Anthropic: Developing a Claude Code competitor using Claude Code is banned

Because your subscription depends on the very API business.

Anthropic's cogs is rent of buying x amount of h100s. cost of a marginal query for them is almost zero until the batch fills up and they need a new cluster. So, API clusters are usually built for peak load with low utilization (filled batch) at any given time. Given AI's peak demand is extremely spiky they end up with low utilization numbers for API support.

Your subscription is supposed to use that free capacity. Hence, the token costs are not that high, hence you could buy that. But it needs careful management that you dont overload the system. There is a claude code telemetry which identifies the request as lower priority than API (and probably decide on queueing + caching too). If your harness makes 10 parallel calls everytime you query, and not manage context as well as claude code, its overwhelming the system, degrading the performance for others too. And if everyone just wants to use subscription and you have no api takers, the price of subscription is not sustainable anyway. In a way you are relying on others' generosity for the cheap usage you get.

Its reasonable for a company to unilaterally decide how they monetize their extra capacity, and its not unjustified to care. You are not purchasing the promise of X tokens with a subscription purchase for that you need api.

Imagine a world where Google has its product shit together and didn’t publish the AIAYN paper, and has the monopoly on LLMs and they are a black box to all outsiders. It’s terrifying. Thankfully we have extreme competition in the space to mitigate anything like this. Let’s hope it stays that way.

The corporate hypocrisy is reaching previously unseen levels. Ultra-wealthy thieves who got rich upon stealing a dragon horde worth of property are now crying foul about people following the same "ideals". What an absolute snowflakes. LLM sector is the only one where I'm rooting for Chinese corporations trouncing the incumbents, thus demonstrating FAFO principle in practice.

Yeah, but that would mean me giving money to Sam Altman, and that ain't happening.

> Developers want to use these 3p client and pay you 200 a month, why are you pissing us off

Presumably because it costs them more than $200 per month to sell you it. It's a loss leader to get you into their ecosystem. If you won't use their ecosystem, they'd rather you just go over to OpenAI.