgear »

baq wrote: post #256
echelon wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you fundamentally dislike him as a person? The only thing I've seen from him that I don't like is the "SWEs will be replaced" line (which is probably true and it's more that I don't like the factuality of it).

It’s kinda obvious he’s a well spoken shark. Personally not an issue for me, you have to be at the top of a unicorn, but it isn’t something people in general like.

Interesting, are there any sources for the shark claims ? I recently saw an interview with Hassabis and him and thought: , so that gave me some hope that what they discussed regarding security and eventual equal distribution of "AI" benefits had some genuine intention.

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

#306

Post by andersmurphy »

deanc wrote: post #227

Just a friendly reminder also to anyone outside the US that these subscriptions cannot be used for commercial work. Check the consumer ToS when you sign up. It’s quite clear.

Yeah for context the TOS outside the US has:

Non-commercial use only. You agree not to use our Services for any commercial or business purposes and we (and our Providers) have no liability to you for any loss of profit, loss of business, business interruption, or loss of business opportunity.

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

#307

Post by safety1st »

ar0 wrote: post #299
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!

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 alrea…

There's no reason that a sizeable portion of LLM usage can't and won't end up free/ad-sponsored. Cutting edge stuff for professional use will probably be monetized via subscription or API credits for a long time to come. But running an older and less resource intensive model works just fine for tasks like summarization. These models will just become another feature in a "free" product that people pay for by watching or clicking ads.

I imagine the split will look a lot like b2b vs b2c in other technologies, b2b customers tend to be willing to pay for tech when it offers a competitive advantage, reduces their operating costs etc. b2c customers mostly just guzzle free slop.

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

#308

Post by andersmurphy »

xyzsparetimexyz wrote: post #292
phyrex wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why?

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

Yeah what's crazy is most of these companies are making accounting choices that obscure the true cost. By extending the stated useful life of their equipment, in some cases from 3 years to 6. Perfectly legal. And it has the effect of suppressing depreciation expenses and inflating reported earnings.

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

#309

Post by g-mork »

chickensong wrote: post #304
g-mork wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Hello old friend, I've been expecting you. First of all, custom harness parallel agent people are so far from the norm, and certainly not on the $20 plan, which doesn't even make sense because you'd hit token limit in about 90 seconds. Second, token limits. Does Anthropic secretly have over-subscription issues? Don't know, don't care. If I'm paying a blistering monthly fee, I should be able to use up to the limit. No…

You're not "rolling your own client." You're using a subscription that prices in a specific usage pattern, the one mediated by their client, and trying to route around it to extract more value than you're paying for. That's not hacking, it's arbitrage, and pretending it's about editor philosophy is cope.

Anthropic sells two products: a consumer subscription with a UI, and an API with metered pricing. You want the API product at the subscription price. That's not a principled stance about interface freedom, it's just wanting something for less than it costs.

The nvim analogy doesn't land either. Nobody's stopping you from writing your own client. You just have to pay API rates for it, because that's the product that matches what you're describing. The subscription subsidises the cost per token by constraining how you use it. Remove the constraint, the economics break. This isn't complicated.

"I don't give a shit about Anthropic's credit liability," right, but they do, because it's their business. You're not entitled to a flat-rate all-you-can-eat API just because you find metered pricing aesthetically displeasing.

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

#310

Post by jspdown »

I pay a Max subscription since a long time, I like their model but I hate their tools:

- Claude Desktop looks like a demo app. It's slow to use and so far behind the Codex app that it's embarassing.

- Claude Code is buggy has hell and I think I've never used a CLI tool that consume so much memory and CPU. Let's not talk about the feature parity with other agents.

- Claude Agent SDK is poorly documented, half finished, and is just thin wrapper around a CLI tool…

Oh and none of this is open source, so I can do nothing about it.

My only option to stay with their model is to build my own tool. And now I discover that using my subscription with the Agent SDK is against the term of use?

I'm not going to pay 500 USD of API credits every months, no way. I have to move to a different provider.

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