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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

#311

Post by Draiken »

kelnos wrote: post #271
rocqua wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your value proposition is: do X, and then you have to take action against an open source competitor for doing X better, that shows that you were beaten at the thing you tried very hard at, by people with way fewer resources. I can see why you would call that embarrassing.

The competitor is not "doing X better"; it's more complicated than that. CC isn't just the TUI tool. It's also the LLM behind it. OC may have built a better TUI tool, but it's useless without an LLM behind it. Anthropic is certainly within their rights to tell people they can only integrate their models certain ways. And as for why this isn't embarrassing, consider that OC can focus 100% of their efforts on their cod…

> CC isn't just the TUI tool. It's also the LLM behind it.

No, Claude Code is literally the TUI tool. The LLMs behind are the models. You can use different models within the same TUI tool, even CC allows that, regardless of the restriction of only using their models (because they chose to do that).

> consider that OC can focus 100% of their efforts on their coding tool.

And they have billions of dollars to hire full teams of developers to focus on it. Yet they don't.

They want to give Claude Code an advantage because they don't want to invest as much in it and still "win", while they're in a position to do so. This is very similar to Apple forcing developers to use their apps because they can, not because it's better. With the caveat that Anthropic doesn't have a consolidated monopoly like Apple.

Can they do that? Yes.

Should they do that? It's a matter of opinion. I think it's a bad move.

Is it embarrassing? Yes. It shows they're admitting their solution is worse and changing the rules of the game to tilt it in their favor while offering an inferior product. They essentially don't want to compete, they want to force people to use their solution due to pricing, not the quality of their product.

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

#312

Post by tietjens »

touristtam wrote: post #287
deveworld wrote: post #192

The fix has been merged in https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode-anthropic-auth/pull/11 , and PR https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/pull/7432 is open to bump the version. Until it's released, here's a workaround: 1. git clone https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode-anthropic-auth.git 2. Add to ~/.config/opencode/opencode.json: "plugin": ["file:///path/to/opencode-anthropic-auth/index.mjs"] 3. Run: OPENCODE_DISABLE_D…

has opencode repo moved organisation from under sst to anomalyco?

yes, anomalyco now comprises of sst, opencode, etc.

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

#313

Post by artdigital »

B480FA8D wrote: post #281

A crucial context is that this "block" is resolved (for now) via bumping version numbers. It is almost as if Anthropic deployed this to test the water on community reaction... Right now it is trivial to fingerprint opencode users without deep inspection into the conversations (privacy conerns), but Anthropic is not doing that. https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/commit/5e0125b78c8da09...

See https://github.com/charmbracelet/crush/pull/1783

I wouldn’t be surprised if Anthropic filed a similar request against OpenCode, and follows it up with a takedown eventually

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

#314

Post by tsimionescu »

eli wrote: post #139
CSSer wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to be less cynical, but I could see them not honoring that, legal or not. The real answer, regardless of how you feel about that conversation, is that Claude Code, not any model, is the product.

I couldn't. Aside from violating laws in various countries and opening them up to lawsuits, it would be extremely bad for their enterprise business if they were caught stealing user data.

You don't have to imagine, you can see it happening all the time. Even huge corps like FB have been already fined for ignoring user consent laws for data tracking, and thousands of smaller ones are obviously ignoring explicit opt in requirements in the GDPR at least.

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

#315

Post by skerit »

dfabulich wrote: post #112

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…

> Anthropic shouldn't have an all-you-can-eat plan for $200 when their pay-as-you-go plan would cost more than $1,000+ for comparable usage. Their subscription plans should just sell you API credits at, like, 20% off

I have the "all-you-can-eat" plan _because_ I know what I'm getting and how much it'll cost me.

I don't see anything wrong with this. It's just a big time-limited amount of tokens you can use. Of course it sucks that it's limited to Claude-Code and Claude.ai. But the other providers have very similar subscriptions. Even the original ChatGTP pro subscription gives you a lot more tokens for the $20 it costs compared to the API cost.

I always assumed tokens over the API cost that much, because that's just what people are willing to pay. And what people are willing to pay for small pay-as-you-go tasks vs large-scale agentic coding just doesn't line up.

And then there's the psychological factor: if Claude messed up and wasted a bunch of tokens, I'm going to be super pissed that those specific tokens will have cost me $30. But when it's just a little blip on my usage limit, I don't really mind.

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

#316

Post by ehnto »

_zoltan_ wrote: post #218
ehnto wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my perspective, I was paying for the model. This is kind of a pointless distinction now though. It was working and now it isn't, and the outcome is that some of their customers are unhappy and might move on. API access is not the same product offering as the subscription, so that's probably a practical option but not a comparable one.

you yourself admit that API access is a separate product. if you want to use 3rd party tooling, pay for API access. if you want to use (most likely heavily) subsidized subscription plans, use their ecosystem. it's that simple.

No one said it was complicated, and you might be imagining that I care more than I do. However if you can't understand why having a feature of a paid product removed is dissatisfying, then I cannot help you understand any further.

I am surprised that anyone would think the "product" is the web interface and cli tool though, the product is very clearly the model. The difference in all options is merely how you access it.

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

#317

Post by _flux »

realharo wrote: post #237
_flux wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then they'd start pinning certs and hiding keys inside the obfuscated binary to make traffic inspection harder? And if an open source tool would start to use those keys, their CI could just detect this automatically and change the keys and the obfuscation method. Probably quite doable with LLMs..

Without breaking legitimate clients? At some point it becomes easier to just reevaluate the business model. Or just make a superior product.

Aren't Anthropic in control of all the legitimate clients? They can download a new version, possibly automatically.

I believe the key issue here is that the product they're selling is all-you-can-eat API buffet for $200/month. The way they manage this is that they also sell the client for this, so they can more easily predict how much this is actually going to consume tokens (i.e. they can just put their new version of Claude Code to CI with some example scenarios and see it doesn't blow out their computing quota). If some third party client is also using the same subscription, it makes it much more difficult to make the deal affordable for them.

As I understand it, using the per-token API works just fine and I assume the reason people don't want to use it because it ends up costing more.

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

#318

Post by mike_hearn »

wooger wrote: post #248
dfabulich wrote: post #112

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's hard to understand what Anthropic are getting from forcing more people to use Claude Code vs any other tools via the API. Why do they care? Do they somehow get better analytics or do they dream that there's a magical lock-in effect... from a buggy CLI?

It's because the model companies believe there's no way to survive just selling a model via an API. That is becoming a low margin, undifferentiated commodity business that can't yield the large revenue streams they need to justify the investments. The differences between models just aren't large enough and the practice of giving model weights away for free (dumping) is killing that business.

So they all want to be product companies. OpenAI is able to keep raising crazy amounts of capital because they're a product company and the API is a sideshow. Anthropic got squeezed because Altman launched ChatGPT first for free and immediately claimed the entire market, meaning Anthropic became an undifferentiated Bing-like also-ran until the moment they launched Claude Code and had something unique. For consumer use Claude still languishes but when it comes to coding and the enormous consumption programmers rack up, OpenAI is the one cloning Claude Code rather than the other way around.

For Claude Code to be worth anything to Anthropic's investors it must be a product and not just an API pricing tier. If it's a product they have so many more options. They can e.g. include ads, charge for corporate SSO integrations, charge extra for more features, add social features... I'm sure they have a thousand ideas, all of which require controlling the user interface and product surface.

That's the entire reason they're willing to engage in their own market dumping by underpricing tokens when consumed via their CLI/web tooling: build up product loyalty that can then be leveraged into further revenue streams beyond paying for tokens. That strategy doesn't work if anyone can just emulate the Claude Code CLI at the wire level. It'd mean Anthropic buys market share for their own competitors.

N.B. this kind of situation is super common in the tech industry. If you've ever looked at Google's properties you'll discover they're all locked behind Javascript challenges that verify you're using a real web browser. The features and pricing of the APIs is usually very different to what consumers can access via their web browser and technical tricks are used to segment that market. That's why SERP scraping is a SaaS (it's far too hard to do directly yourself at scale, has to be outsourced now), and why Google is suing them for bypassing "SearchGuard", which appears to just be BotGuard rebranded. I designed the first version of BotGuard and the reason they use it on every surface now, and not just for antispam, is because businesses require the ability to segment API traffic that might be generated by competitors from end user/human traffic generated by their own products.

If Anthropic want to continue with this strategy they'll need to do the same thing. They'll need to build what is effectively an anti-abuse team similar to the BotGuard team at Google or the VAC team at Valve, people specialized in client integrity techniques and who have experience in detecting emulators over the network.

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

#319

Post by juped »

dfabulich wrote: post #112

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…

I'm baffled that people, unknown to me, have apparently been considering Claude Code, the program, some kind of "secret sauce". It's a tool harness. Claude could one-shot write it for you, lol.

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

#320

Post by vidarh »

mlrtime wrote: post #307
vidarh wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That would seem to be a very good reason for them to make Claude Code good enough that people would prefer doing that over the inverse...

But also, they're a bit schizophrenic about what they want Claude Code to be, given you can stream JSON to/from Claude Code to use it as a headless backend including with your subscriptions.

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