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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

#681

Post by athrowaway3z »

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.

https://mariozechner.at/posts/2025-11-30-pi-coding-agent/

This coding agent is minimal, and it completely changed how I used models and Claude's cli now feels like extremely slow bloat.

I'd not be surprised if you're right in that this is companies / management will prefer to "pay for a complete package" approach for a long while, but power-users should not care for the model providers.

I have like 100 lines of code to get me a tmux controls & semaphore_wait extension in the pi harness. That gave me a better orchestration scheme a month ago when I adopted it, than Claude has right now.

As far as I can tell, the more you try to train your model on your harness, the worse they get. Bitter lesson #2932.

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

#682

Post by deadbabe »

jspdown wrote: post #310

I pay a Max subscription since a long time, I like their model but I hate their tools: - Claude Desktop looks like a demo app. It's slow to use and so far behind the Codex app that it's embarassing. - Claude Code is buggy has hell and I think I've never used a CLI tool that consume so much memory and CPU. Let's not talk about the feature parity with other agents. - Claude Agent SDK is poorly documented, half finished…

I regret ever promoting that Claude Code crap. I remember when it was nothing but glowing reviews everywhere. Honestly AI companies should stick to what they are good at: direct API interface to powerful models.

We are heading toward a $1000/month model just to use LLMs in the cloud.

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

#683

Post by ogimagemaker »

The fundamental tension here is that AI companies are selling compute at a loss to capture market share, while users are trying to maximize value from their subscriptions.

From a backend perspective, the subscription model creates perverse incentives. Heavy users (like developers running agentic workflows) consume far more compute than casual users, but pay the same price. Third-party tools amplify this asymmetry.

Anthropic's move is economically rational but strategically risky. Models are increasingly fungible - Gemini 3.1 and Claude 4.5 produce similar results for most tasks. The lock-in isn't the model; it's the tooling ecosystem.

By forcing users onto Claude Code exclusively, they're betting their tooling moat is stronger than competitor models. Given how quickly open-source harnesses like pi have caught up, that's a bold bet.

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

#684

Post by mcherm »

canibal wrote: post #642
naveen99 wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This move feels poorly timed. Their latest ad campaigns about not having ads, and the goodwill they'd earned lately in my book was just decimated by this. I'm sure I'm not the only one who's still just dipping their toes into the AI pool. And am very much a user that under utilizes what I pay for because of that. I have several clients who are scrambling to get on board with cowork. Eliminating API usage for subscrip…

> the goodwill they'd earned lately in my book was just decimated by this

That sounds absurd to me. Committing to not building in advertising is very important and fundamental to me. Asking people who pay for a personal subscription rather than paying by the API call to use that subscription themselves sounds to me like it is. Just clarifying the social compact that was already implied.

I WANT to be able to pay a subscription price. Rather like the way I pay for my internet connectivity with a fixed monthly bill. If I had to pay per packet transmitted, I would have to stop and think about it every time I decided to download a large file or watch a movie. Sure, someone with extremely heavy usage might not be able to use a normal consumer internet subscription; but it works fine for my personal use. I like having the option for my AI usage to operate the same way.

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

#685

Post by NewsaHackO »

admx8 wrote: post #526
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?

Btw API is not for coding, it's designed for pipelines, automation, products. They just kill competition making better software like opencode.

Is that your belief to what their API should be used for?

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

#686

Post by dcre »

gbear605 wrote: post #253
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…

I’m not familiar with the Claude Code subscription, but with Codex I’m able to use millions of tokens per day on the $200/mo plan. My rough estimate was that if I were API billing, it would cost about $50/day, or $1200/mo. So either the API has a 6x profit margin on inference, the subscription is a loss leader, or they just rely on most people not to go anywhere near the usage caps.

It's the latter. It's the average use that matters. Though I suspect API margins are also probably higher than people think.

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

#687

Post by DefineOutside »

tappio wrote: post #212
sambull wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 limits in the max subscriptions are more generous and power users are generating loss. I'm rather certain, though cannot prove it, that buying the same tokens would cost at least 10x more if bought from API. Anecdotally, my cursor team usage was getting to around 700$ / month. After switching to claude code max, I have so far only once hit the 3h limit window on the 100$ sub. What Im thinking is that Anthropic is…

I've spent $17.64 on on-demand usage in cursor with an estimated API cost of $350, mostly using Claude Opus 4.5. Some of this is skewed since subagents use a cheaper model, but even with subagents, the costs are 10x off the public API costs. Either the enterprise on-demand usage gets subsidized, API costs are 10x higher, or cursor is only billing their 10% surplus to cover their costs of indexing and such.

edit: My $40/month subscription used $662 worth of API credits.

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

#689

Post by endymi0n »

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…

„Open Access APIs are like a subway. You use them to capture a market and then you get out.“

— Erdogan, probably.

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

#690

Post by TechSquidTV »

sciencejerk wrote: post #161
TechSquidTV wrote: post #97

My alt Google accounts were all banned from Gemini access. Luckily Google left my main account alone. They are all cracking down.

From 3rd party AI app use?

Using a proxy to switch accounts
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