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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

#611

Post by bravetraveler »

andersmurphy wrote: post #467
well_ackshually wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you're fundamentally wrong. There's the regular wear & tear of GPUs that all have varying levels of quality, you'll have blown capacitors (just as you do with any piece of hardware), but running in a datacenter does not damage them more. If anything, they're better taken care of and will last longer. However, since instead of having one 5090 in a computer somewhere, you have a million of them. A 1% failure rate q…

GPU bitcoin mining rigs had a high failure rate too. It was quite common to run at 80% power to keep them going longer. That's before taking into account that the more recent generations of GPUs seems to be a lot more fragile in general.

Mining rigs also used more milk cartons than datacenter racks; [hot/cold] aisles? No, piles! Not to mention the often questionable power delivery...

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

#612

Post by ac29 »

joseda-hg wrote: post #541
regularfry wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Except they can't. Their costs are not magically lower when you use claude code vs when you use a third-party client. I don't have a dog in this fight but is this actually true? If you're using Claude Code they can know that whatever client-side model selection they put into it is active. So if they can get away with routing 80% of the requests to Haiku and only route to Opus for the requests that really need it, t…

It (CC) does have a /models command, you can still decide to route everything to Opus if you just want to burn tokens I guess it's not default so most wouldn't, but still, people willing to go to a third party client are more likely that kind of power user anyway They still have the total consumption under their control (*bar prompt caching and other specific optimizations) where in the past they even had different q…

> It (CC) does have a /models command, you can still decide to route everything to Opus if you just want to burn tokens I guess it's not default so most wouldn't

Opus is claude code's default model as of sometime recently (around Opus 4.6?)

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

#613

Post by Marsymars »

safety1st wrote: post #307
ar0 wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the big difference is that Google is free: everyone is using Google because it doesn’t cost anything and for a long time was the best search engine out there. I am sure that if Google would suddenly charge a few dollars per month for access, Bing market share would explode overnight, because it would become “good enough but cheaper”. With the AI models, using a model that is “good enough but cheaper” is alrea…

There's no reason that a sizeable portion of LLM usage can't and won't end up free/ad-sponsored. Cutting edge stuff for professional use will probably be monetized via subscription or API credits for a long time to come. But running an older and less resource intensive model works just fine for tasks like summarization. These models will just become another feature in a "free" product that people pay for by watching…

It's actually pretty bonkers when you think about how basically every cutting edge professional you deal with is getting ads for all of their top search results for all of their work.

(Not quite "every", but outside of tech, most professional workplaces don't support ad blocking or Kagi.)

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

#614

Post by knollimar »

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #191
MillionOClock wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a bit worried that this is the situation I am in with my (unpublished) commercial app right now: one of the major pain points I have is that while I have no doubt the app provides value in itself, I am worried about how many potential users will actually accept paying inference per token... As an independent dev I also unfortunately don't have investors backing me to subsidize inference for my subscription plan.

I recommend kimi. It's possible for people to haggle with it to get cheap for the first month and as such try out your project and best part of the matter is that kimi intentionally supports api usage in any of their subscribed plan and they also recently changed their billing to be more token usage based like others instead of their previous tool calling limits It's seriously one of the best models. very comparable…

Kimi terms prohibit enterprise use for their sub plans.

Please correct me if you feel I'm wrong after reading it.

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

#615

Post by tom_m »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #576
bluelightning2k wrote: post #559

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…

Anthropic is going to be on the losing side with this. Models are too fungible, it's really about vibes, and Claude Code is far too fat and opinionated. Ironically, they're holding back innovation, and it's burning the loyalty the model team is earning.

I thought Anthropic would fall after OpenAI, but they just might be racing to the bottom faster here.

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

#616

Post by DrammBA »

KingMob wrote: post #372
DrammBA wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 g…

> are you likely to place the blame on OpenCode?

am I? Probably, but I get your point that your average user would blame Anthropic instead.

> even if total token limits are the same, less caching means higher costs

Not really, flat-rate pricing simply gives you a fixed token allotment, so less caching means you consume your 5-hour/weekly allotment faster.

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

#617

Post by tom_m »

naveen99 wrote: post #569
9cb14c1ec0 wrote: post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are. It's like healthcare, the healthy don't use it as much and pay for the sick.

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

#618

Post by tom_m »

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…

They tier it. So you are limited until you pay more. So you can't just right away get the access you need.

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

#619

Post by Frannky »

I feel like they want to be like Apple, and open-code + open-source models are Linux. The thing is, Apple is (for some) way better in user experience and quality. I think they can pull it off only if they keep their distance from the others. But if Google/Chinese models become as good as Claude, then there won’t be a reason — at least for me — to pay 10x for the product

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

#620

Post by Ajedi32 »

Hot take: trying to restrict what front end people use to access your service is almost always an anti-competitive, anti-consumer freedom move which should be legally prohibited for those reasons. (Not just for AI, I'm talking about any and all cloud services.)

Regarding consumer freedom, I believe software running on user machines should serve the interests of the user, not the company who wrote the software or anyone else for that matter. Trying to force users to run a particular client written by your company violates this principle.

Regarding competition, forcing users to run a particular client is a form of anti competitive bundling, a naked attempt to prevent alternative clients from being able to enter the market unless they are able to build a competing backed as well. Such artificial "moats" are great for companies but harmful to consumers.

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