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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

#671

Post by ac29 »

small_model wrote: post #487
miroljub wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you purchase a year's worth of almost unlimited MiniMax coding plan for a price you'd pay for 15 days of limited Claude usage. And as a bonus, you can choose your harness. You don't have to suffer CC. And if something better appears tomorrow, you switch your model, while still using your harness of choice.

And do you think Claude won't have released a few models by then, which will be way ahead of any open model? you are paying for SOTA.

Being 3-6 months behind SOTA may be less of a hindrance than not being able to use the tools you want, though.

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

#672

Post by HanClinto »

mkw5053 wrote: post #20
eleventyseven wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know that if you are just using a cloud service and not running local models, you could have just bought a raspberry pi.

Yeah. I know it’s dumb but it’s also a very expensive machine to run BlueBubbles, because iMessage requires a real Mac signed into an Apple ID, and I want a persistent macOS automation host with native Messages, AppleScript, and direct access to my local dev environment, not just a headless Linux box calling APIs.

Hey, I made the same decision (except I went with the 24gb model, not the 16gb). The other thing I like about having it on a separate Mac Mini is that it it's completely sandboxed, and I don't log into anything with it on my personal machine. It's VERY nice to have this as an isolated environment, and the extra VRAM means that I can run my own local models, and it's got enough beef to do long-running tasks (right now I have it chugging through several gigs of images and building embeddings for them with DINOv2) -- that's the sort of local workload that would crush a Raspberry Pi, but the Macbook is hitting 17 images per second -- all managed by OpenClaw.

All that to say, don't let the naysayers get you down. I bought my Mac Mini last week and have been really happy with it as an isolated environment. Way better than futzing around with VMs. The always-on nature of OpenClaw means that it's nice to be able to restart my personal laptop or do gaming or whatever else I want and I'm not fighting for GPU resources in the background.

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

#673

Post by thenaturalist »

9cb14c1ec0 wrote: post #566
thenaturalist wrote: post #562

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.

Be the economics as they may, there is no lock in as OP claims.

This statement is plainly wrong.

If you boost and praise AI usage, you have to face the real cost.

Can't have your cake and eat it, too.

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

#674

Post by CuriouslyC »

empath75 wrote: post #661
CuriouslyC wrote: post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 think you have it exactly backwards, and that "owning the stack" is going to be important. Yes the harness is important, yes the model is important, but developing the harness and model together is going to pay huge dividends.

That was true more mid last year, but now we have a fairly standard flow and set of core tools, as well as better general tool calling support. The reality is that in most cases harnesses with fewer tools and smaller system prompts outperform.

The advances in the Claude Code harness have been more around workflow automation rather than capability improvements, and truthfully workflows are very user-dependent, so an opinionated harness is only ever going to be "right" for a narrow segment of users, and it's going to annoy a lot of others. This is happening now, but the sub subsidy washes out a lot of the discontent.

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

#675

Post by quikoa »

empath75 wrote: post #661
CuriouslyC wrote: post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 think you have it exactly backwards, and that "owning the stack" is going to be important. Yes the harness is important, yes the model is important, but developing the harness and model together is going to pay huge dividends.

If Claude Code is so much better why not make users pay to use it instead of forcing it on subscribers?

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

#676

Post by popcorncowboy »

empath75 wrote: post #661
CuriouslyC wrote: post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 think you have it exactly backwards, and that "owning the stack" is going to be important. Yes the harness is important, yes the model is important, but developing the harness and model together is going to pay huge dividends.

You're right, because owning the stack means better options for making tons of money. Owning the stack is demonstrably not required for good agents, there are several excellent (frankly way better than ol' Claude Code) harnesses in the wild (which is in part why so many people are so annoyed by Anthropic about this move - being forced back onto their shitty cli tool).

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

#677

Post by Reddit_MLP2 »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #578
nerdjon wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is, plain and simple, a tie-in sale of claude code. I am particularly amused by people accepting it as "fair" because in Brazil this is an illegal practice I am very curious what is particularly illegal about this. On the sales page nowhere do they actually talk about the API https://claude.com/pricing Now we all know obviously the API is being used because that is how things work, but you are not actually pay…

Imagine if video service came with a free TV that watched you, and was really opinionated about what you watch, and you could only watch your videos on the creeper TV.

Is that not most if not all smart TVs today? Basically nearly every TV made and sold right now?

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

#678

Post by ac29 »

stiiv wrote: post #605

I'm wondering: why now, in early 2026? Why not last year? Why not in July? What changed? What does this teach us about Anthropic and what can we infer about their competition?

Especially how generous Anthropic has been recently with subscribers - extra usage in December, $50 credit earlier this month, $20 subscription getting access to Opus.

It suggests to me Anthropic is less concerned with the financial impact of letting subscribers use alternative tools and more concerned with creating lock in to their products and subscriptions. It very well might backfire though, I was not considering alternative models yesterday, but today I am actively exploring other options and considering cancelling my sub. I've been using my subscription primarily through pi recently, so if they aren't interested in me as a customer, pretty much everyone else is.

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

#679

Post by thepasch »

The people who they’re going to piss off the most with this are the exact people who are the least susceptible to their walled garden play. If you’re using OpenCode, you’re not going to stop using it because Anthropic tells you to; you’re just going to think ‘fuck Anthropic’, press whatever you’ve bound “switch model” to, and just continue using OpenCode. I think most power users have realized by now that Claude Code is sub-par software and probably actively holding back the models because Anthropic thinks they can’t work right without 20,000 tokens worth of system prompt (my own system prompt has around 1,000 and outperforms CC at every test I throw it at).

They’re losing the exact crowd that they want in their corner because it’s the crowd that’s far more likely to be making the decisions when companies start pivoting their workflows en-masse. Keep pissing on them and they’ll remember the wet when the time comes to decide whom to give a share from the potentially massive company’s potentially massive coffers.

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

#680

Post by refsys »

theturtletalks wrote: post #519
rglullis wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If they can provide a relatively cheap subscription against the direct API use Except they can't. Their costs are not magically lower when you use claude code vs when you use a third-party client. > For me, this is fair. This is, plain and simple, a tie-in sale of claude code. I am particularly amused by people accepting it as "fair" because in Brazil this is an illegal practice.

I've heard they actually cache the full Claude Code system prompt on their servers and this saves them a lot of money. Maybe they cache the MCP tools you use and other things. If another harness like Opencode changes that prompt or adds significantly to it, that could increase costs for them. What I don't understand is why start this game of cat and mouse? Just look at Youtube and YT-DLP. YT-DLP, and the dozens of ap…

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