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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

#371

Post by input_sh »

cryptoegorophy wrote: post #326
bilekas wrote: post #314

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

They can sell API access via transparent pricing.

Instead, many, many websites (especially in the music industry) have some sort of funky API that you can only get access to if you have enough online clout. Very few are transparent about what "enough clout" even means or how much it'd cost you, and there's like an entire industry of third-party API resellers that cost like 10x more than if you went straight to the source. But you can't, because you first have to fulfill some arbitrary criteria that you can't even know about ahead of time.

It's all very frustrating to deal with.

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

#372

Post by KingMob »

DrammBA wrote: post #266
KingMob wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably because their flat rate pricing is based off their ability to manage token use via their first-party tools. A third-party tool may be less efficient in saving costs (I have heard many of them don't hit Anthropic LLMs' caches as well). Would you be willing to pay more for your plan, to subsidize the use of third-party tools by others? --- Note, afaik, Anthropic hasn't come out and said this is the reason, b…

But wouldn't a less efficient tool simply consume your 5-hour/weekly quota faster? There's gotta be something else, probably telemetry, maybe hoping people switch to API without fighting, or simply vendor lock-in.

> But wouldn't a less efficient tool simply consume your 5-hour/weekly quota faster?

Maybe.

First, Anthropic is also trying to manage user satisfaction as well as costs. If OpenCode or whatever burns through your limits faster, are you likely to place the blame on OpenCode?

Maybe a good analogy was when DoorDash/GrubHub/Uber Eats/etc signed up restaurants to their system without their permission. When things didn't go well, the customers complained about the restaurants, even though it wasn't their fault, because they chose not to support delivery at scale.

Second, flat-rate pricing, unlike API pricing, is the same for cached vs uncached iirc, so even if total token limits are the same, less caching means higher costs.

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

#373

Post by Veen »

ed_mercer wrote: post #303
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

Many people use the Max subscription OAuth token in OpenClaw. The main chat, heartbeat, etc., functionality does not call the Claude Code CLI. It uses the API authenticated via subscription OAuth tokens, which is precisely what Anthropic has banned.

There are many other options too: direct API, other model providers, etc. But Opus is particularly good for "agent with a personality" applications, so it's what thousands of OpenClaw users go with, mostly via the OAuth token, because it's much cheaper than the API.

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

#374

Post by closewith »

wiseowise wrote: post #347
pirsquare wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook doing that is actually good, to protect consumers from data abuse after incidents like cambridge analytica. They are holding businesses who touches your personal data responsible.

Is it? I’ve never touched Facebook api, but it sounds ridiculous that you need to provide tax details for DEVELOPMENT. Can’t they implement some kind of a sandbox with dummy data?

You can mock their API all you want for development and there are many pre-built options for that, but it you want to touch their systems, they're sending a very clear signal. You must be a corporate with an RBO. Seems prudent to me.

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

#375

Post by hrpnk »

raffkede wrote: post #225

At this point, where Kimi K2.5 on Bedrock with a simple open source harness like pi is almost as good the big labs will soon have to compete for users,... openai seems to know that already? While anthropic bans bans bans

Do you know by any chance if Bedrock custom model import also works with on-demand use, without any provisioned capacity? I'm still puzzled why they don't offer all qwen3 models on Bedrock by default.

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

#376

Post by andreagrandi »

kilroy123 wrote: post #368
ifwinterco wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I agree with you. Codex 5.3 is good it's just a bit slower.

It is (slower), especially at xhigh setting. But if I have to redo things three times, keep confirming trivial stuff (Claude Code seems to keep changing the commands it uses to read code... once it uses "bash-read", once it uses "tree", once it uses "head" and I have to keep confirming permission), I definitely waste more time than give a command to codex (or in my case OpenCode + codex model) and come back after 10 minutes.

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

#377

Post by arghwhat »

Loic wrote: post #369
bilekas wrote: post #314

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…

They put no limits on the API usage, as long as you pay. Here, they put limits on the "under-cover" use of the subscription. If they can provide a relatively cheap subscription against the direct API use, this is because they can control the stuff end-to-end, the application running on your system (Claude Code, Claude Desktop) and their systems. As you subscribe to these plans, this is the "contract", you can use onl…

Their subscriptions aren't cheap, and it has nothing really to do with them controlling the system.

It's just price differentiation - they know consumers are price sensitive, and that companies wanting to use their APIs to build products so they can slap AI on their portfolio and get access to AI-related investor money can be milked. On the consumer-facing front, they live off branding and if you're not using claude code, you might not associate the tool with Anthropic, which means losing publicity that drives API sales.

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

#379

Post by jeroenhd »

giamma wrote: post #370

So even simple apps that are just code usage monitors are banned?

Always have been, unless you're using the API meant for apps.

But if you're doing something very basic, you might be able to slop together a tool that does local inferencing based on a small, local model instead, alleviating the need to call Claude entirely.

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