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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

#441

Post by neya »

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…

It's the most overrated model there is. I do Elixir development primarily and the model sucks balls in comparison to Gemini and GPT-5x. But the Claude fanboys will swear by it and will attack you if you ever say even something remotely negative about their "god sent" model. It fails miserably even in basic chat and research contexts and constantly goes off track. I wired it up to fire up some tasks. It kept hallucinating and swearing it did when it didn't even attempt to. It was so unreliable I had to revert to Gemini.

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

#442

Post by stavros »

bildung wrote: post #382
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…

Of course they bundle R&D with inference pricing, how else could you the recoup that investment. The interesting question is: In what scenario do you see any of the players as being able to stop spending ungodly amounts for R&D and hardware without losing out to the competitors?

In the scenario where that market collapses, ie when we stop making significant gains with new models. It might be a while, though, who knows.

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

#443

Post by cahaya »

MillionOClock wrote: post #47
paxys wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how they can get more clear about this, considering they have repeatedly answered it the exact same way. Subscriptions are for first-party products (claude.com, mobile and desktop apps, Claude Code, editor extensions, Cowork). Everything else must use API billing.

You are talking about Anthropic and indeed compared to OpenAI or GitHub Copilot they have seemed to be the ones with what I would personally describe as a more restrictive approach. On the other hand OpenAI and GitHub Copilot have, as far as I know, explicitly allowed their users to connect to at least some third party tools and use their quotas from there, notably to OpenCode. What is unclear to me is whether they a…

Same question here. A while ago I read rumors OpenAI might build a "Login with OpenAI" (comparable to login with Apple, Facebook, Google) so people can also use their existing sub in commercial apps. Hope it's true.

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

#444

Post by neya »

Anthropic is just doing this out of spite. They had a real scenario to win mindshare and marketshare and they fucked up instead. They could have done what Open AI did - hired the OpenClaw/d founder. Instead, they sent him a legal notice for trademark violation. And now they're just pissed he works for their biggest competitor. Throw all tantrums you want, you're on the wrong side of this one, Anthropic.

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

#445

Post by energy123 »

sambull wrote: post #94
vicchenai wrote: post #83

[dead]

these subscriptions have limits.. how could someone use $200 worth on $20/month.. is that not the issue with the limits they set on a $20 plan, and couldn't a claude code user use that same $200 worth on $20/month? (and how do i do this?)

The median subscriber generates about 50% gross margin, but some subscribers use 10x the amount of inference compute as other subscribers (due to using it more...), and it's a positive skewness distribution.

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

#446

Post by cahaya »

prodigycorp wrote: post #241
adastra22 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes. You can build third party applications on top of codex app server. All open source. https://developers.openai.com/codex/app-server/

  Codex app-server is the interface Codex uses to power rich clients (for example, the Codex VS Code extension). Use it when you want a deep integration inside your own product.
It mentions 'Inside your own product', but not sure if that means also your own commercial application.

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

#447

Post by jauntywundrkind »

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…

This is sort of true!

Spotify in particular is just patently the very worst. They released an amazing and delightful app sdk, allowing for making really neat apps in the desktop app in 2011. Then cancelled it by 2014. It feels like their entire ecosystem has only ever gone downhill. Their car device was cancelled nearly immediately. Every API just gets worse and worse. Remarkable to see a company have only ever such a downward slide. The Spotify Graveyard is, imo, a place of singnificantly less honor than the Google Graveyard. https://web.archive.org/web/20141104154131/https://gigaom.co...

But also, I feel like this broad repulsive trend is such an untenable position now that AI is here. Trying to make your app an isolated disconnected service is a suicide pact. Some companies will figure out how to defend their moat, but generally people are going to prefer apps that allow them to use the app as they want, increasingly, over time. And they are not going to be stopped even if you do try to control terms!

Were I a smart engaged company, I'd be trying to build WebMCP access as soon as possible. Adoption will be slow, this isn't happening fast, but people who can mix human + agent activity on your site are going to be delighted by the experience, and that you will spread!

WebMCP is better IMHO than conventional APIs because it layers into the experience you are already having. It's not a separate channel; it can build and use the session state of your browsing to do the things. That's a huge boon for users.

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

#448

Post by FeepingCreature »

stavros wrote: post #430
dragonwriter wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You aren't paying for usage, you are paying for the product that the subscription is offered to. If you are paying for usage, well, that's their billed by token-usage API plan, which they are quite happy for you to use with any client you want.

Even worse, if I'm paying a subscription for the product, and I don't want to use the product, what's it to them?

You are free to not use it. You are not free to use the API provided specifically for the product, which you are not explicitly paying for, for a different product.

You can of course use OpenCode or any other project with the API, which is also offered as a separate product. People just don't want to do that because it's not subsidized, ie. more expensive. But the entire reason it's subsidized is that Anthropic can use the data to improve their product.

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

#449

Post by FeepingCreature »

bilekas wrote: post #397
throwaway24778 wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't and would never pay for an LLM, but presumably they also want for force ads down your throat eventually, yea? Hard to do if you're just selling API access.

But the idea of an API is more to encourage creativity and other people/companies building products and services on or around your systems. This used to be seen as a positive as it would mean you were an important cog in other peoples products and so more users, exposure, brand awareness etc.

Anthropic do of course sell API access and you can of course use any product with it.

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

#450

Post by PierceJoy »

stavros wrote: post #438
hobofan wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I'm paying for usage You are not paying for usage. You are paying for usage via their application. If their business plan is based on how quickly a human can enter requests and react to the results, and Claude Code is optimized for that, why should you be allowed to use an alternative client that e.g. always tries to saturate the token limits?

But a) I'm not doing that and b) they can just ban that, like they have rate limits. Why ban OpenCode?

The speculative reasoning I've seen is that they have optimizations in their CC client that reduces their costs. If that's true, I think it's fair that they can limit subscription usage to their client. If you don't want those optimizations and prefer more freedom, use the API.
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