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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

#801

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Pi has specific instructions to extend itself.

You can just tell it to create an extension to connect to any AI API provider and it'll most likely one or two-shot it for you.

IMO it's the most self-aware of all of the current harnesses.

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

#802

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…

"Are becoming", you sweet summer child.

It all started with Facebook closing pretty much everything and making FB Messenger a custom protocol instead of XMPP.

And whatever API access is still available is so shit and badly managed that even a household name billion dollar gaming company couldn't get a fast-lane for approval to use specific API endpoints.

The final straw was Twitter effectively closing up their API "to protect from bots", which in fact did NOT protect anyone from bots. All it did was prevent legitimate entertaining and silly bots from acting on the platform, the actual state-controlled trolls just bought the blue checkmark and continued as-is.

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

#803

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So if Claude code didn’t communicate with Anthropic’s server using a well defined public api but some obscure undocumented binary format it would be fine? Or should every app/service be required to expose documented APIs?

This is not a technical question.

The immediate pro-market position is that if third-party clients are allowed / possible, Anthropic should be allowed to favor its own clients with lower prices.

But the position can go further if the service in question can be considered infrastructure. For example, a company that owns a mobile network may be required to let virtual operators use their infrastructure for a reasonable price. And a company owning a power grid may be required to become a neutral infrastructure provider that is not allowed to generate/sell power.

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

#804
post #768
post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whats better with opencode? Never tried it. I like that claude code has double escape, shift + tab, team of agents

I haven't used opencode but pi agent runs rings around claude code. Never eats tons of CPU on big outputs, no flickering, open source, tree-based context instead of claude's linear context, easy to toggle collapsing/expanding tool outputs, built for extension with runtime reloading of extensions and skills, etc. You can easily build your own amp-code like handoff mechanism, customize the UI (i see models' edit diffs…

The great force of claude code is that you can use claude sub, you can’t with pi unfortunately

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

#805
post #328

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…

Every garden eventually becomes a walled garden once enough people are inside.

Enshittification

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

#807

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There probably wouldn’t be anything funny-looking – it might look like a genuine mistake in implementation that burns 2× or 3× tokens somehow (which, considering OpenClaw is vibe coded in the purest sense of this term, would blend right in).

Regardless, such things would eventually be found. Just as OpenClaw was tasked with finding and improving science repos (though unwelcome), it could - and very likely will - be tasked with improving its own codebase.

The bug that was causing the crazy token burn was added on Feb 15. It was claimed to have been fixed on Feb 19 (see https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw/pull/20597 ) but it's unclear to me whether that fix has been rolled out yet or if it completely solved the problem. (see https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw/issues/21785 )

TLDR: the commit broke caching so the entire conversation history was being treated as new input on each call instead of most of the conversation being cached.

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

#808
post #796

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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

These products can function independently, and the acquisition at a heavy discouont for one of them is conditional on the acquisition of the other. It definitely is a tie-in sale.

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

#809

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if Claude code didn’t communicate with Anthropic’s server using a well defined public api but some obscure undocumented binary format it would be fine? Or should every app/service be required to expose documented APIs?

This is not a technical question. The immediate pro-market position is that if third-party clients are allowed / possible, Anthropic should be allowed to favor its own clients with lower prices. But the position can go further if the service in question can be considered infrastructure. For example, a company that owns a mobile network may be required to let virtual operators use their infrastructure for a reasonable…

EDIT: Anthropic should not be allowed to favor its own clients with lower prices.

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

#810

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> as the market is loaded with LLM service providers

The LLMs are not commodities. The program that interfaces with them are.

> they aren't intended for public use.

It was available at first, it made possible for people to use the LLM model without having to use their specific CLI tool. It's a bait-and-switch.

> You have no case here.

I don't need to have a legal case here to keep thinking it's a morally dsgusting practice. What I don't understand is: why do you keep defending it? Is there something in it for you, or are you just trying to rationalize your way into acceptance of their terms?

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