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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

#791
post #641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Training the specific harness" is marginal -- it's obvious if you've used anything else. pi with Claude is as good as (even better! given the obvious care to context management in pi) as Claude Code with Claude. This whole game is a bizarre battle. In the future, many companies will have slightly different secret RL sauces. I'd want to use Gemini for documentation, Claude for design, Codex for planning, yada yada ..…

> pi with Claude is as good as (even better! given the obvious care to context management in pi) as Claude Code with Claude And that’s out of the box . With how comically extensible pi is and how much control it gives you over every aspect of the pipeline, as soon as you start building extensions for your own, personal workflow, Claude Code legimitely feels like a trash app in comparison. I don’t care what Anthropic…

As a Claude Code user looking for alternatives, I am very intrigued by this statement.

Can you please share good resources I can learn from to extend pi?

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

#792

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think their branding is cementing in place for a lot of people, and the lived experience of people trying a lot of models often ends up with a simple preference for Claude, likely using a lot of the same mental heuristics as how we choose which coworkers we enjoy working with. If they can keep that position, they will have it made.

I'm a very experienced developer with a lot of diverse knowledge and experience in both technical and domain knowledge. I've only tried a handful of AI coding agents/models... I found most of them ranging from somewhat annoying to really annoying. Claude+Opus (4.5 when I started) is the first one I've used where I found it more useful than annoying to use. I think Github Co-Pilot is most annoying from what I've tried…

Github Copilot let's you pick the underlying model, including Claude models.

Is the problem you observed true regardless of the model you picked?

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

#793

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was no third choice if they didn't explicitly state that there was. > If the "private API" was accessible via OAuth, then it's hardly "private". If you invite people on your porch for a party, and someone finds that you left the house key under the mat and went off to restock, then it's hardly "private". It's perfectly fine for whomever feels like to take the party indoors without your permission. Pretty much w…

Try not making it sound like the company is doing me a favor by letting me access the thing I was paying for. I wasn't "invited to a party", I was sold on an agreement that by paying a guaranteed monthly fee I could have access to the model at a rate that was lower than the pay-as-you-go rate from the API. The primary offering is access to the models. That's what the subscription is about. They can try as hard as the…

> I was sold on an agreement that by paying a guaranteed monthly fee I could have access to the model at a rate that was lower than the pay-as-you-go rate from the API

Yes, that agreement is there, with the condition that their app is used. That's option B. And I'd think it fairly obvious that if one has to go to extraordinary lengths to gain access, like finding a key under a mat, or needing to login with an official client to gain access to a token for an unofficial client, then - implicitly - it's highly unlikely that that method of access is part of the agreement. And Anthropic has now made it explicitly clear that no, that access method is not part of the agreement.

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

#794

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try not making it sound like the company is doing me a favor by letting me access the thing I was paying for. I wasn't "invited to a party", I was sold on an agreement that by paying a guaranteed monthly fee I could have access to the model at a rate that was lower than the pay-as-you-go rate from the API. The primary offering is access to the models. That's what the subscription is about. They can try as hard as the…

> I was sold on an agreement that by paying a guaranteed monthly fee I could have access to the model at a rate that was lower than the pay-as-you-go rate from the API Yes, that agreement is there, with the condition that their app is used. That's option B. And I'd think it fairly obvious that if one has to go to extraordinary lengths to gain access, like finding a key under a mat, or needing to login with an officia…

> that agreement is there, with the condition that their app is used.

And setting this condition is what constitutes a tie-in sale.

> if one has to go to extraordinary lengths to gain access

BS! Sorry, there is nothing extraordinary about using an undocumented API.

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

#795

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a very experienced developer with a lot of diverse knowledge and experience in both technical and domain knowledge. I've only tried a handful of AI coding agents/models... I found most of them ranging from somewhat annoying to really annoying. Claude+Opus (4.5 when I started) is the first one I've used where I found it more useful than annoying to use. I think Github Co-Pilot is most annoying from what I've tried…

Github Copilot let's you pick the underlying model, including Claude models. Is the problem you observed true regardless of the model you picked?

I've only used the default selection, whatever it is in VS Code. Even paid for a year at one point as I was first using it with some SQL schema generation and it was pretty useful, kind of as a super auto-complete.

If the default option isn't at least arguably the best option I can't really speak to that. I would suggest that maybe metrics on a given set of technologies be done and that based on the project in use, that it should choose the best option dynamically by default. Such as C#+MS-SQL vs Node+Postgres vs Python+Matlab+DuckDB.

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

#796
post #712

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We don't know if, on average, paying API prices for Claude Code is cheaper or not, so we don't know if they're operating it at a "loss". That math doesn't make sense in any case since it would be a "loss" based on their own external prices. The entire company is operating at a loss, regardless.

In any case, the point is it's not tying; you're free to choose any combination of products.

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

#797
post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unstoppable monopoly will be extremely hard to pull off given the number of quality open (weights) alternatives. I only use LLMs through OpenRouter and switch somewhat randomly between frontier models; they each have some amount of personality but I wouldn't mind much if half of them disappeared overnight, as long as the other half remained available.

I'm old, so I remember saying the same thing about Google and search. I hope you're right!

There was never a high quality alternative to Google search, until Kagi - and even that isn't free!

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

#798
post #212

Earlier 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 $…

oh, I figured out the costs for the enterprise plan. It's $0.04 per request, I'm not charged per token at all. The billing is completely different for enterprise users than regular users.

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

#799
post #615

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think they're doing a great job on the coding front though

I think there is a huge gap between people who has a good CLAUDE.md (or similar), or those who doesn’t.

When I first tried, the created code was garbage. Now that I slowly built my memory, several thousands of manually written examples and guidance, it can generate quite reliably, when it doesn’t need literally anything outside of those…

That being said, most of the vibe coded codebases (in reality every single one which I saw) use garbage memory, and consequently have garbage output.

So the same thing is terrible and great at the same time. People who give time, and people who is fine producing garbage (huge majority) says it’s great. People who just tried it out, and don’t have the luxury to potentially waste days and weeks, say that it’s bad. All of these are true at once.

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

#800

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was sold on an agreement that by paying a guaranteed monthly fee I could have access to the model at a rate that was lower than the pay-as-you-go rate from the API Yes, that agreement is there, with the condition that their app is used. That's option B. And I'd think it fairly obvious that if one has to go to extraordinary lengths to gain access, like finding a key under a mat, or needing to login with an officia…

> that agreement is there, with the condition that their app is used. And setting this condition is what constitutes a tie-in sale. > if one has to go to extraordinary lengths to gain access BS! Sorry, there is nothing extraordinary about using an undocumented API.

Nope, there's no tie-in sale[0] as you do not pay for the apps. And particularly, there's no real competition angle[1] as the market is loaded with LLM service providers, not to mention downloadable options.

There's a reason in this particular case why the particular APIs aren't documented: they aren't intended for public use. And they've made it crystal clear, so all you have to do now is take your wallet somewhere that offers the access you desire. You have no case here.

[0] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/tie-in

[1] https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...

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