The entitlement from many HN posters is astounding. "Companies must provide services in the way I want billed how I want and with absolutely zero restrictions at all!" Get over yourselves. You're not that important. Don't like it. Don't use it. Seems pretty straightforward.
Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use
731–740 of 827 posts
Re: Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use
#732Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What law is actually being broken in Brazil? "Tie-in sale": the business practice where a seller conditions the sale of one product (the tying good) on the buyer’s agreement to purchase a different product (the tied good). The examples you are giving are not "tie-in" sales because the service from Playstation Plus, Spotify, Apple Music, etc is the distribution of digital goods. > Unless I am mistaken Claude Code do…
Claude Pro = claude.ai, and they made no changes to that arrangement. Both claude.ai and Claude Pro are products built on top of the Claude API. You are free to buy access to the Claude API itself, with or without the other two, but the pricing is different because the price of claude.ai and Claude Code includes the API charges they incur.
> but the pricing is different because the price of claude.ai and Claude Code includes the API charges they incur.
If that was true, then getting equivalent usage of the API without claude.ai and Claude Code should cost less, not more.
You can try to find all sorts of explanations for it, at the end of the day is quite simple: they are subsidizing one product in order to grow the market share, and they are doing it at a loss now, because they believe they will make up for it later. I understand the reasoning from a business point of view, but this doesn't mean they are entitled to their profits. I do not understand people that think we simply accept their premise and assume they can screw us over just because they asked and put it on a piece of paper.
Re: Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use
#733Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 I mean I suspect for corporate usage Microsoft already has this wrapped up with Microsoft & GitHub Co-Pilots.
OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft certainly desire path dependence but the very nature of LLMs and intelligence itself might make that hard unless they can develop models which truly are differentiated (and better) from the rest. The Chinese open source models catching up make me suspect that won't happen. The models will just be a commodity. There is a countdown clock for when we can get Opus 4.6+ level models an…
Thinking about this a little more -> "nature of LLMs and intelligence"
Bloated apps are a material disadvantage. If I'm in a competitive industry that slow down alone can mean failure. The only thing Claude Code has going for it now is the loss making $200 month subsidy. Is there any conceivable GUI overlay that Anthropic or OpenAI can add to make their software better than the current terminal apps? Sure, for certain edge cases, but then why isn't the user building those themselves? 24 months ago we could have said that's too hard, but that isn't the case in 2026.
Microsoft added all of this stuff in to Windows, and it's a 5 alarm fire. Stuff that used to be usable is a mess and really slow. Running linux with Claude Code, Codex, or Pi is clearly superior to having a Windows device with neither (if it wasn't possible to run these in Windows; just a hypothetical.)
From the business/enterprise perspective - there is no single most important thing, but having an environment that is reliable and predictable is high up there. Monday morning, an the Anthropic API endpoint is down, uh oh! In the longer term, businesses will really want to control both the model and the software that interfaces with it.
If the end game is just the same as talking to the Star Trek computer, and competitors are narrowing gaps rather than widening them (e.g. Anthropic and OpenAI releases models minutes from each other now, Chinese frontier models getting closer in capability not further), then it is really hard to see how either company achieves a vertical lock down.
We could actually move down the stack, and then the real problem for OpenAI and Anthropic is nVidia. 2030, the data center expansion is bust, nVidia starts selling all of these cards to consumers directly and has a huge financial incentive to make sure the performant local models exist. Everyone in the semiconductor supply chain below nvidia only cares about keeping sales going, so it stops with them.
Maybe nvidia is the real winner?
Also is it just me or does it now feel like hn comments are just talking to a future LLM?
Re: Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use
#734Earlier quoted context omitted.
> it shouldn't cost them more money As things are currently, better models mean bigger models that take more storage+RAM+CPU, or just spend more time processing a request. All this translates to higher costs, and may be mitigated by particular configs triggered by knowledge that a given client, providing particular guarantees, is on the other side.
That’s kind of the point. Even if users can choose which model to use (and apparently the default is the largest one), they could still say (For roughly the same cost): your Opus quota is X, your Haiku quota is Y, go ham. We’ll throttle you when you hit the limit.
But they don't want the subscription to be quota'd like that. The API automatically does that though, as different models use different amounts of tokens when generating responses, and the billing is per token. And quite literally is having the user account for the actual costs of usage, which is the thing said users are trying to avoid, on their own terms, and getting upset about when they aren't.
Re: Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use
#735Earlier quoted context omitted.
You’re not really paying for the model, you’re paying for the tool, the ecosystem, and the application layer around it. Sonnet 4.6 in CC doesn’t behave the same way as Sonnet 4.6 in Antigravity.
Skills is a generic construct. System prompt is generic as well. Subagents, AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md etc. these are generic, "please care for my instruction" kind of constructs without any real guarantee to close gaps. Tool is generic (CC vs OpenCode) Ecosystem is already same everywhere. I don't understand what's the point.
The point is that wrappers matter. Orchestration, tool calls, reasoning loops, system prompts, agentic capabilities. Output is different, quality is different.
This is the moat for AI frontier companies.
Re: Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use
#736Earlier quoted context omitted.
> All I care about is the access to the models through the client that I was already using! But that's not a product that they're offering. That ability was an undesired (from their business perspective) trait that they're now rectifying.
> But that's not a product that they're offering Of course it was. - It was possible to do it. - OpenCode did not break any security protocol in order to integrate with them. - OAuth is *precisely* a system to let third-party applications use their resources. It's not what they wanted , but it's not my problem. The fact that I was a customer does not mean that I need to protective of their profits. > (from their busi…
> Of course it was.
You'd have to point me to an authoritative source on that (explicitly saying users are allowed to use their models via private APIs in apps of the user's choosing). If something isn't explicitly provided in the contract, then it can be changed at any point in any way without notice.
Honestly, I'm not big on capitalism in general, but I don't understand why people should expect companies to provide things exactly the way they want at exactly the prices they would like to be charged (if at all). That's just not how the world/system works, or should, especially given there are so many alternatives available. If one doesn't like what's happening with some service, then let the wallet do the talking and move to another. Emigration is a far more effective message than complaining.
Re: Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use
#737Earlier 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…
It's basically the difference between pro-market capitalism and pro-business capitalism. The value to the society comes from competition in the market and from the businesses' ability to choose freely how they do business. When those two goals are in conflict, which one should be prioritized? Anthropic provides an API third-party clients can use. The pro-market position is that the API must be available at every pric…
Like I mentioned somewhere else I can see why some people think they are entitled to do this and I also fully understand wanting to do it from a cost standpoint.
While I do personally disagree with thinking that you should be able to do this when it was never sold in that way, at the end of the day as a customer you can choose if you want to use the product in the way that they are saying or use something else if you don’t want to support that model.
However the person I was responding too brought up legality which is a very different discussion.
Re: Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use
#738Earlier quoted context omitted.
That you are buying a bundle and it doesnt matter how much of the bundle you use you pay the same amount every billing period?
So if I buy entry to the swimming hall that allows me to be there for 4 hours but also allows me to leave earlier you would call that a flat rate? I have never noticed there are people who interpret it that way.
If it allows you 4 hours total per month yea
Re: Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use
#739Earlier quoted context omitted.
After hearing this 10 times a day for the last 5 years I'm starting to get a bit tired. Do you have a rough time for when this great replacement is coming? 1 year? 2? 5? If it's longer than that can we shut up about it for a few years please.
It’s happening already? Ask any new CS grads about how good the job market is.
A poor economy that is still dealing with a decade+ of ZIRP, COVID shock, tariffs, and political strife; I don't see how AI has much, if anything, to do with this when compared with other options.
If AI was truly this productive they wouldn't be struggling so hard to sell their wares.
Re: Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use
#740Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 $…
Cursor also significantly upcharges compared to API pricing. Last I checked they were charging ~3X API prices for Anthropic models