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…
Apple can do those things because they control the hardware device, which has physical distribution, and they lock down the ecosystem. There is no third party app store, and you can't get the Photos app to save to Google Drive.
With Claude Code, just export an env variable or use a MITM proxy + some middleware to forward requests to OpenAI instead. It's impossible to have lock in. Also, coding agent CLIs are a commodity.