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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

#321
post #267

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.

They will [try to] ban open weights for ethics / security reasons: to stop spammers, to protect children, to stop fascism, to defend minorities. Take your pick; it won't matter why, it will only matter which media case can they thrust in the spotlight first.

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

#322
post #255

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…

Don’t be mad at it, be happy you were able to throw some of that sweet free vc money at your hobbies instead of paying the market rate.

Oh I'm not mad, it's more of a sad clown type of thing. I'm still stoked to use it for now. We can always go back to the old ways if things don't work out.

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

#323
post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It seems to me the consumer subscription still has metered token limits (it's not all you can eat), so why should it matter how we use those tokens?

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

#324
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.

GPUs do not wear down from being ran at 100%, unless they're pushed past their voltage limits, or gravely overheating.

You can buy a GPU that's been used to mine bitcoin for 5 years with zero downtime, and as long as it's been properly taken care of (or better, undervolted), that GPU functions the exact same as a 5 year old GPU in your PC. Probably even better.

GPUs are rated to do 100%, all the time. That's the point. Otherwise it'd be 115%.

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

#325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's a wrapper that invokes the `claude` binary then I believe it's fine.

Is there a way to legally or even practically prevent this? `claude` CLI execution in a shell is certainly included in the subscription - it’s the product.

Practically; yes. MMOs have been doing this kind of thing (Preventing alteration / automation of the client) for ages now.

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

#326

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 screa…

Can you sell ads via api? If answer is no then this “feature” would be at the bottom of the list

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

#328

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 screa…

Every garden eventually becomes a walled garden once enough people are inside.

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

#329
¡Quick reminder! We are in the golden era of big company programming agents. Enjoy it while you can because it is likely going to get worse over time. Hopefully, there were will be competitive open source agents and some benevolent nerds put together a reasonable service. Otherwise I can see companies investing in their own AI infrastructure and developers who build their own systems becoming the top performers.

This is the VC funded startup playbook. It has been repeated many times, but maybe for the younger crowd it is new. Start a new service that is relatively permissive, then gradually restrict APIs and permissions. Finally, start throwing in ads and/or making it more expensive to use. Part of the reason is in the beginning they are trying to get as many users as possible and burning VC money. Then once the honey moon is over, they need to make a profit so they cut back on services, nerf stuff, increase prices and start adding ads.

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

#330

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 has gone down the hill continously in the last week

Is a week the whole attention timespan of the late 2020s?

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