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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

#331

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…

Claude Code is unusually efficient in the use if tokens in top of it all.

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

#332
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.

Multi model is the way of the future though as much as I like and prefer Anthropic.

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

#333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

When I compared OpenCode and Claude Code head to head a couple of months ago, Claude Code worked much better for me. I don't know if they closed the gap in the meantime, but for sure Claude Code has improved since then.

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

#334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anthropic want you to use claude code cli badly and are prepared to be very generous if you do. People want to take that generosity without the reciprocity. I don't normally like to come down on the side of the megabigcorp but in this case anthropic aren't being evil. Not yet anyway.

Assuming the actual price for many user is closer to 1k USD/mth than to 200 USD/mth, and the actual price is closer to their target margin to be a viable business, they're practically subsidising usage after 200 USD/mth. Together with other AI-TECH doing the same, they fabricate a false sense of "AI is capable AND affordable", which imo is evil.

There is nothing evil about prioritizing customer acquisition over immediate profit.

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

#335

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

Look a bit closer to the contents of this repo. There is basically no code.

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

#336

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 believe there are a number of cli tools which also use Anthropic's Max plan (subscription) - this isn't just an OpenCode issue.

I had the TaskMaster AI tool hooked up to my Anthropic sub, as well as a couple of other things - Kilo Code and and Roo Code iirc?

From discussions at the time (6 months ago) this "use your Anthropic sub" functionality was listed by at least one of the above projects as "thanks to the functionality of the Anthropic SDK you can now use your sub...." implying it was officially sanctioned rather than via a "workaround".

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

#337

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 all about the data.

They want you to use their tool so they can collect data.

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

#338

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…

> Why is Anthropic offering such favorable pricing to subscribers? I dunno. But they really want you to use the Claude Code™ CLI with that subscription, not the open-source OpenCode CLI. Because they are harvesting all the data they can harvest through CLI to train further models. API access in contrast provides much more limited data

That is not true, though. You have to opt in for them to train on your data

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

#339

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…

Claude code is nothing more than a loop to Opus.
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