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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

#53

The API is not banned only using the Claude Code subscription is I actually tried this several months back to do a regular API request using the CC subscription token and it gave the same error message So this software must have been pretending to be Claude Code in order to get around that A Claude Code subscription should not work with other software, I think this is totally fair

> A Claude Code subscription should not work with other software. why not though? aren't you paying for the model usage regardless of the client you use?

> aren't you paying for the model usage

No, you’re paying for “Claude Code” usage.

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

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not up to you or me. I think it's pretty clear by the phrase "Claude Code subscription" that it's meant for only "Claude Code". Why are you confused? This could be so easily abused by companies who spend thousands of dollars per month for API costs you could just reverse engineer it and use the subscription tokens to get that down to a few hundred

IDK if Anthropic wants to offer a service at below cost, I don't think they should gate keep which client you access that service over. Or in other terms, I won't use a service that locks me into a client I don't like.

> IDK if Anthropic wants to offer a service at below cost, I don't think they should gate keep which client you access that service over.

Are you going to say why you think they shouldn't? You didn't give a reason.

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

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not up to you or me. I think it's pretty clear by the phrase "Claude Code subscription" that it's meant for only "Claude Code". Why are you confused? This could be so easily abused by companies who spend thousands of dollars per month for API costs you could just reverse engineer it and use the subscription tokens to get that down to a few hundred

IDK if Anthropic wants to offer a service at below cost, I don't think they should gate keep which client you access that service over. Or in other terms, I won't use a service that locks me into a client I don't like.

How do you draw that conclusion? If Anthropic wants to offer a service at below cost, they seem a lot more justified in restricting how and where they subsidize usage.

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

#56

I know this will sound strange, but SOTA model companies will eventually allow subscription based usage through third-party tools. For any usage whatsoever. Models are pretty much democratized. I use Claude Code and opencode and I get more work done these days with GLM or Grok Code (using opencode). Z.ai (GLM) subscription is so worth it. Also, mixing models, small and large ones, is the way to go. Different models f…

They already do it’s called the API

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

#57
Ugh, well at least this was the nudge I needed to cancel my Claude Pro subscription... I've already had a bad taste in my mouth watching the rate limits on the plan get worse and worse since I first subscribed and I have a few other subscriptions to fall back on while I've been evaluating different options. I literally never use the regular Claude Chat web UI either, that's pretty much 100% Gemini since I get it via my Google One plan.

OpenCode makes me feel a lot better knowing that my workflow isn't completely dependent on single vendor lock-in, and I generally prefer the UX to Claude Code anyway.

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

#58
This will piss a lot of people off, and seems like a strange move. I get that this was always a hack and against the ToS. But I've been paying Anthropic money every month to do exactly what I would have done with Claude Code, but in another harness that I like better. All they've achieved here is that I am no longer giving them money. Their per-token pricing is really expensive compared to OpenAI, and I like the results from the OpenAI models better too, they're just very slow.

Here's a good benchmark from the brokk team showing the performance per dollar, GPT-5.1 is around half the price of Opus 4.5 for the same performance, it just takes twice as long.

https://brokk.ai/power-ranking?dataset=openround&models=flas...

So as of today, my money is going to OpenAI instead of Anthropic. They probably don't care though, I suspect that not many users are sufficiently keen on alternative harnesses to make a difference to their finances. But by the same token (ha ha), why enforce this? I don't understand why it's so important to them that I'm using Claude Code instead of something else.

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

#59
post #15

This is an unusual L for Anthropic. The unfortunate truth is that the engineering in opencode is so far ahead of Claude Code. Obviously, CC is a great tool, but that's more about the magic of the model than the engineering of the CLI. The opencode team[^1][^2] built an entire custom TUI backend that supports a good subset of HTML/CSS and the TypeScript ecosystem (i.e. not tied to Opencode, a generic TUI renderer). Th…

My favorite is running CC in a screen session. There if I type out a prompt and then just start holding down the backspace key to delete a bunch of characters, at some point they key press refresh rate outruns CC’s brains and it just starts acting like it moved the cursor but didn’t delete anything. It is an embarrassing bug, but one that I suspect wouldn’t be found in automated testing.

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

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not up to you or me. I think it's pretty clear by the phrase "Claude Code subscription" that it's meant for only "Claude Code". Why are you confused? This could be so easily abused by companies who spend thousands of dollars per month for API costs you could just reverse engineer it and use the subscription tokens to get that down to a few hundred

IDK if Anthropic wants to offer a service at below cost, I don't think they should gate keep which client you access that service over. Or in other terms, I won't use a service that locks me into a client I don't like.

That seems mutual. They don’t want you to use this service with an arbitrary client and you don’t want to use this service that won’t allow an arbitrary client. So both of you don’t want the relationship. Seems fine.

For my part, I’m fine understanding that bundling allows for discounting and I would prefer to enable that.

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