They did not. Anthropic is protecting its huge asset: the Claude Code value chain, which has proven itself to be a winner among devs (me included, after trying everything under the sun in 2025). If anything, Anthropic's mistake is that they are incapable of monetizing their great models in the chat market, where ChatGPT reigns: ie. Anthropic did not invest in image generation, Google did and Gemini has a shot at the market now.
Apparently nobody gets the Anthropic move: they are only good at coding and that's a very thin layer. Opencode and other tools are game for collecting inputs and outputs that can later be used to train their own models - not necessarily being done now, but they could - Cursor did it. Also Opencode makes it all easily swappable, just eval something by popping another API key and let's see if Codex or GLM can replicate the CC solution. Oh, it does! So let's cancel Claude and save big bucks!
Even though CC the agent supports external providers (via the ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL env var), they are working hard on making it impossible for other models to support their every increasing agent feature set (skills, teleport and remote sessions, LSP, Chrome integration, etc). The move totally makes sense, like it or not.
It's all easily swappable without OpenCode. Just symlink CLAUDE.md -> AGENTS.md and run `codex` instead of `claude`.
> they are working hard on making it impossible for other models to support their every increasing agent feature set (skills, teleport and remote sessions, LSP, Chrome integration, etc).
Every feature you listed has an open-source MCP server implementation, which means every agent that supports MCP already has all those features. MCP is so epic because it has already nailed the commodification coffin firmly shut. Besides, Anthropic has way less funding than OAI or Google. They wouldn't win the moat-building race even if there were one.
That said, the conventional wisdom is that lowering switching costs benefits the underdogs, because the incumbents have more market share to lose.
> ie. Anthropic did not invest in image generation, Google did and Gemini has a shot at the market now.
They're after the enterprise market - where office / workspace + app + directory integration, security, safety, compliance etc. are more important. 80% of their revenue is from enterprise - less churn, much higher revenue per W/token, better margins, better $/user.
Microsoft adopting the Anthropic models into copilot and Azure - despite being a large and early OpenAI investor - is a much bigger win than yet another image model used to make memes for users who balk at spending $20 per month.
Same with the office connector - which is only available to enterprises[0] (further speaking to where their focus is). There hasn't yet been a "claude code" moment for office productivity, but Anthropic are the closest to it.
[0] This may be a mistake as Claude Code has been adopted from the ground up
It might make sense from Anthropics perspective but as a user of these tools I think it would be a huge mistake to build your workflow around Claude Code when they are pushing vendor lock in this aggressively.
Making this mistake could end up being the AI equivalent of choosing Oracle over Postgres
This is really not the point. Anthropic isn’t cutting off third-party. You can use their models via API all you want. Why are people conflating this issue? Anthropic doesn’t owe anyone anything to offer their “unlimited” pro tiers outside of Claude Code. It’s not hard to build your own Opencode and use API keys. CLI interface by itself is not a moat.
> Anthropic is protecting its huge asset: the Claude Code value chain
Why is that their “huge asset?” The genus of this complaint is that Opencode et al replace everything but the LLM, so it seems like the latter is the true “huge asset.”
If Clause Code is being offered at or near operational breakeven, I don’t see the advantage of lock-in. If it’s being offered at a subsidy, then it’s a hint that Claude Code itself is medium-term unsustainable.
“Training data” is a partial but not full explanation of the gap, since it’s not obviously clear to me how Anthropic can learn from Claude Code sessions but not OpenCode sessions.
I rather have a product that is only good at one single thing than mid for everything else especially when the developer experience for me is much more consistent than using gemini and chatgpt to the point that I only have chatgpt for productivity reasons and also sometimes making better prompts to claude (when I don't use claude to make a better prompt). After realizing that Anthropic is discounting token usages for claude code they should have made that more explicit and also the API key (but hindsight is 20/20) they should already have been blocking third party apps or just have you make another API key that has no discount but even then this could have pissed off developers.
I am pretty sure most people get Anthropic's move. I also think "getting it" is perfectly compatible with being unhappy about it and voicing that opinion online.
The problem the second you stop subsidizing Claude Code and start making money on it the incentive to use it over opencode disappears. If opencode is the better tool than claude code - and that's the reason people are using their claude subscription with it instead of claude code - people will end up switching to it.
Maybe they can hope to murder opencode in the meantime with predatory pricing and build an advantage that they don't currently have. It seems unlikely though - the fact that they're currently behind proves the barrier to building this sort of tool isn't that high, and there's lots of developers who build their own tooling for fun that you can't really starve out of doing that.
I'm not convinced that attempting to murder opencode is a mistake - if you're losing you might as well try desperate tactics. I think the attempt is a pretty clear signal that Antrhopic is losing though.
Agreed. The system is ALL about who controls the customer relationship.
If Anthropic ended up in a position that they had to beg various Client providers to be integrated (properly) and had to compete with other LLMs on the same clients and could be swapped out at a moment's notice, they would just become a commodity and lose all leverage. They don't want to end up in such situation. They do need to control the delivery of the product end-to-end to ensure that they control the customer relationship and the quality.
This is also going to be KEY in terms of democratizing the AI industry for small startups because this model of ai-outside-tools-inside provides an alternative to tools-outside-ai-inside platforms like Lovable, Base44 and Replit which don't leave as much flexibility in terms of swapping out tooling.
> Anthropic's mistake is that they are incapable of monetizing their great models in the chat market
The types of people who would use this tool are precisely the types of people who don't pay for licenses or tools. They're in a race to the bottom and they don't even know it.
> and that's a very thin layer
I don't think Anthropic understands the market they just made massive investments in.
They’re betting that the stickiness of today’s regular users is more valuable than the market research and training data they were receiving from those nerdy, rule-breaking users.
>They did not. Anthropic is protecting its huge asset: the Claude Code value chain
that's just it, it has been proven over and over again with alternatives that CC isn't the moat that Anthropic seems to think it is. This is made evident with the fact that they're pouring R&D into DE/WM automation meanwhile CC has all the same issues it has had for months/years -- it's as if they think CC is complete.
if anything MCP was a bigger moat than CC.
also : I don't get the opencode reference. Yes, it's nice -- but codex and gemini-cli are largely compatible with cc generated codebases.
There will be some initial bumpiness as you tell the agent to append the claude.md file to all agent reads -- or better yet just merge it into agent file.) -- but that's about as rough as it'll get.
> they are working hard on making it impossible for other models to support their every increasing agent feature set (skills, teleport and remote sessions, LSP, Chrome integration, etc). The move totally makes sense, like it or not.
I don't understand, why would other models not be able to support any, or some, or even a particular single one of these? I don't even see most of these as relevant to the model itself, but rather the harness/agentic framework around it. You could argue these require a base degree of model competence for following instructions, tool calling, etc, but these things are assumed for any SOTA model today, we are well past this. Almost all of these things, if not all, are already available in other CLI + IDE-based agentic coding tools.
Claude Code isn't a good as the other tools. The models are the attractive part about Anthropic. I love Opus 4.5, but won't ever use it with Claude Code. Ok... never is strong...I won't use it any time soon. It has a long ways to go. Might get there, we'll see.
i think they're trading future customer acquisition and model quality for the current claude code userbase which they might also lose from this choice.
the reason i got the subscription wasnt to use claude code. when i subscribed you couldnt even use it for claude code. i got it because i figured i could use those tokens for anything, and as i figured out useful stuff, i could split it off onto api calls.
now that exploration of "what can i do with claude" will need to be elsewhere, and the results of a working thing will want to stay with the model that its working on.
> making it impossible for other models to support their every increasing agent feature set (skills, teleport and remote sessions, LSP, Chrome integration, etc)
I use CC as my harness but switch between third party models thanks to ccs. If Anthropic decided to stop me from using third party models in CC, I wouldn't just go "oh well, let's buy another $200/mo Claude subscription now". No. I'd be like: "Ok, I invested in CC—hooks/skills/whatever—but now let's ask CC to port them all to OpenCode and continue my work there".
I mean... I don't like it either but this is pretty standard stuff and it's obvious why they're doing it.
Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok are all more or less on par with each other, or a couple months behind at most. Chinese open models are also not far behind.
There's nothing inherent to these products to make them "sticky". If your tooling is designed for it, you can trivially switch models at any time. Mid-conversation, even. And it just works.
When you have basically equivalent products with no switching cost, you have perfect competition. They are all commodities. And that means: none of them can make a profit. It's a basic law of economics.
If they can't make a profit, no matter how revolutionary the tech is, their valuation is not justified, and they will be in big trouble when people figure this out.
So they need to make the product sticky somehow. So they:
1. Add a subscription payment model. Once you are paying a subscription fee, then the calculus on switching changes: if you only maintain one subscription, you have a strong reason to stick with it for everything.
2. Force you to use their client app, which only talks to their model, so you can't even try other models without changing your whole workflow, which most people won't bother to do.
These are bog standard tactics across the tech industry and beyond for limiting competitive pressure.
Everyone is mad about #2 but honestly I'm more mad about #1. The best thing for consumers would be if all these model providers strictly provided usage-based API pricing, which makes switching easy. But right now the subscription prices offer an enormous discount over API pricing, which just shows how much they are really desperate to create some sort of stickiness. The subscriptions don't even provide the "peace of mind" benefit that Spotify-like subscription models provide, where you don't have to worry about usage, because they still have enforced usage limits that people regularly hit. It's just purely a discount offered for locking yourself in.
But again I can't really be that mad because of course they are doing this, not doing it would be terrible business strategy.
I'm not "mad", I'm "sad" -- because I was very much on "Team Anthropic" a few months ago ... but the tool has failed to keep up in terms of quality.
If they're going to close the sub off to other tools, they need to make very strong improvements to the tool. And I don't really see that. It's "fine" but I actually think these tools are letting developers down.
They take over too much. They fail to give good insights into what's happening. They have poor stop/interrupt/correct dynamics. They don't properly incorporate a basic review cycle which is something we demand of junior developers and interns on our teams, but somehow not our AIs?
They're producing mountains of sometimes-good but often unreviewable code and it isn't the "AI"'s fault, it's the heuristics in the tools.
So I want to see innovation here. And I was hoping to see it from Anthropic. But I just saw the opposite.
Well, no. It just means no single player can dominate the field in terms of profits. Anthropic is probably still losing money on subscribers, so other companies "reselling" their offering does them no good. Forcing you to use their TUI at least gives them control of how you interact with the models back. I'm guessing but since they've gone full send into the developer tooling space, their pitch to investors likely highlights the # of users on CC, not their subscriber numbers (which again, lose money). The move makes since in that respect.
> The best thing for consumers would be if all these model providers strictly provided usage-based API pricing
Using openrouter myself I find the costs of APIs to be extremely low and affordable? I don't send the whole codebase to every question, I just ask about what I need, and everything is actually ridiculously cheap? $20 lasts about 3 months.
I'll be honest; I'm pretty sure this "mistake" will be completely forgotten by the next month. Their enforcing that their subscription only works with their product should not really come as a surprise to anyone, and the alt-agent users are a small enough minority that they'll get over it.
I’m starting to think you’re right but only because software engineers don’t seem to actually value or care about open source anymore. Apparently we have collectively forgotten how bad it can be to let your tools own you instead of the other way around.
Maybe another symptom of Silicon Valley hustle culture — nobody cares about the long term consequences if you can make a quick buck.
I am sure the company is going to get very upset at people no longer paying who were using their product in a way that they did not intend. Just going to be heartbroken. I will never understand the people that make a big deal about "I will never support this business again because of x" when X not something the company ever officially said they cared about.
In all seriousness, I really don't think it should be a controversial opinion that if you are using a companies servers for something that they have a right to dictate how and the terms. It is up to the user to determine if that is acceptable or not.
Particularly when there is a subscription involved. You are very clearly paying for "Claude Code" which is very clearly a piece of software connected to an online component. You are not paying for API access or anything along those lines.
Especially when they are not blocking the ability to use the normal API with these tools.
I really don't want to defend any of these AI companies but if I remove the AI part of this and just focus on it being a tool, this seems perfectly fine what they are doing.
To me it's very easy to understand why people would be upset and post about it online.
1. The company did something the customers did not like.
2. The company's reputation has value.
3. Therefore highlighting the unpopular move online, and throwing shade at the company so to speak, is (alongside with "speaking with your wallet") one of the few levers customers have to push companies to do what they want them to do.
Before this drama started, OpenCode was just another item on a long list of tools I've been meaning to test. I was 100% content with CC (still am, mostly). But it was nice to know that there were alternatives, and that I could try them, maybe even switch to them, without having to base my decision on token pricing. The idea of there being escape hatch made me less concerned about vendor lock-in and encouraged me to a) get my entire team onto CC and b) invest time into building CC's flavor of agents, skills, commands, hooks, etc., as well as setting up a marketplace to distribute them internally.
While Anthropic was within their right to enforce their ToS, the move has changed my perspective. In the language of moats and lock-ins, it all makes sense, sure, but as a potential sign of the shape of things to come, it has hurt my trust in CC as something I want to build on top of.
Yesterday, I finally installed OpenCode and tried it. It feels genuinely more polished, and the results were satisfactory.
So while this is all very anecdotal, here's what Anthropic accomplished:
1) I no longer feel like evangelizing for their tool
2) I installed a competitor and validated it's as good as others are claiming.
Perhaps I'm overly dramatic, but I can't imagine I'm the only one who has responded this way.
I responded in a similar way. More than that I preemptively canceled my claude subscription (which just cancels auto-renewal) to make sure it was an affirmative choice to continue with it next month, after I have some time to try out the alternative they are so worried about and see if I should switch to it instead.
Claude already played their card, from threatening that 90% of the code will be written by Ai then cutting off their most enthusiastic followers. Opencode and others haven't threatened the industry and generally have better standing with most devs. I do not see how Claude can ever be profitable at this point, they don't have any stickyness and they actively propose cutting their own market.
It seems that Anthropic's thesis is that vertical integration wins.
It's too soon to tell if that's true or not.
One of the features of vertical integration is that there will be folks complaining about it. Like the way folks would complain that it's impossible or hard to install macOS on anything other than a Mac, and impossible or hard to install anything other than macOS on a Mac. Yet, despite those complains, the Mac and macOS are successful. So: the fact that folks are complaining about Anthropic's vertical integration play does not mean that it won't be successful for them. It also doesn't mean that they are clueless
Interestingly, another front page article today is about Apple choosing to use Gemini for Siri.
A lot of the comments revolve around how much they will be locked in and how much the base models are commoditized.
Google is pretty clearly ok with being an infrastructure/service provider for all comers. Same is true for Open AI (especially via Azure?) I guess Anthropic does not want to compete like that.
The models are pretty much the same, the differentiation for the last few months have purely been in the tooling and harness around the models.
As it will continue to be. Unless we get a Opus-5 or GPT-6 that blows everything out of the water, all major progress will be in the UX/DX of the tools and what tools each harness will let the agent use and how.
For now Claude is the best at this, MS is trying to keep up with Copilot in VSCode and Codex ... exists.
Have any of these sorts of proclamations ever actually come true? I recall when Reddit effectively cut off all the clients from their API, there were similar loud proclamations that they had ruined their business and everyone would defect. I remember something similar with Twitter. These businesses both have their problems, but blocking third-party apps doesn’t seem to be one of them.
I think Anthropic took a look at the market, realized they had a strong position with Claude Code, and decided to capitalize on that rather than joining the race to the bottom and becoming just another option for OpenCode. OpenAI looked at the market and decided the opposite, because they don’t have strong market share with Codex and they would rather undercut Claude, which is a legitimate strategy. Don’t know who wins.
I feel like Anthropic is probably making the right choice here. What do they have to gain by helping competitors undercut them? I don’t think Anthropic wants to be just another model that you could use. They want to be the ecosystem you use to code. Probably better to try to win a profitable market than to try to compete to be the cheapest commodity model.
But there are specific subreddits and communities who did, /r/linux and related being the biggest ones, who moved to Lemmy.
As for Twitter blocking the API, they just killed all of the fun bots people made (two of mine) - the actual goverment propaganda troll-bots never went away, they just paid the $10 for the checkmark to get top of everyone's replies and kept running as-is.
Anthropic doesn’t want you to use a tool that makes it easy to switch to a competitor’s model when you reach a cap. They want to nudge you toward upgrading - Pro -> Max -> Max 20× -> extra usage - rather than switching to Codex. They can afford to make moves like this as long as they stay on top. OpenAI isn’t the good guy here - it’s just an opportunity for them to bite off a bit more of the cake.
It is blocking the usage of subsidized subscriptions that are intended to be used with Claude Code, with third party tools. Those thirdy party tools can still use claude's api, but paying API rates, which are not subsidized or at least are a lot less subsidized.
Can't Opencode just modify their implementation to use the anthropic claude code SDK directly? The issue is they were spoofing oauth. I tried OpenCode before this whole drama and immediately noticed the oauth spoofing and never authorized it. Doesn't opencode speak ACP? https://agentclientprotocol.com/overview/agents
The SDK bundles Claude code and uses it for its agentic work. The SDK really only lets you control the UI layer. It als doesn’t yet fully support plan mode.
While I respect the author's opinion (and it's interesting that Vibe Coding, the term is less than a year old), I am more than happy to be an Anthropic customer, and actually happy that they've opened more capacity for their paying customers. What I'm achieving with Claude is spectacular and for now, it's the best system I've found to meet my goals.
Not sure what you mean by "paying customers" as a distinction. Everyone on the Max plans is a paying customer, it's just a question of what agent harness they are able to use.
You are just taking advantage of their CC subscription business model, which they are subsidizing because you are using CC. Why should they do this when you don't use their product?
Also You can still use OpenCode with API access...so no they didn't lock anything down. Basically the people just don't want to pay what is fair and is whining about it.
Q: Do I need extra AI subscriptions to use OpenCode?
A: Not necessarily, OpenCode comes with a set of free models that you can use without creating an account. Aside from these, you can use any of the popular coding models by creating a Zen account. While we encourage users to use Zen, OpenCode also works with all popular providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI etc. You can even connect your local models.
Honestly very confused by the people happy or agreeing with Anthropic here. You can use their API on a pay-per-use basis, or (as I interpreted the agreement) you can prepay as a subscription and use their service with hourly & weekly session limits.
What's changed is that I thought I was subscribing to use their API services, claude code as a service. They are now pushing it more as using only their specific CLI tool.
As a user, I am surprised, because why should it matter to them whether I open my terminal and start up using `claude code`, `opencode`, `pi`, or any other local client I want to send bits to their server.
Now, having done some work with other clients, I can kind of see the point of this change (to play devils' advocate): their subscription limits likely assume aggregate usage among all users doing X amount of coding, which when used with their own cli tool for coding works especially well with client side and service caching and tool-calls log filtering— something 3rd party clients also do to varying effectivness.
So I can imagine a reason why they might make this change, but again, I thought I was subscribing to a prepaid account where I can use their service within certain session limits, and I see no reason why the cli tool on my laptop would matter then.
Note - we primarily make use of Gemini CLI, which is very promising, but have made pretty extensive trials as Claude Code.
Anthropic hasn't changed their licensing, just enforcing what the licensing always required by closing a loophole.
Business models aside - what is interesting is whether the agent :: model relationship requires a proprietary context and language such that without that mutual interaction, will the coding accuracy and safety be somehow degraded? Or, will it be possible for agentic frameworks to plug and play with models that will generate similar outcomes.
So far, we tend to see the former is needed --- that there are improvements that can be had when the agentic framework and model language understanding are optimized to their unique properties. Not sure how long this distinction will matter, though.
I want to like Anthropic, they have such a great knowledge sharing culture and their content is bar none, but then they keep pulling stuff like this... I just can't bring myself to trust their leadership's values or ethics.
I would disagree on the knowledge sharing. They're the only major AI company that's released zero open weight models. Nor do they share any research regarding safety training, even though that's supposedly the whole reason for their existence.
I don't think I agree with this claim. Also, they didn't cut-off anyone. You can still use their API as you wish. It's out there for anyone who wants it.
They simply stopped people from abusing a accessibility feature that they created for their own product.
Dec 7, 2025 (A day that will live in infamy?) Linked from TFA:
> > > one word: repositories view
> > what do you mean?
> It's possible, and the solution is so silly that I laughed when I finally figured it out. I'm not sure if I should just post it plainly here since Anthropic might block it which would affect opencode as well, but here's a hint. After you exhaust every option and you're sure the requests you're sending are identical to CC's, check the one thing that probably still isn't identical yet (hint: it comes AFTER the headers).
Yeah I think Anthropic has the "right" to do this. That's fine.
But they also have shown a weakness by failing to understand why people might want to do this (use their Max membership with OpenCode etc instead).
People aren't using opencode or crush with their Claude Code memberships because they're trying to exploit or overuse tokens or something. That isn't possible.
They do it because Claude Code the tool itself is full of bugs and has performance issues, and OpenCode is of higher quality, has more open (surprise) development, is more responsive to bug fixes, and gives them far more knobs and dials to control how it works.
I use Claude Code quite a bit and there isn't a session that goes by where I don't bump into a sharp edge of some kind. Notorious terminal rendering issues, slow memory leaks, or compaction related bugs that took them 3 months to fix...
Failure to deal with quality issues and listen to customers is hardly a good sign of company culture, leading up to IPO... If they're trying to build a moat... this isn't a strong way to do it.
If you want to own the market and have complete control at the tooling level, you're simply going to have to make a better product. With their mountain of cash and army of engineers at their disposal ... they absolutely could. But they're not.
Meh. I’ve never used my x20 Max account in OpenCode because the Oauth solution was clearly “hacky”.
But to me the appeal of OpenCode is that I can mix and match APIs and local models. I have DeepSeek R1 doing research while KLM is planning and doing code reviews and o4 mini breaking down screenshots into specs while local QWEN is doing the work.
My experience with bugs has also been the exact opposite of what you described.
I was paying for Max but after trying GLM 4.7 I am a convert. Hardly hit the limit but even if I do it is cheaper to get two accounts from Z.ai than one Max from Anthropic
I want them to cut off these electron wrappers. If there's no tokens going to these third parties, the more they can keep subsidizing my claude code usage.
Please stop with this 'subsidising' nonsense. It is nobody's business whether anybody is subsidizing anything. I couldn't care less what the internal financial mechanics of Anthropic is. Even if they are losing money on every single paying user, I DO NOT CARE, it's their problem, not mine.
After reading this opinion ten times today. Can someone explain to me why OpenCode is a “better harness”? Or is it just because it’s open source that people support it?
No matter what the answer to the question is.. IMO "just" is out of place here. Being free/open source software is a big deal, particularly for a developer tool.
It's mostly based on feelings/"vibes", and hugely dependent on the workflow you use. I'm so happy with Claude Code, Opus and plan mode that I don't feel any need to check the others.
OpenCode has some more advanced features and plays nicely in more advanced setups. ClaudeCode isn't bad at all, but OpenCode has some tricks up it's sleeve.
I agree that this probably isn't in their own interests but "because I refuse to do business with a company that takes its customers for granted" should be heavily qualified. My power company is taking advantage of me but so far I haven't had the nerve to fire them.
Anthropic has been doing this from the start and they are justified in it (the plan has different pricing rates than API). People have been making workarounds and they are justified in that as well - those people understand their workarounds are fragile when they made them.
I don’t get the outrage, this is same as when Twitter and Reddit cut off 3rd party clients to push people to use their official client. The lesson is that don’t build a product that depends on unofficial APIs. Opencode got huge adoption because they baked in being able to use Claude’s max plan so people could switch with no switching costs. Why would you think Anthropic would be ok with this? On top of that, I read Anthropic cache’s the system prompt for Claude code for every user and this helps their costs.
The truth is Opencode didn’t have to bake this in. People who can will proxy Claude’s API anyways through other means.
Here's one thing I'm a little nervous about, because it doesn't make sense to cut off distribution channels.
Anthropic should be profitable from the inference alone. That's their product...but they (like others) aren't.
This makes some sense now why they want to control usage/distribution. I bet they have a very good chunk of subscribers to Claude Code who aren't using their credits. So they probably don't have any chance at being profitable without this. Not a great place to be.
> they really, really want to own the entire value chain rather than being relegated to becoming just another "model provider"
I remember the story used to be the other way around - "just a wrapper", "wrapper AI startups" were everywhere, nobody trusted they can make it.
Maybe being "just a model provider" or "just a LLM wrapper" matter less than the context of work. What I mean is that benefits collect not at the model provider, nor at the wrapper provider, but where the usage takes place, who sets the prompts and uses the code gets the lion share of benefits from AI.
Technically, isn't the API they want third-party software to use better anyway? This is really about pricing. The price difference between the regular API and the Oauth API is too large.
I forgot what Malcolm Gladwell called them but I imagine the small minority of users affected here have disproportionate influence over their peers.
Power users?
Any such users in the thread? I used third-party clients for a little while but I did not see the benefit.
(I was more likely to do the opposite, and run Claude Code with a proxy which allows me to use it with other models. Though after much experimentation I ended up back on Claude.)
when i signed up for a subscription it was with the understanding that id be able to use those tokens on which ever agent i wanted to play with, and that as i got to something i want to have persistently running, id switch that to be an api client. i quickly figured out that claude code was the current best coding agent for the model, but seeing other folks calling opus now im not actually sure thats true, in which case that subsidized token might be more expensive to both me and anthropic, because its not the most token efficient route over their model.
i dislike that now i wont be able to feed them training data using many different starting points and paths, which i think over time will have a bad impact on their models making them worse over time
> they really, really want to own the entire value chain rather than being relegated to becoming just another "model provider"
This is really the salient point for everything. The models are expensive to train but ultimately worthless if paying customers aren't captive and can switch at will. The issue it that a lot of the recent gains are in the prefill inference, and in the model's RAG, which aren't truly a most (except maybe for Google, if their RAG include Google scholar). That's where the bubble will pop.
I think they’re smart enough to know that they’re not making a mistake here. I’m fine with it. The API costs are not outrageous. I don’t mind paying per token prices and I don’t mind getting a discounted all-inclusive plan.
> they really, really want to own the entire value chain
That is it. That is the problem. Everyone wants vertical integration and to corner the market, from Standard Oil on down. And everyone who wants that should be smacked down.
A good example of an extremely small but extremely vocal minority doing their best to punish a company for not catering to their explicitly disallowed use case for no reason other than they want it. I'd bet this has 0 negative impact on their business.
What I learned from all this is that OpenAI is willing to offer a service compatible with my preferred workflow/method of billing and Anthropic clearly is not. That's fine but disappointing, I'm keeping my Codex subscription and letting my Claude subscription lapse but sure, it would be nice if Anthropic changed their mind to keep that option available because yes, I do want it.
I'm a bit perplexed by some comments describing the situation like OpenCode users were getting something for free and stealing from CC users when the plan quota was enforced either way and were paying the same amount for it. Or why you seem to think this post pointing out that Anthropic's direct competitor endorses that method of subscription usage is somehow malicious or manipulative behavior.
Commerce is a two-way street and customers giving feedback/complaining/cancelling when something changes is normal and healthy for competition. As evidenced by OpenAI immediately jumping in to support OpenCode users on Codex without needing to break their TOS.
I'm paying for the $200 a month plan. If blocking out alternative harnesses reduces server load and bugs and makes the claude code experience better then I'm pro-anthropic on this one.
my guess is that they are probably drowning in traffic since claude code really took off over the break and are now doing everything they can to reduce traffic and keep things up.
> For me personally, I have decided I will never be an Anthropic customer, because I refuse to do business with a company that takes its customers for granted.
Archaeologist.dev Made a Big Mistake
If guided by this morality column, Archaeologist should immediately stop using pretty-much anything they are using in their life. There's no company today that doesn't have their hands dirty. The life is a dance between choosing the least bad option, not radically cutting off any sight of "bad".
> "For me personally, I have decided I will never be an Anthropic customer, because I refuse to do business with a company that takes its customers for granted."
The best pressure on companies comes from viable alternatives, not from boycotts that leave you without tools altogether.
This reads like an overreaction. I think both OpenAI and Anthropic are soon to settle upon their target markets; that each of them are attracting separate crowds/types of coders and that the people already sold on Claude Code don’t care about this decision.
I'm supposed to adopt these wonderful new tools, but no one can figure out exactly what they are, how they should work, how much they cost, or other basics. This is worse than the early days of the cloud. Hopefully most of this goes the way of SOAP.
I just cancelled, citing this as the reason. I’m actually not all that torn up about it. I mostly want to see how Anthropic responds to the community about this issue.
When the only winning move is corner-the-market, the only way for the customer to win is not to play the game. I'll take my token-money elsewhere.
That said, the author is deluding themselves if they think OpenAI is supporting OpenCode in earnest. Unlike Anthropic, they don't have explicit usage limits. It's a 'we'll let you use our service as long as we want' kind of subscription.
I got a paid plan with GPT 5.2 and after a day of usage was just told 'try again in a week'. Then in a week I hit it again and didn't even get a time estimate. I wasn't even doing anything heavy or high reasoning. It's not a dependable service.
"they utterly failed to consider the second-order effects of this business decision"
Or maybe they did consider but were capital/ inference capacity constrained to keep serving at this pricepoint. Pretty sure without any constraints they would eagerly go for 100% market share.
CC users give them the reigns to the agentic process. Non CC users take (mostly indirect) control themselves. So if you are forced to slow growth, where do you push the break (by charging defacto more per (api) token)?
Yep. That was definitely a major mistake. They could have secured an epic W by letting Claude Code hang as a consumable endpoint. Trying to protect it behind their own, Anthropic-based tools, is asinine and serves absolutely no-one.
I wrote a response here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46602206) but TLDR, no they didn't. These third-party clients are competitors and capitalists. They raised money from institutional investors, and are trying to get Anthropic to subsidize their growth, which Anthropic is not at all obligated to do. One could maybe argue that this was an honest mistake, but then you probably shouldn’t have a file called ‘anthropic_spoof.txt’ in your repo with the line “You are Claude Code, Anthropic’s official CLI for Claude”, which you then use to bypass oauth.
I think these third party clients put their customers at risk. Most of them likely did not realize that the tools were doing something that violated ToS. Using these tools put many of those users at risk of account bans and risk Anthropic pulling the plug entirely and raising prices, which would be bad for everyone
The people defending Anthropic because “muh terms of service” are completely missing the point. These are bad terms. You should not accept these terms and bet the future of your business on proprietary tooling like this. It might be a good deal right now, but they only want to lock you in so that they can screw you later.
ojosilva|1 month ago
Apparently nobody gets the Anthropic move: they are only good at coding and that's a very thin layer. Opencode and other tools are game for collecting inputs and outputs that can later be used to train their own models - not necessarily being done now, but they could - Cursor did it. Also Opencode makes it all easily swappable, just eval something by popping another API key and let's see if Codex or GLM can replicate the CC solution. Oh, it does! So let's cancel Claude and save big bucks!
Even though CC the agent supports external providers (via the ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL env var), they are working hard on making it impossible for other models to support their every increasing agent feature set (skills, teleport and remote sessions, LSP, Chrome integration, etc). The move totally makes sense, like it or not.
bloppe|1 month ago
It's all easily swappable without OpenCode. Just symlink CLAUDE.md -> AGENTS.md and run `codex` instead of `claude`.
> they are working hard on making it impossible for other models to support their every increasing agent feature set (skills, teleport and remote sessions, LSP, Chrome integration, etc).
Every feature you listed has an open-source MCP server implementation, which means every agent that supports MCP already has all those features. MCP is so epic because it has already nailed the commodification coffin firmly shut. Besides, Anthropic has way less funding than OAI or Google. They wouldn't win the moat-building race even if there were one.
That said, the conventional wisdom is that lowering switching costs benefits the underdogs, because the incumbents have more market share to lose.
nikcub|1 month ago
They're after the enterprise market - where office / workspace + app + directory integration, security, safety, compliance etc. are more important. 80% of their revenue is from enterprise - less churn, much higher revenue per W/token, better margins, better $/user.
Microsoft adopting the Anthropic models into copilot and Azure - despite being a large and early OpenAI investor - is a much bigger win than yet another image model used to make memes for users who balk at spending $20 per month.
Same with the office connector - which is only available to enterprises[0] (further speaking to where their focus is). There hasn't yet been a "claude code" moment for office productivity, but Anthropic are the closest to it.
[0] This may be a mistake as Claude Code has been adopted from the ground up
jrsj|1 month ago
Making this mistake could end up being the AI equivalent of choosing Oracle over Postgres
lvl155|1 month ago
Majromax|1 month ago
Why is that their “huge asset?” The genus of this complaint is that Opencode et al replace everything but the LLM, so it seems like the latter is the true “huge asset.”
If Clause Code is being offered at or near operational breakeven, I don’t see the advantage of lock-in. If it’s being offered at a subsidy, then it’s a hint that Claude Code itself is medium-term unsustainable.
“Training data” is a partial but not full explanation of the gap, since it’s not obviously clear to me how Anthropic can learn from Claude Code sessions but not OpenCode sessions.
zitterbewegung|1 month ago
Palmik|1 month ago
gpm|1 month ago
Maybe they can hope to murder opencode in the meantime with predatory pricing and build an advantage that they don't currently have. It seems unlikely though - the fact that they're currently behind proves the barrier to building this sort of tool isn't that high, and there's lots of developers who build their own tooling for fun that you can't really starve out of doing that.
I'm not convinced that attempting to murder opencode is a mistake - if you're losing you might as well try desperate tactics. I think the attempt is a pretty clear signal that Antrhopic is losing though.
socketcluster|1 month ago
If Anthropic ended up in a position that they had to beg various Client providers to be integrated (properly) and had to compete with other LLMs on the same clients and could be swapped out at a moment's notice, they would just become a commodity and lose all leverage. They don't want to end up in such situation. They do need to control the delivery of the product end-to-end to ensure that they control the customer relationship and the quality.
This is also going to be KEY in terms of democratizing the AI industry for small startups because this model of ai-outside-tools-inside provides an alternative to tools-outside-ai-inside platforms like Lovable, Base44 and Replit which don't leave as much flexibility in terms of swapping out tooling.
themafia|1 month ago
The types of people who would use this tool are precisely the types of people who don't pay for licenses or tools. They're in a race to the bottom and they don't even know it.
> and that's a very thin layer
I don't think Anthropic understands the market they just made massive investments in.
sergiotapia|1 month ago
The CLI tool is terrible compared to opencode.
That is the unfortunate reality, we are now being foisted claude code. :( I wish they just fork opencode.
irthomasthomas|1 month ago
serf|1 month ago
that's just it, it has been proven over and over again with alternatives that CC isn't the moat that Anthropic seems to think it is. This is made evident with the fact that they're pouring R&D into DE/WM automation meanwhile CC has all the same issues it has had for months/years -- it's as if they think CC is complete.
if anything MCP was a bigger moat than CC.
also : I don't get the opencode reference. Yes, it's nice -- but codex and gemini-cli are largely compatible with cc generated codebases.
There will be some initial bumpiness as you tell the agent to append the claude.md file to all agent reads -- or better yet just merge it into agent file.) -- but that's about as rough as it'll get.
apstls|1 month ago
I don't understand, why would other models not be able to support any, or some, or even a particular single one of these? I don't even see most of these as relevant to the model itself, but rather the harness/agentic framework around it. You could argue these require a base degree of model competence for following instructions, tool calling, etc, but these things are assumed for any SOTA model today, we are well past this. Almost all of these things, if not all, are already available in other CLI + IDE-based agentic coding tools.
tom_m|1 month ago
8note|1 month ago
the reason i got the subscription wasnt to use claude code. when i subscribed you couldnt even use it for claude code. i got it because i figured i could use those tokens for anything, and as i figured out useful stuff, i could split it off onto api calls.
now that exploration of "what can i do with claude" will need to be elsewhere, and the results of a working thing will want to stay with the model that its working on.
aaroninsf|1 month ago
I'd be pretty happy if Anthropic acquired Midjourney
unknown|1 month ago
[deleted]
behnamoh|1 month ago
I use CC as my harness but switch between third party models thanks to ccs. If Anthropic decided to stop me from using third party models in CC, I wouldn't just go "oh well, let's buy another $200/mo Claude subscription now". No. I'd be like: "Ok, I invested in CC—hooks/skills/whatever—but now let's ask CC to port them all to OpenCode and continue my work there".
gigatexal|1 month ago
kentonv|1 month ago
Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok are all more or less on par with each other, or a couple months behind at most. Chinese open models are also not far behind.
There's nothing inherent to these products to make them "sticky". If your tooling is designed for it, you can trivially switch models at any time. Mid-conversation, even. And it just works.
When you have basically equivalent products with no switching cost, you have perfect competition. They are all commodities. And that means: none of them can make a profit. It's a basic law of economics.
If they can't make a profit, no matter how revolutionary the tech is, their valuation is not justified, and they will be in big trouble when people figure this out.
So they need to make the product sticky somehow. So they:
1. Add a subscription payment model. Once you are paying a subscription fee, then the calculus on switching changes: if you only maintain one subscription, you have a strong reason to stick with it for everything.
2. Force you to use their client app, which only talks to their model, so you can't even try other models without changing your whole workflow, which most people won't bother to do.
These are bog standard tactics across the tech industry and beyond for limiting competitive pressure.
Everyone is mad about #2 but honestly I'm more mad about #1. The best thing for consumers would be if all these model providers strictly provided usage-based API pricing, which makes switching easy. But right now the subscription prices offer an enormous discount over API pricing, which just shows how much they are really desperate to create some sort of stickiness. The subscriptions don't even provide the "peace of mind" benefit that Spotify-like subscription models provide, where you don't have to worry about usage, because they still have enforced usage limits that people regularly hit. It's just purely a discount offered for locking yourself in.
But again I can't really be that mad because of course they are doing this, not doing it would be terrible business strategy.
cmrdporcupine|1 month ago
If they're going to close the sub off to other tools, they need to make very strong improvements to the tool. And I don't really see that. It's "fine" but I actually think these tools are letting developers down.
They take over too much. They fail to give good insights into what's happening. They have poor stop/interrupt/correct dynamics. They don't properly incorporate a basic review cycle which is something we demand of junior developers and interns on our teams, but somehow not our AIs?
They're producing mountains of sometimes-good but often unreviewable code and it isn't the "AI"'s fault, it's the heuristics in the tools.
So I want to see innovation here. And I was hoping to see it from Anthropic. But I just saw the opposite.
vrosas|1 month ago
Well, no. It just means no single player can dominate the field in terms of profits. Anthropic is probably still losing money on subscribers, so other companies "reselling" their offering does them no good. Forcing you to use their TUI at least gives them control of how you interact with the models back. I'm guessing but since they've gone full send into the developer tooling space, their pitch to investors likely highlights the # of users on CC, not their subscriber numbers (which again, lose money). The move makes since in that respect.
bambax|1 month ago
Using openrouter myself I find the costs of APIs to be extremely low and affordable? I don't send the whole codebase to every question, I just ask about what I need, and everything is actually ridiculously cheap? $20 lasts about 3 months.
Philpax|1 month ago
jrsj|1 month ago
Maybe another symptom of Silicon Valley hustle culture — nobody cares about the long term consequences if you can make a quick buck.
nerdjon|1 month ago
In all seriousness, I really don't think it should be a controversial opinion that if you are using a companies servers for something that they have a right to dictate how and the terms. It is up to the user to determine if that is acceptable or not.
Particularly when there is a subscription involved. You are very clearly paying for "Claude Code" which is very clearly a piece of software connected to an online component. You are not paying for API access or anything along those lines.
Especially when they are not blocking the ability to use the normal API with these tools.
I really don't want to defend any of these AI companies but if I remove the AI part of this and just focus on it being a tool, this seems perfectly fine what they are doing.
Palmik|1 month ago
1. The company did something the customers did not like.
2. The company's reputation has value.
3. Therefore highlighting the unpopular move online, and throwing shade at the company so to speak, is (alongside with "speaking with your wallet") one of the few levers customers have to push companies to do what they want them to do.
themafia|1 month ago
> It is up to the user to determine if that is acceptable or not.
It sounds like you understand it perfectly.
lemontheme|1 month ago
While Anthropic was within their right to enforce their ToS, the move has changed my perspective. In the language of moats and lock-ins, it all makes sense, sure, but as a potential sign of the shape of things to come, it has hurt my trust in CC as something I want to build on top of.
Yesterday, I finally installed OpenCode and tried it. It feels genuinely more polished, and the results were satisfactory.
So while this is all very anecdotal, here's what Anthropic accomplished:
1) I no longer feel like evangelizing for their tool 2) I installed a competitor and validated it's as good as others are claiming.
Perhaps I'm overly dramatic, but I can't imagine I'm the only one who has responded this way.
gpm|1 month ago
falloutx|1 month ago
zestyOrange67|1 month ago
[deleted]
pizlonator|1 month ago
It's too soon to tell if that's true or not.
One of the features of vertical integration is that there will be folks complaining about it. Like the way folks would complain that it's impossible or hard to install macOS on anything other than a Mac, and impossible or hard to install anything other than macOS on a Mac. Yet, despite those complains, the Mac and macOS are successful. So: the fact that folks are complaining about Anthropic's vertical integration play does not mean that it won't be successful for them. It also doesn't mean that they are clueless
anon84873628|1 month ago
A lot of the comments revolve around how much they will be locked in and how much the base models are commoditized.
Google is pretty clearly ok with being an infrastructure/service provider for all comers. Same is true for Open AI (especially via Azure?) I guess Anthropic does not want to compete like that.
bloppe|1 month ago
They're probably losing money on each pro subscription so they probably won't miss me!
theshrike79|1 month ago
As it will continue to be. Unless we get a Opus-5 or GPT-6 that blows everything out of the water, all major progress will be in the UX/DX of the tools and what tools each harness will let the agent use and how.
For now Claude is the best at this, MS is trying to keep up with Copilot in VSCode and Codex ... exists.
dpark|1 month ago
I think Anthropic took a look at the market, realized they had a strong position with Claude Code, and decided to capitalize on that rather than joining the race to the bottom and becoming just another option for OpenCode. OpenAI looked at the market and decided the opposite, because they don’t have strong market share with Codex and they would rather undercut Claude, which is a legitimate strategy. Don’t know who wins.
I feel like Anthropic is probably making the right choice here. What do they have to gain by helping competitors undercut them? I don’t think Anthropic wants to be just another model that you could use. They want to be the ecosystem you use to code. Probably better to try to win a profitable market than to try to compete to be the cheapest commodity model.
theshrike79|1 month ago
But there are specific subreddits and communities who did, /r/linux and related being the biggest ones, who moved to Lemmy.
As for Twitter blocking the API, they just killed all of the fun bots people made (two of mine) - the actual goverment propaganda troll-bots never went away, they just paid the $10 for the checkmark to get top of everyone's replies and kept running as-is.
ethbr1|1 month ago
And if they've made a business decision to do this, rolling it out without announcement is even worse.
Did they think no one would notice?
msxT|1 month ago
F7F7F7|1 month ago
It’s CC with Qwen and KLM and other OSS and/or local models.
theshrike79|1 month ago
And if I was making any money, the Max tiers would be pennies in the bucket.
elzbardico|1 month ago
It is blocking the usage of subsidized subscriptions that are intended to be used with Claude Code, with third party tools. Those thirdy party tools can still use claude's api, but paying API rates, which are not subsidized or at least are a lot less subsidized.
kzahel|1 month ago
dd8601fn|1 month ago
You can use the Anthropic API in any tool, but these users wanted to use the claude code subscription.
macinjosh|1 month ago
arjie|1 month ago
shepherdjerred|1 month ago
MaintenanceMode|1 month ago
redhale|1 month ago
rCube22|1 month ago
Also You can still use OpenCode with API access...so no they didn't lock anything down. Basically the people just don't want to pay what is fair and is whining about it.
alvsilvao|1 month ago
It looks like they need to update their FAQ:
Q: Do I need extra AI subscriptions to use OpenCode? A: Not necessarily, OpenCode comes with a set of free models that you can use without creating an account. Aside from these, you can use any of the popular coding models by creating a Zen account. While we encourage users to use Zen, OpenCode also works with all popular providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI etc. You can even connect your local models.
Philpax|1 month ago
falloutx|1 month ago
unknown|1 month ago
[deleted]
jsumrall|1 month ago
What's changed is that I thought I was subscribing to use their API services, claude code as a service. They are now pushing it more as using only their specific CLI tool.
As a user, I am surprised, because why should it matter to them whether I open my terminal and start up using `claude code`, `opencode`, `pi`, or any other local client I want to send bits to their server.
Now, having done some work with other clients, I can kind of see the point of this change (to play devils' advocate): their subscription limits likely assume aggregate usage among all users doing X amount of coding, which when used with their own cli tool for coding works especially well with client side and service caching and tool-calls log filtering— something 3rd party clients also do to varying effectivness.
So I can imagine a reason why they might make this change, but again, I thought I was subscribing to a prepaid account where I can use their service within certain session limits, and I see no reason why the cli tool on my laptop would matter then.
F7F7F7|1 month ago
awestroke|1 month ago
Just pay per token if you want to use third party tools. Stop feeling entitled to other people's stuff.
TylerJewell|1 month ago
Anthropic hasn't changed their licensing, just enforcing what the licensing always required by closing a loophole.
Business models aside - what is interesting is whether the agent :: model relationship requires a proprietary context and language such that without that mutual interaction, will the coding accuracy and safety be somehow degraded? Or, will it be possible for agentic frameworks to plug and play with models that will generate similar outcomes.
So far, we tend to see the former is needed --- that there are improvements that can be had when the agentic framework and model language understanding are optimized to their unique properties. Not sure how long this distinction will matter, though.
verdverm|1 month ago
that and they "stole" my money
buppermint|1 month ago
cat-whisperer|1 month ago
They simply stopped people from abusing a accessibility feature that they created for their own product.
gpm|1 month ago
taytus|1 month ago
They did banned a lot people. Later, they "unbanned" them, but your comment isn't truthful.
projektfu|1 month ago
> > > one word: repositories view
> > what do you mean?
> It's possible, and the solution is so silly that I laughed when I finally figured it out. I'm not sure if I should just post it plainly here since Anthropic might block it which would affect opencode as well, but here's a hint. After you exhaust every option and you're sure the requests you're sending are identical to CC's, check the one thing that probably still isn't identical yet (hint: it comes AFTER the headers).
I guess Anthropic noticed.
cmrdporcupine|1 month ago
But they also have shown a weakness by failing to understand why people might want to do this (use their Max membership with OpenCode etc instead).
People aren't using opencode or crush with their Claude Code memberships because they're trying to exploit or overuse tokens or something. That isn't possible.
They do it because Claude Code the tool itself is full of bugs and has performance issues, and OpenCode is of higher quality, has more open (surprise) development, is more responsive to bug fixes, and gives them far more knobs and dials to control how it works.
I use Claude Code quite a bit and there isn't a session that goes by where I don't bump into a sharp edge of some kind. Notorious terminal rendering issues, slow memory leaks, or compaction related bugs that took them 3 months to fix...
Failure to deal with quality issues and listen to customers is hardly a good sign of company culture, leading up to IPO... If they're trying to build a moat... this isn't a strong way to do it.
If you want to own the market and have complete control at the tooling level, you're simply going to have to make a better product. With their mountain of cash and army of engineers at their disposal ... they absolutely could. But they're not.
F7F7F7|1 month ago
But to me the appeal of OpenCode is that I can mix and match APIs and local models. I have DeepSeek R1 doing research while KLM is planning and doing code reviews and o4 mini breaking down screenshots into specs while local QWEN is doing the work.
My experience with bugs has also been the exact opposite of what you described.
mohsen1|1 month ago
isoprophlex|1 month ago
bloppe|1 month ago
blumenkraft|1 month ago
fathermarz|1 month ago
eikenberry|1 month ago
cadamsdotcom|1 month ago
hakanderyal|1 month ago
vorpalhex|1 month ago
Havoc|1 month ago
Animats|1 month ago
- Google cutting off using search from other than their home page code. (At one time there was an official SOAP API for Google Search.)
- Apple cutting off non-Apple hardware in the Power PC era. ("We lost our license for speeding", from a third party seller of faster hardware.)
- Twitter cutting off external clients. (The end of TweetDeck.)
mfkp|1 month ago
matchagaucho|1 month ago
But it was only a matter of time before: a) Microsoft reclaimed its IDE b) Frontier model providers reclaimed their models
Sage advice: don’t fill potholes in another company’s roadmap.
daveguy|1 month ago
Re: b) "frontier" models can reclaim all they want; bring it. that's not a moat.
smoyer|1 month ago
4b11b4|1 month ago
theturtletalks|1 month ago
The truth is Opencode didn’t have to bake this in. People who can will proxy Claude’s API anyways through other means.
Gander5739|1 month ago
tom_m|1 month ago
Anthropic should be profitable from the inference alone. That's their product...but they (like others) aren't.
This makes some sense now why they want to control usage/distribution. I bet they have a very good chunk of subscribers to Claude Code who aren't using their credits. So they probably don't have any chance at being profitable without this. Not a great place to be.
visarga|1 month ago
I remember the story used to be the other way around - "just a wrapper", "wrapper AI startups" were everywhere, nobody trusted they can make it.
Maybe being "just a model provider" or "just a LLM wrapper" matter less than the context of work. What I mean is that benefits collect not at the model provider, nor at the wrapper provider, but where the usage takes place, who sets the prompts and uses the code gets the lion share of benefits from AI.
estearum|1 month ago
Being "just a wrapper" wouldn't be a risky position if the LLMs would be content to be "just a model." But they clearly wouldn't be, and so it wasn't.
charcircuit|1 month ago
It's a trivial violation until it isn't. Competitors need to be fought off early else they become much harder to fight in the future.
skybrian|1 month ago
ChrisArchitect|1 month ago
Anthropic blocks third-party use of Claude Code subscriptions
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46549823
andai|1 month ago
Power users?
Any such users in the thread? I used third-party clients for a little while but I did not see the benefit.
(I was more likely to do the opposite, and run Claude Code with a proxy which allows me to use it with other models. Though after much experimentation I ended up back on Claude.)
ProofHouse|1 month ago
ChicagoDave|1 month ago
This will be completely forgotten in like a week.
And if you leave because of this, more support for those that abide by the TOS and stay.
This is akin to someone selling/operating a cloud platform named Blazure and it’s just a front for Azure.
My view to everyone is to stop trying to control the ecosystem and just build shit. Fast.
AznHisoka|1 month ago
8note|1 month ago
when i signed up for a subscription it was with the understanding that id be able to use those tokens on which ever agent i wanted to play with, and that as i got to something i want to have persistently running, id switch that to be an api client. i quickly figured out that claude code was the current best coding agent for the model, but seeing other folks calling opus now im not actually sure thats true, in which case that subsidized token might be more expensive to both me and anthropic, because its not the most token efficient route over their model.
i dislike that now i wont be able to feed them training data using many different starting points and paths, which i think over time will have a bad impact on their models making them worse over time
unknown|1 month ago
[deleted]
unknown|1 month ago
[deleted]
gaigalas|1 month ago
I have a gut feeling that the real top dog harness (profitability, sticky users, growth) is VSCode + Copilot.
orwin|1 month ago
This is really the salient point for everything. The models are expensive to train but ultimately worthless if paying customers aren't captive and can switch at will. The issue it that a lot of the recent gains are in the prefill inference, and in the model's RAG, which aren't truly a most (except maybe for Google, if their RAG include Google scholar). That's where the bubble will pop.
AstroBen|1 month ago
renewiltord|1 month ago
BrenBarn|1 month ago
That is it. That is the problem. Everyone wants vertical integration and to corner the market, from Standard Oil on down. And everyone who wants that should be smacked down.
lacoolj|1 month ago
theshrike79|1 month ago
Opencode was spoofing itself as the official Claude Code CLI to get access to the subscription tier.
nwienert|1 month ago
ewoodrich|1 month ago
What I learned from all this is that OpenAI is willing to offer a service compatible with my preferred workflow/method of billing and Anthropic clearly is not. That's fine but disappointing, I'm keeping my Codex subscription and letting my Claude subscription lapse but sure, it would be nice if Anthropic changed their mind to keep that option available because yes, I do want it.
I'm a bit perplexed by some comments describing the situation like OpenCode users were getting something for free and stealing from CC users when the plan quota was enforced either way and were paying the same amount for it. Or why you seem to think this post pointing out that Anthropic's direct competitor endorses that method of subscription usage is somehow malicious or manipulative behavior.
Commerce is a two-way street and customers giving feedback/complaining/cancelling when something changes is normal and healthy for competition. As evidenced by OpenAI immediately jumping in to support OpenCode users on Codex without needing to break their TOS.
joelthelion|1 month ago
jsumrall|1 month ago
squidster|1 month ago
a-dub|1 month ago
tom_m|1 month ago
motbus3|1 month ago
What people expect from them?
itsdrewmiller|1 month ago
dang|1 month ago
(@dang often doesn't work, I just happened to see this. If you want guaranteed message delivery it's best to email hn@ycombinator.com)
zzzeek|1 month ago
what? that's a thing ? why would a vibe coder be "renowned"? I use Claude every day but this is just too much.
hakanderyal|1 month ago
eddyg|1 month ago
https://clawd.bot/ https://github.com/clawdbot/clawdbot
He's also the guy behind https://github.com/steipete/oracle/
Mystery-Machine|1 month ago
Archaeologist.dev Made a Big Mistake
If guided by this morality column, Archaeologist should immediately stop using pretty-much anything they are using in their life. There's no company today that doesn't have their hands dirty. The life is a dance between choosing the least bad option, not radically cutting off any sight of "bad".
mooktakim|1 month ago
ickelbawd|1 month ago
dbbk|1 month ago
pella|1 month ago
The best pressure on companies comes from viable alternatives, not from boycotts that leave you without tools altogether.
nicce|1 month ago
tolerance|1 month ago
m0llusk|1 month ago
luxuryballs|1 month ago
reilly3000|1 month ago
gausswho|1 month ago
That said, the author is deluding themselves if they think OpenAI is supporting OpenCode in earnest. Unlike Anthropic, they don't have explicit usage limits. It's a 'we'll let you use our service as long as we want' kind of subscription.
I got a paid plan with GPT 5.2 and after a day of usage was just told 'try again in a week'. Then in a week I hit it again and didn't even get a time estimate. I wasn't even doing anything heavy or high reasoning. It's not a dependable service.
milkey_mouse|1 month ago
PeterStuer|1 month ago
Or maybe they did consider but were capital/ inference capacity constrained to keep serving at this pricepoint. Pretty sure without any constraints they would eagerly go for 100% market share.
CC users give them the reigns to the agentic process. Non CC users take (mostly indirect) control themselves. So if you are forced to slow growth, where do you push the break (by charging defacto more per (api) token)?
dmezzetti|1 month ago
blumenkraft|1 month ago
netdur|1 month ago
theahura|1 month ago
I think these third party clients put their customers at risk. Most of them likely did not realize that the tools were doing something that violated ToS. Using these tools put many of those users at risk of account bans and risk Anthropic pulling the plug entirely and raising prices, which would be bad for everyone
bschmidt900|1 month ago
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unknown|1 month ago
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jrsj|1 month ago
unknown|1 month ago
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solumunus|1 month ago