Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use

code.claude.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 827 posts

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

#311

Post by TZubiri »

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…

Sure they are having a blast, they are paying 20$ instead of getting charged hundreds for forr tokens.

It's simple, follow the ToS

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

#312

Post by thunfischtoast »

MikeNotThePope wrote: post #202
mirzap wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are not losing money on subscription plans. Inference is very cheap - just a few dollars per million tokens. What they’re trying to do is bundle R&D costs with inference so they can fund the training of the next generation of models. Banning third-party tools has nothing to do with rate limits. They’re trying to position themselves as the Apple of AI companies -a walled garden. They may soon discover that screwi…

I wonder how many people have a subscription and don’t fully utilize it. That’s free money for them, too.

The trick is that the jump goes from 20 to 100 Dollar for the Pro to Max subscription. Pro is not enough for me, Max is too much. 60 would be ideal, but currently at 100 it's worth the cost.

But this is how every subscription works. Most people lose money on their gym subscription, but the convenience takes us.

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

#313

Post by ifwinterco »

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…

Opus 4.6 genuinely seems worse than 4.5 was in Q4 2025 for me. I know everyone always says this and anecdote != data but this is the first time I've really felt it with a new model to the point where I still reach for the old one.

I'll give GPT 5.3 codex a real try I think

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

#314

Post by bilekas »

It might be some confirmation bias here on my part but it feels as if companies are becoming more and more hostile to their API users. Recently Spotify basically nuked their API with zero urgency to fix it, redit has a whole convoluted npm package your obliged to use to create a bot, Facebook requires you to provide registered company and tax details even for development with some permissions. Am I just old man screaming at cloud about APIs used to being actually useful and intuitive?

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

#315

Post by barrenko »

nostromo wrote: post #262
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…

They'll all do this eventually. We're in the part of the market cycle where everyone fights for marketshare by selling dollar bills for 50 cents. When a winner emerges they'll pull the rug out from under you and try to wall off their garden. Anthropic just forgot that we're still in the "functioning market competition" phase of AI and not yet in the "unstoppable monopoly" phase.

"Naveen Rao, the Gen AI VP of Databricks, phrased it quite well:

all closed AI model providers will stop selling APIs in the next 2-3 years. Only open models will be available via APIs (…) Closed model providers are trying to build non-commodity capabilities and they need great UIs to deliver those. It's not just a model anymore, but an app with a UI for a purpose."

~ https://vintagedata.org/blog/posts/model-is-the-product A. Doria

> new Amp Free (10$) access is also closed up since of last night

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

#316

Post by dolphenstein »

bambax wrote: post #267
nostromo wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They'll all do this eventually. We're in the part of the market cycle where everyone fights for marketshare by selling dollar bills for 50 cents. When a winner emerges they'll pull the rug out from under you and try to wall off their garden. Anthropic just forgot that we're still in the "functioning market competition" phase of AI and not yet in the "unstoppable monopoly" phase.

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.

OpenRouter falls in the acceptable use category. They targeting users that are misusing their Claude OAuth token on non-Anthropic products.

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

#317

Post by maplethorpe »

mirzap wrote: post #155
paxys wrote: post #31

I don't think it's a secret that AI companies are losing a ton of money on subscription plans. Hence the stricter rate limits, new $200+ plans, push towards advertising etc. The real money is in per-token billing via the API (and large companies having enough AI FOMO that they blindly pay the enormous invoices every month).

They are not losing money on subscription plans. Inference is very cheap - just a few dollars per million tokens. What they’re trying to do is bundle R&D costs with inference so they can fund the training of the next generation of models. Banning third-party tools has nothing to do with rate limits. They’re trying to position themselves as the Apple of AI companies -a walled garden. They may soon discover that screwi…

Didn't OpenAI spend like 10 billion on inference in 2025? Which is around the same as their total revenue?

Why do people keep saying inference is cheap if they're losing so much money from it?

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

#318

Post by mihau »

jspdown wrote: post #310

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…

I agree that Claude Code is buggy as hell, but:

> Let's not talk about the feature parity with other agents.

What do you mean feature parity with other agents? It seems to me that other CLI agents are quite far from Claude Code in this regard.

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

#319

Post by [deleted] »

adastra22 wrote: post #36
artdigital wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s very clearly a no, I don’t understand why so many people think this is unclear. You can’t use Claude OAuth tokens for anything. Any solution that exists worked because it pretended/spoofed to be Claude Code. Same for Gemini (Gemini CLI, Antigravity) Codex is the only one that got official blessing to be used in OpenClaw and OpenCode, and even that was against the ToS before they changed their stance on it.

Is Codex ok with any other third party applications, or just those?

[deleted]

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

#320

Post by jfim »

BoorishBears wrote: post #206
firloop wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest reason why this is confusing is the Claude Agent SDK[0] will use subscription/oauth credentials if present. The terms update implies that there's some use cases where that's ok and other use cases (commercial?) where using their SDK on a user's device violates terms. [0] https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/agent-sdk/overview

The SDK is Claude Code in a harnesss, so it works with your credentials the same way CC does. But they're stating you can only use your subscription for your personal usage, not someone else's for their usage in your product. I honestly think they're being short sighted not just giving a "3rd party quota" since they already show users like 4 quotas. If the fear is 3rd party agents screwing up the math, just make it l…

I agree, it'd actually be great if they did give maybe $5 or $10 worth of API tokens per month to max subscribers, since they're likely to be the most likely to actually build stuff that uses the Claude APIs.

I built a quick thing to download YouTube videos and transcribe them using with whisper, but it kind of feels clunky to summarize them using the claude CLI, even though that works.

Post reply on HN