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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

#561
post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that these companies are understanding that as the barrier to entry to build a frontend gets lower and lower, APIs will become the real moat. If you move away from their UI they will lose ad revenue, viewer stats, in short the ability to optimize how to harness your full attention. It would be great to have some stats on hand and see if and how much active API user has increased decreased in the last two year…

> the barrier to entry to build a frontend gets lower My impression is the opposite: frontend/UI/UX is where the moat is growing because that's where users will (1) consume ads (2) orchestrate their agents.

I agree with you - we are saying the same thing, by restricting their API or making less developer friendly, they want you to be captive in their UI. This might not be true for Anthropic or OpenAI - another child commenter made a comment about ads in CLI, I would not be surprised if in a while we will have product placements in LLM responses exactly as we have it in movies - not a plain ad but just a slightly less subliminal suggestion.

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

#562

Reading these comments aren't we missing the obvious? Claude Code is a lock in, where Anthropic takes all the value. If the frontend and API are decoupled, they are one benchmark away from losing half their users. Some other motivations: they want to capture the value. Even if it's unprofitable they can expect it to become vastly profitable as inference cost drops, efficiency improves, competitors die out etc. Or wor…

???

Use an API Key and there's no problem.

They literally put that in plain words in the ToS.

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

#563

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…

I was underwhelmed by Opus4.6. I didn’t get a sense of significant improvement, but the token usage was excessive to the point that I dropped the subscription for codex. I am suspect that all the models are so glib that they can create a quagmire for themselves in a project. I have not yet found a satisfying strategy for non-destructive resets when the systems own comments and notes poisons new output. Fortunately, deleting and starting over is cheap.

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

#564
post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that these companies are understanding that as the barrier to entry to build a frontend gets lower and lower, APIs will become the real moat. If you move away from their UI they will lose ad revenue, viewer stats, in short the ability to optimize how to harness your full attention. It would be great to have some stats on hand and see if and how much active API user has increased decreased in the last two year…

> the barrier to entry to build a frontend gets lower My impression is the opposite: frontend/UI/UX is where the moat is growing because that's where users will (1) consume ads (2) orchestrate their agents.

It’s objectively easier to build a frontend now and therefore that moat is disappearing. What you can argue is the moat is in incumbent advantage at the UI layer, not the UI itself.

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

#565
post #125

At this point, are there decent alternatives to Anthropic models for coding that allow third-party usage?

OpenAI have been very generous in their plans in terms of token and what you use it with. Is Codex better or as good as Opus for coding? No. Is it a decent alternative? Very.

Thanks for the reply. Need to try Codex

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

#566

Reading these comments aren't we missing the obvious? Claude Code is a lock in, where Anthropic takes all the value. If the frontend and API are decoupled, they are one benchmark away from losing half their users. Some other motivations: they want to capture the value. Even if it's unprofitable they can expect it to become vastly profitable as inference cost drops, efficiency improves, competitors die out etc. Or wor…

??? Use an API Key and there's no problem. They literally put that in plain words in the ToS.

Using an API key is orders of magnitude more expensive. That's the difference here. The Claude Code subscriptions are being heavily subsidized by Anthropic, which is why people want to use their subscriptions in everything else.

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

#567

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…

OpenAI forces users to verify with their ID + face scan when using Codex 5.3 if any of your conversations was redeemed as high risk. It seems like they currently have a lot of false positives: https://github.com/openai/codex/issues?q=High%20risk

They haven't asked me yet (my subscription is from work with a business/team plan). Probably my conversations as too boring

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

#568

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…

all this because of a single week?

No, it's not the first time their models degrade for some time.

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

#569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

??? Use an API Key and there's no problem. They literally put that in plain words in the ToS.

Using an API key is orders of magnitude more expensive. That's the difference here. The Claude Code subscriptions are being heavily subsidized by Anthropic, which is why people want to use their subscriptions in everything else.

They are subsidized by people who underuse their subscriptions. There must be a lot of them.

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

#570

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…

No developer writes the same prompt twice. How can you be sure something has changed?

I suspect you may not be writing code regularly... If I have to ask Claude the same things three times and it keeps saying "You are right, now I've implemented it!" and the code is still missing 1 out of 3 things or worse, then I can definitely say the model has become worse (since this wasn't happening before).
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