[HN Gopher] Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth fo...
___________________________________________________________________
Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party
use
Author : theahura
Score : 597 points
Date : 2026-02-19 02:52 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (code.claude.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (code.claude.com)
| theahura wrote:
| From the legal docs:
|
| > Authentication and credential use
|
| > Claude Code authenticates with Anthropic's servers using OAuth
| tokens or API keys. These authentication methods serve different
| purposes:
|
| > OAuth authentication (used with Free, Pro, and Max plans) is
| intended exclusively for Claude Code and Claude.ai. Using OAuth
| tokens obtained through Claude Free, Pro, or Max accounts in any
| other product, tool, or service -- including the Agent SDK -- is
| not permitted and constitutes a violation of the Consumer Terms
| of Service.
|
| > Developers building products or services that interact with
| Claude's capabilities, including those using the Agent SDK,
| should use API key authentication through Claude Console or a
| supported cloud provider. Anthropic does not permit third-party
| developers to offer Claude.ai login or to route requests through
| Free, Pro, or Max plan credentials on behalf of their users.
|
| > Anthropic reserves the right to take measures to enforce these
| restrictions and may do so without prior notice.
| spullara wrote:
| why wouldn't they just make it so the SDK can't use claude
| subs? like what are they doing here?
| adastra22 wrote:
| When your company happens upon a cash cow, you can either
| become a milk company or a meat company.
| akulbe wrote:
| Is this a direct shot at things like OpenClaw, or am I reading it
| wrong?
| baconner wrote:
| For sure, yes. They already added attempts to block opencode,
| etc.
| mapontosevenths wrote:
| Opencode as well. Folks have been getting banned for abusing
| the OAuth login method to get around paying for API tokens or
| whatever. Anthropic seems to prefer people pay them.
| serf wrote:
| its not that innocent.
|
| a 200 dollar a month customer isn't trying to get around
| paying for tokens, theyre trying to use the tooling they
| prefer. opencode is better in _a lot_ of ways.
|
| tokens get counted and put against usage limits anyway,
| unless theyre trying to eat analytics that are CC exclusive
| they should allow paying customers to consume to the usage
| limits in however way they want to use the models.
| fastball wrote:
| A $200/m max subscriber using OpenCode and not wanting to
| use API keys with pay-per-token pricing is _very clearly_
| trying to get around paying for tokens.
| sambull wrote:
| Is there any limits to that users 200/month? Why should
| they not be able to use the limits to the extent from
| other tools?
|
| If openclaw chews my 200/month up in 15 days... I don't
| get more requests for free
| fastball wrote:
| There is no monthly limit, it (currently) is a weekly and
| 5-hourly limit. If they allow anyone to use any tool with
| their subscription service, you could have a system (like
| OpenClaw) which involves 0 human interaction and is
| constantly consuming 100% of your token limit, then
| waiting until limits reset to do it all over again. It
| seems fairly clear that Anthropic is probably losing
| money on such usage patterns.
|
| Once again: you can use API keys and pricing to get
| UNLIMITED usage whenever you want. If you are choosing to
| pay for a subscription instead, it is because Anthropic
| is offering those subscriptions at a much better value-
| per-token. They are not offering such a subscription out
| of the goodness of their heart.
| sambull wrote:
| There are 4 weeks in a month.
|
| 4 periods of weekly limits, is a monthly limit.
| bdangubic wrote:
| 4 weeks * 12 months = 48 weeks in a year * 7 days in a
| week = 336 days per year - close enough :)
| fastball wrote:
| That's... not how that works. Might as well say Anthropic
| has a 63 day limit (cuz that's 9 weeks).
|
| The point of the first half of my comment is that you
| cannot chew through your tokens in 15 days, because
| although the billing cycle is monthly, the limits are
| not.
| mapontosevenths wrote:
| > they should allow paying customers to consume to the
| usage limits in however way they want to use the models.
|
| I think I agree, but it's their business to run however
| they like. They have competition if we don't like it.
| Bolwin wrote:
| Anthropic is offering a _steep_ discount in their plans. I
| highly doubt they want you using it in a harness where you
| can trivially switch away when someone else releases a
| better model
| LinXitoW wrote:
| Funny, because you CAN switch Claude Code to other
| providers and models easily.
|
| Anthropic is just a deeply "mis-dev-anthropic" company.
| planckscnst wrote:
| They even block Claude Code of you've modified it via tweakcc.
| When they blocked OpenCode, I ported a feature I wanted to
| Claude Code so I could continue using that feature. After a
| couple days, they started blocking it with the same message
| that OpenCode gets. I'm going to go down to the $20 plan and
| shift most of my work to OpenAI/ChatGPT because of this. The
| harness features matter more to me than model differences in
| the current generation.
| numpad0 wrote:
| I wonder if it has to do with Grok somehow. They had a
| suspiciously high reputation until they just binarily didn't,
| after Anthropic said they did something.
| MillionOClock wrote:
| I really hope someone from any of those companies (if possible
| all of them) would publish a very clear statement regarding the
| following question: If I build a commercial app that allows my
| users to connect using their OAuth token coming from their
| ChatGPT/Claude etc. account, do they allow me (and their users)
| to do this or not?
|
| I totally understand that I should not reuse my own account to
| provide services to others, as direct API usage is the obvious
| choice here, but this is a different case.
|
| I am currently developing something that would be the perfect fit
| for this OAuth based flow and I find it quite frustrating that in
| most cases I cannot find a clear answer to this question. I don't
| even know who I would be supposed to contact to get an answer or
| discuss this as an independent dev.
|
| EDIT: Some answers to my comment have pointed out that the ToS of
| Anthropic were clear, I'm not saying they aren't if taken in a
| vacuum, yet in practice even after this being published some
| confusion remained online, in particular regarding wether OAuth
| token usage was still ok with the Agent SDK for personal usage.
| If it happens to be, that would lead to other questions I
| personally cannot find a _clear_ answer to, hence my original
| statement. Also, I am very interested about the stance of _other_
| companies on this subject.
|
| Maybe I am being overly cautious here but I want to be clear that
| this is just my personal opinion and me trying to understand what
| exactly is allowed or not. This is not some business or legal
| advice.
| azuanrb wrote:
| Usually, it is already stated in their documentation (auth
| section). If a statement is vague, treat it as a no. It is not
| worth the risk when they can ban you at any time. For example,
| ChatGPT allows it, but Claude and Gemini do not.
|
| https://developers.openai.com/codex/auth
| MillionOClock wrote:
| Maybe I am missing something from the docs of your link, but
| I unfortunately don't think it actually states anything
| regarding allowing users to connect and use their Codex quota
| in third party apps.
| adastra22 wrote:
| From TFA: "OAuth authentication (used with Free, Pro, and
| Max plans) is intended exclusively for Claude Code and
| Claude.ai. Using OAuth tokens obtained through Claude Free,
| Pro, or Max accounts in any other product, tool, or service
| -- including the Agent SDK -- is not permitted and
| constitutes a violation of the Consumer Terms of Service."
| raincole wrote:
| They're not asking if Claude forbids it. They're asking
| if OpenAI (Codex, specifically) allows it.
| MillionOClock wrote:
| The comment you are responding to is about ChatGPT/Codex,
| not Claude.
| s-lambert wrote:
| https://x.com/thdxr/status/2013010664776683644
|
| I can't find anything official from OpenAI, but they have
| worked with the OpenCode people to support using your
| ChatGPT subscription in OpenCode.
| eleventyseven wrote:
| It is pretty obviously no. API keys billed by the token, yes,
| Oauth to the flat rate plans no.
|
| > OAuth authentication (used with Free, Pro, and Max plans) is
| intended exclusively for Claude Code and Claude.ai. Using OAuth
| tokens obtained through Claude Free, Pro, or Max accounts in
| any other product, tool, or service -- including the Agent SDK
| -- is not permitted and constitutes a violation of the Consumer
| Terms of Service.
| MillionOClock wrote:
| If you look at this tweet [1] and in particular responses
| under it, it still seems to me like some parts of it need
| additional clarification. For instance, I have seen some
| people interpret the tweet as meaning using the OAuth token
| is actually ok for personal experimentation with the Agent
| SDK, which can be seen as a slight contradiction with what
| you quoted. A parent tweet also mentioned the docs clean up
| causing some confusion.
|
| None of this is legal advice, I'm just trying to understand
| what exactly is allowed or not.
|
| [1] https://x.com/trq212/status/2024212380142752025?s=10
| adastra22 wrote:
| Read the actual ToS. What you describe is NOT allowed.
| eclipxe wrote:
| That tweet is from a product leader on Claude Code
| itself...
| kahnclusions wrote:
| A tweet is not a ToS.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Then they should speak to legal about fixing the ToS
| before making public statements about their intentions
| with it. It won't look good to show up at arbitration and
| have to explain why your public comms contradict your
| ToS.
| croes wrote:
| What flatrate?
|
| Pro and Max are both limited
| margalabargala wrote:
| Flat rate does not imply unlimited.
| croes wrote:
| >A flat fee, also referred to as a flat rate or a linear
| rate refers to a pricing structure that charges a single
| fixed fee for a service, regardless of usage.
| margalabargala wrote:
| That's one definition. There are others.
|
| I'm sure you can use context clues to figure this one
| out. You're so close! Just put the pieces together.
| croes wrote:
| There are no other definitions that's why they why
| internet flat rates got throttled instead of capped.
| Throttling is the loop bole because you paid for usage
| not for speed but flat rate with a cap is simply a lie.
| master-lincoln wrote:
| What else would it mean?
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| That you are buying a bundle and it doesnt matter how
| much of the bundle you use you pay the same amount every
| billing period?
| master-lincoln wrote:
| So if I buy entry to the swimming hall that allows me to
| be there for 4 hours but also allows me to leave earlier
| you would call that a flat rate?
|
| I have never noticed there are people who interpret it
| that way.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| If it allows you 4 hours total per month yea
| margalabargala wrote:
| That you are charged a single fixed fee regardless of
| usage.
|
| Nothing about that prevents a usage cap.
| croes wrote:
| A cap pretty much is the opposite of regardless of usage
| artdigital wrote:
| That's very clearly a no, I don't understand why so many people
| think this is unclear.
|
| You can't use Claude OAuth tokens for anything. Any solution
| that exists worked because it pretended/spoofed to be Claude
| Code. Same for Gemini (Gemini CLI, Antigravity)
|
| Codex is the only one that got official blessing to be used in
| OpenClaw and OpenCode, and even that was against the ToS before
| they changed their stance on it.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Is Codex ok with any other third party applications, or just
| those?
| theLiminator wrote:
| Interested to know this too
| artdigital wrote:
| By default, assume no. The lack of any official integration
| guide should be a clear sign. Even saying that you reverse-
| engineer Codex for apps to pretend to be Codex makes it
| clear that this is not an officially endorsed thing to do
| turblety wrote:
| Codex is Open Source though, so I wonder at what stage me
| adding features to Codex is different from me starting a
| new project and using the subscription.
|
| But I believe OpenAI does let you use their subscription
| in third parties, so not an issue anyway.
| prodigycorp wrote:
| Yes. You can build third party applications on top of codex
| app server. All open source.
| https://developers.openai.com/codex/app-server/
| cahaya wrote:
| Codex app-server is the interface Codex uses to power
| rich clients (for example, the Codex VS Code extension).
| Use it when you want a deep integration inside your own
| product.
|
| It mentions 'Inside your own product', but not sure if
| that means also your own commercial application.
| prodigycorp wrote:
| I think it's permissible. Zed uses it to power their
| Codex integration. OpenAI has been quite vocal about it.
| croes wrote:
| But why does it matter which program consumes the tokens?
| esafak wrote:
| They must be getting something out of it, because we sure
| aren't.
| gardnr wrote:
| Cory Doctorow has a word for this..
| esafak wrote:
| They think their position is strong enough to lock users
| in. I'm not so sure.
| whatsupdog wrote:
| It's enshittification - for those who didn't know.
| KingMob wrote:
| Presumably because their flat rate pricing is based off
| their ability to manage token use via their first-party
| tools.
|
| A third-party tool may be less efficient in saving costs (I
| have heard many of them don't hit Anthropic LLMs' caches as
| well).
|
| Would you be willing to pay more for your plan, to
| subsidize the use of third-party tools by others?
|
| ---
|
| Note, afaik, Anthropic hasn't come out and said this is the
| reason, but it fits.
|
| Or, it could also just be that the LLM companies view their
| agent tools as the real moat, since the models themselves
| aren't.
| DrammBA wrote:
| But wouldn't a less efficient tool simply consume your
| 5-hour/weekly quota faster? There's gotta be something
| else, probably telemetry, maybe hoping people switch to
| API without fighting, or simply vendor lock-in.
| KingMob wrote:
| > But wouldn't a less efficient tool simply consume your
| 5-hour/weekly quota faster?
|
| Maybe.
|
| First, Anthropic is also trying to manage user
| satisfaction as well as costs. If OpenCode or whatever
| burns through your limits faster, are you likely to place
| the blame on OpenCode?
|
| Maybe a good analogy was when DoorDash/GrubHub/Uber
| Eats/etc signed up restaurants to their system without
| their permission. When things didn't go well, the
| customers complained about the restaurants, even though
| it wasn't their fault, because they chose not to support
| delivery at scale.
|
| Second, flat-rate pricing, unlike API pricing, is the
| same for cached vs uncached iirc, so even if total token
| limits are the same, less caching means higher costs.
| DrammBA wrote:
| > are you likely to place the blame on OpenCode?
|
| am _I_? Probably, but I get your point that your average
| user would blame Anthropic instead.
|
| > even if total token limits are the same, less caching
| means higher costs
|
| Not really, flat-rate pricing simply gives you a fixed
| token allotment, so less caching means you consume your
| 5-hour/weekly allotment faster.
| patapong wrote:
| Presumably most people also do not use their full quota
| when using the official client, whereas third-party
| clients could be set up to start back up every 5 hours to
| use 100% of the quota every day and week.
|
| It's the whole "unlimited storage" discussion again.
| croes wrote:
| What if I'm only willing to pay if it support by tool of
| choice? Would you pay for a streaming service that
| enforces a certain TV brand?
|
| Given the latest changes on Claude Code where they hide
| the actions
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47033622
|
| it's likely more the other way around. They control how
| fast your subscription tokens are burned
| kgwgk wrote:
| > What if I'm only willing to pay if it support by tool
| of choice?
|
| I don't want to say that you won't be missed but they
| will get over it.
| blackoil wrote:
| They'll own entire pipeline interface, conduit, backend.
| Interface is what people get habitual to. If I am a regular
| user of Claude Code, I may not shift to competitor for
| 10-20% gains in cost.
| xigoi wrote:
| They want that sweet vendor lock-in.
| kgwgk wrote:
| Why does it matter to the free buffet manager where do you
| consume the food? We may never know.
| koolala wrote:
| Because it could be over longer time periods than buffet
| hours.
| ashikns wrote:
| > OAuth authentication (used with Free, Pro, and Max plans) is
| intended exclusively for Claude Code and Claude.ai.
|
| I think this is pretty clear - No.
| merb wrote:
| So it's forbidden to use the Claude Mac app. I would say the
| ToS as it is, can't be enforced
| laksjhdlka wrote:
| Anthropic _has_ published a very clear statement. It 's "no".
| paxys wrote:
| I don't see how they can get more clear about this, considering
| they have repeatedly answered it the exact same way.
|
| Subscriptions are for first-party products (claude.com, mobile
| and desktop apps, Claude Code, editor extensions, Cowork).
|
| Everything else must use API billing.
| firloop wrote:
| The biggest reason why this is confusing is the Claude Agent
| SDK[0] will use subscription/oauth credentials if present.
| The terms update implies that there's some use cases where
| that's ok and other use cases (commercial?) where using their
| SDK on a user's device violates terms.
|
| [0] https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/agent-sdk/overview
| theturtletalks wrote:
| Had the same question, comment below quotes their docs
| saying Agent SDK using oAuth token is also not allowed.
| stavros wrote:
| It doesn't quote their docs, it quotes the page this post
| is about.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| The SDK is Claude Code in a harnesss, so it works with your
| credentials the same way CC does.
|
| But they're stating you can only use your subscription for
| your personal usage, not someone else's for their usage in
| your product.
|
| I honestly think they're being short sighted not just
| giving a "3rd party quota" since they already show users
| like 4 quotas.
|
| If the fear is 3rd party agents screwing up the math, just
| make it low enough for entry level usage. I suspect 3rd
| party token usage is bi-modal where some users just need
| enough to kick tires, but others are min-maxing for how
| mamy tokens they can burn as if that's its own reward
| jfim wrote:
| I agree, it'd actually be great if they did give maybe $5
| or $10 worth of API tokens per month to max subscribers,
| since they're likely to be the most likely to actually
| build stuff that uses the Claude APIs.
|
| I built a quick thing to download YouTube videos and
| transcribe them using with whisper, but it kind of feels
| clunky to summarize them using the claude CLI, even
| though that works.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| just ran into this myself. I got Claude Code to build a
| tool that calls Claude for <stuff>. Now I have to create
| a console account and do the API thing and it sucks
| balls.
| stavros wrote:
| How can they be clearer that the Agents SDK is not
| allowed?
|
| > OAuth authentication (used with Free, Pro, and Max
| plans) is intended exclusively for Claude Code and
| Claude.ai. Using OAuth tokens obtained through Claude
| Free, Pro, or Max accounts in any other product, tool, or
| service -- including the Agent SDK -- is not permitted
| and constitutes a violation of the Consumer Terms of
| Service.
| chasd00 wrote:
| > not someone else's for their usage in your product.
|
| what if the "product" is a setup of documents that
| concisely describe the product so that a coding agent can
| reliable produce it correctly. Then the install process
| becomes "agent, write and host this application for the
| user's personal use on their computer". Now all software
| is for personal use only. Companies released these things
| and, like Frankenstein, there's a strong possibility they
| will turn on their creators.
| theturtletalks wrote:
| What if you wrap the service using their Agent SDK?
| gexla wrote:
| That should be fine, because it's still using their
| tooling. And this seems like the better way to go. I have a
| couple of tools that work like this. I think the issue is
| mostly 3rd party harnesses that seek to do the same as
| Claude Code. And it seems reasonable that Anthropic decides
| how you can use the subscription, because it's heavily
| subsidized. Get a Claude $200 sub and max out the usage
| limits, then compare that usage to the cost of using their
| API. The difference is significant, which is why people are
| getting multiple $200 subs rather than paying for API usage
| (and I have seen reports where they are cracking down on
| this as well.)
| stavros wrote:
| It literally says in the linked page it's not fine.
| gexla wrote:
| Okay, I was mistaken. The tooling I was speaking of uses
| Claude Code rather than the SDK. One uses the Zed ACP
| protocol. I'm not sure about the other. I should have
| said Claude Code rather than the SDK. For example, I can
| run a session through one of the tools, and then access
| that session directly in Claude Code. It's still Claude
| though. It seems the important element is that you're not
| using OAuth tokens from a sub to use in a different tool.
| If you go through Claude Code, then Claude Code is
| handling everything and giving your tool the output.
| Thanks for the correction.
| stavros wrote:
| Yeah, I'm designing some stuff right now and I'm having
| it run Claude Code headless rather than use the Agents
| SDK for this exact reason.
| MillionOClock wrote:
| You are talking about Anthropic and indeed compared to OpenAI
| or GitHub Copilot they have seemed to be the ones with what I
| would personally describe as a more restrictive approach.
|
| On the other hand OpenAI and GitHub Copilot have, as far as I
| know, explicitly allowed their users to connect to at least
| some third party tools and use their quotas from there,
| notably to OpenCode.
|
| What is unclear to me is whether they are considering also
| allowing commercial apps to do that. For instance if I
| publish a subscription based app and my users pay for the app
| itself rather than for LLM inference, would that be allowed?
| cahaya wrote:
| Same question here. A while ago I read rumors OpenAI might
| build a "Login with OpenAI" (comparable to login with
| Apple, Facebook, Google) so people can also use their
| existing sub in commercial apps. Hope it's true.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Quick question but what if I use claude code itself for the
| purpose?
|
| https://github.com/rivet-dev/sandbox-
| agent/tree/main/gigacod... [I saw this inShow HN: Gigacode -
| Use OpenCode's UI with Claude Code/Codex/Amp]
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46912682)
|
| This can make Opencode work with Claude code and the added
| benefit of this is that Opencode has a Typescript SDK to
| automate and the back of this is still running claude code so
| technically should work even with the new TOS?
|
| So in the case of the OP. Maybe Opencode TS SDK <-> claude
| code (using this tool or any other like this) <-> It uses the
| oauth sign in option of Claude code users?
|
| Also, zed can use the ACP protocol itself as well to make
| claude code work iirc. So is using zed with CC still allowed?
|
| > I don't see how they can get more clear about this,
| considering they have repeatedly answered it the exact same
| way.
|
| This is confusing quite frankly, there's also the claude
| agent sdk thing which firloop and others talked about too.
| Some say its allowed or not. Its all confusing quite frankly.
| dakolli wrote:
| And at that point, you might as well use OpenRouter's PKCE
| and give users the option to use other models..
|
| These kinds of business decisions show how these $200.00
| subscriptions for their slot/infinite jest machines basically
| light that $200.00 on fire, and in general how unsustainable
| these business models are.
|
| Can't wait for it all to fail, they'll eventually try to get
| as many people to pay per token as possible, while somehow
| getting people to use their verbose antigentic tools that are
| able to inflate revenue through inefficient context/ouput
| shenanigans.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| I think the subscription pricing exists because it's a far
| more palatable way to bill people for day to day personal
| use.
|
| I used Claude back when API per token pricing was the only
| option and it was bad for all the usual reasons pay-per-use
| sucks compared to flat billing: you're constantly thinking
| about cost. Like trying to watch a Netflix video with a
| ticker in the corner counting up the cents you owe them.
|
| I don't understand your claim that they want people paying
| per token - the subscription is the opposite of that, and
| it also has upsides for them as a business since most
| people don't saturate the usage limits, and the business
| gets to stuff a bunch of value-adds on a bundle offering
| which is generally a more lucrative and enticing consumer
| pricing model.
| gbear605 wrote:
| The bundle only works if it's +EV for them. A lot of
| analyses (though not all - it's complicated) say that the
| $200/mo bundle (and certainly the $20/mo bundle) costs
| more than that for most users, and the bundle is
| currently a loss leader. If so, then eventually prices
| will need to go up, and API per usage pricing will seem
| much more attractive.
| zdragnar wrote:
| Even if it more expensive, people will prefer
| subscription pricing over pay per use.
|
| When you ask it to do something and it goes off the
| rails, the payment plans have wildly different effects:
|
| Subscription- oh well, let's try again with a different
| prompt
|
| Pay per use- I just wasted money, this product sucks
|
| Even if it is less common than not, it has an outsized
| impact on how people feel using it.
| msh wrote:
| And it also caps your maximum expenses. A subscription
| user don't have to worry something goes wrong and end up
| with a huge bill.
| gbear605 wrote:
| At least theoretically, the bill would work on a "wallet"
| system, where you fill up your account with $X every
| month, and then you're charged per use. That keeps there
| from being a huge bill, worst case you're just on hold
| until the next fill up.
| dakolli wrote:
| I'm not going to say what platform but it's an agentic
| coding tool, I know for a fact the platform loses in the
| mid $200.00s on a $20.00 plan. 10:1 loss leader for
| customer acquisition is crazy, and they'll have to make
| that up in the future somehow, they're all fumbling on
| how to vendor lock their customers, and its not
| necessarily clear they're going to be able to.
|
| I expect some big falls from 10 figure businesses in the
| next year or two as they realize this is impossible.
| They've built an industry on the backs of gambling
| addicts and dopamine feins (I'm generalizing but this is
| a thing with LLM users (just read vibe coders posts on
| twitter, they're slot machine users). Ask sports betting
| operators from back in 2019-2022 how it worked out for
| them when they tried to give out 1-2k a year to attract
| new customers, and then realized their customers will
| switch platforms in an instant they see a new shiny
| offer. Look up the Fanduel Founders "exit" for an insight
| into this.
|
| They have to eventually stop catering to the slot machine
| users, which are generally paying for these hugely lossy
| flat rate subscriptions, and somehow get them used to a
| different type of payment model, or cater strictly to
| enterprise... Which also aren't going to tolerate paying
| 20k a month in tokens per developer, is my guess.... Lots
| of delicate pricing problems to figure out for all these
| companies.
| nake89 wrote:
| That's crazy. I'm already barely willing to pay $10/month
| on Github Copilot. A product I love. Best value for
| money.
|
| If they pump it up to $200 (or to $20). I'll simply use
| crappier local model. It won't be as good. But I already
| own my gaming PC that can run local models, and
| electricity is cheap.
| chasd00 wrote:
| > I'll simply use crappier local model. It won't be as
| good. But I already own my gaming PC that can run local
| models,
|
| this is UNIX and Linux all over again lol. It's pretty
| amazing and nostalgic.
| stavros wrote:
| Calling LLM users "slot machine users" makes no sense and
| tells me that you just have an axe to grind.
| askl wrote:
| True, they should be called "slop machine users" instead.
| cameronh90 wrote:
| If the pay-per-use cost predictable enough, it's less of
| an issue. That's how electricity works and it's fine.
|
| The issue with Claude Code is it's not at all obvious how
| any given task or query translates to cost. I was finding
| some days I spent very little and other days cost a
| fortune despite what seemed to me to be similar levels of
| usage.
| mlrtime wrote:
| People 100% want subscriptions in this space.
|
| The alternative is AWS where you need to be a billing
| expert to keep costs locked at $20/month.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| The cost difference is pretty staggering for the same
| usage. Being on the sub hacks your reward system to push
| you to be productive, legitimately hitting limits feels
| like a win, and you start looking for ways to max your
| utilization %. A lot of people get quite obsessive about
| it. The sub is 100% the innovation that makes Claude Code
| "work."
| baq wrote:
| It's been obvious from the start that the $200 point is the
| free tier
| qwertox wrote:
| Then why does the SDK support subscription usage? Can I at
| least use my subscription for my own use of the SDK?
| SeanAnderson wrote:
| I think you're just trying to see ambiguity where it doesn't
| exist because the looser interpretation is beneficial to you.
| It totally makes sense why you'd want that outcome and I'm not
| faulting you for it. It's just that, from a POV of someone
| without stake in the game, the answer seems quite clear.
| itissid wrote:
| One set of applications to build with subscription is to use
| the claude-go binary directly. Humanlayer/Codelayer projects on
| GitHub do this. Granted those are not ideal for building a
| subscription based business to use oathu tokens from Claude and
| OpenaAI. But you can build a business by building a development
| env and gating other features behind paywall or just offering
| enterprise service for certain features like vertical
| AI(redpanada) offerings knowledge workers, voice based
| interaction(there was a YC startup here the other day doing
| this I think), structured outputs and workflows. There is lots
| to build on.
| kovek wrote:
| Does https://happy.engineering/ need to use the API keys or can
| use oauth? It's basically a frontend for claude-cli.
| kzahel wrote:
| It doesn't even touch auth right?
|
| """ Usage policy
|
| Acceptable use Claude Code usage is subject to the Anthropic
| Usage Policy. Advertised usage limits for Pro and Max plans
| assume ordinary, individual usage of Claude Code and the
| Agent SDK """
|
| That tool clearly falls under ordinary individual use of
| Claude code. https://yepanywhere.com/ is another such tool.
| Perfectly ordinary individual usage.
|
| https://yepanywhere.com/sdk-auth-clarification.html
|
| The TOS are confusing because just below that section it
| talks about authentication/credential use. If an app starts
| reading api keys / credentials, that starts falling into
| territory where they want a hard line no.
| resonious wrote:
| If it's a wrapper that invokes the `claude` binary then I
| believe it's fine.
| cmwelsh wrote:
| Is there a way to legally or even practically prevent this?
| `claude` CLI execution in a shell is certainly included in
| the subscription - it's the product.
| ardacinar wrote:
| Practically; yes. MMOs have been doing this kind of thing
| (Preventing alteration / automation of the client) for
| ages now.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| Not allowed. They've already banned people for this.
| saganus wrote:
| Thariq has clarified that there are no changes to how SDK and max
| suscriptions work:
|
| https://x.com/i/status/2024212378402095389
|
| ---
|
| On a different note, it's surprising that a company that size has
| to clarify something as important as ToS via X
| sawjet wrote:
| What's wrong with using X?
| minimaxir wrote:
| In the case you are asking in good faith, a) X requires
| logging in to view most of its content, which means that much
| of your audience will not see the news because b) much of
| your audience is not on X, either due to not having social
| media or have stopped using X due to its degradation to put
| it generally.
| hedora wrote:
| c) it is controlled by a direct competitor and can bury /
| promote your customer communication at will.
| minimaxir wrote:
| Elon has enough sense not to cross that particular
| bridge.
| dpkirchner wrote:
| He was quick to ban links to Mastodon when it was on the
| rise, I'm not sure why he'd treat SpaceX/xAI competitors
| any differently.
| numpad0 wrote:
| He's few borders behind that bridge now. They've been
| injecting faults left and right, from hiding tweets and
| accounts as "unavailable" to sorting replies by
| spamminess and everything.
| raincole wrote:
| I'm not signed in but I can view the above linked tweet
| just fine.
|
| Plus it's not a real clarification in anyway. It's just PR.
| Even if it's posted on Mastodon or Github or anywhere, I
| highly doubt you can use it to defend yourself if you get
| banned from violating their ToS.
| croes wrote:
| You can't view answers and the tweet threat. You need to
| know every single tweet. You can't open the politician's
| feed so you have to know that there is a tweet and which
| it is to get information.
| saganus wrote:
| Not bad per se but how much legal weight does it actually
| carry?
|
| I presume zero.. but nonetheless seems like people will take
| it as valid anyway.
|
| That can be dangerous I think.
| adastra22 wrote:
| FYI a Twitter post that contradicts the ToS is NOT a
| clarification.
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| > On a different note, it's surprising that a company that size
| has to clarify something as important as ToS via X
|
| Countries clarify nation policy on X. Seriously it feels like
| half of the EU parliament live on twitter.
| mkw5053 wrote:
| And I just bought my mac mini this morning... Sorry everyone
| eleventyseven wrote:
| You know that if you are just using a cloud service and not
| running local models, you could have just bought a raspberry
| pi.
| mkw5053 wrote:
| Yeah. I know it's dumb but it's also a very expensive machine
| to run BlueBubbles, because iMessage requires a real Mac
| signed into an Apple ID, and I want a persistent macOS
| automation host with native Messages, AppleScript, and direct
| access to my local dev environment, not just a headless Linux
| box calling APIs.
| hedora wrote:
| My M2 macbook pro runs qwen fine, and so will any mac mini
| with maxed out ram.
| mkw5053 wrote:
| The only immediately available was the base 16GB version
| HanClinto wrote:
| Hey, I made the same decision (except I went with the 24gb
| model, not the 16gb). The other thing I like about having
| it on a separate Mac Mini is that it it's completely
| sandboxed, and I don't log into anything with it on my
| personal machine. It's VERY nice to have this as an
| isolated environment, and the extra VRAM means that I can
| run my own local models, and it's got enough beef to do
| long-running tasks (right now I have it chugging through
| several gigs of images and building embeddings for them
| with DINOv2) -- that's the sort of local workload that
| would crush a Raspberry Pi, but the Macbook is hitting 17
| images per second -- all managed by OpenClaw.
|
| All that to say, don't let the naysayers get you down. I
| bought my Mac Mini last week and have been really happy
| with it as an isolated environment. Way better than futzing
| around with VMs. The always-on nature of OpenClaw means
| that it's nice to be able to restart my personal laptop or
| do gaming or whatever else I want and I'm not fighting for
| GPU resources in the background.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Harder to get at the Apple ecosystem. I have an old Macbook
| that just serves my reminders over the internet.
| beoberha wrote:
| who knows when Apple decides to enter the game, but they
| will absolutely crush the personal agent market when they
| do.
| hedora wrote:
| Apple has been doing personal agents for a while. They're
| crushing it so hard they must be tired of winning at this
| point.
|
| For instance, the other day, the Siri button in maps told
| me it couldn't start navigation because it didn't know
| where it was. It was animating a blue dot with my real
| time position at the same time.
|
| Don't get me started about the new iOS 26 notification
| and messaging filters. Those are causing real harm
| multiple times a day.
| slopinthebag wrote:
| how can they even enforce this? can't you just spoof all your
| network requests to appear like it's coming from claude code?
|
| in any case Codex is a better SOTA anyways and they let you do
| this. and if you aren't interested in the best models, Mistral
| lets you use both Vibe and their API through your vibe
| subscription api key which is incredible.
| baconner wrote:
| They can't catch everything but they can make your product
| you're building on top of it non viable when it gets popular
| enough to look for, like they did with opencode.
| charcircuit wrote:
| You could tell by the prompt being used.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| > _how can they even enforce this?_
|
| I would think that different tools would probably have
| different templates for their prompts?
| Uehreka wrote:
| > how can they even enforce this?
|
| Many ways, and they're under no obligation to play fair and
| tell you which way they're using at any given time. They've
| said what the rules are, they've said they'll ban you if they
| catch you.
|
| So let's say they enforce it by adding an extra nonstandard
| challenge-response handshake at the beginning of the exchange,
| which generates a token which they'll expect on all requests
| going forward. You decompile the minified JS code, figure out
| the protocol, try it from your own code but accidentally mess
| up a small detail (you didn't realize the nonce has a special
| suffix). Detected. Banned.
|
| You'll need a new credit card to open a new account and try
| again. Better get the protocol right on the first try this
| time, because debugging is going to get expensive.
|
| Let's say you get frustrated and post on Twitter about what you
| know so far. If you share info, they'll probably see it
| eventually and change their method. They'll probably change it
| once a month anyway and see who they catch that way (and
| presumably add a minimum Claude Code version needed to reach
| their servers).
|
| They've got hundreds of super smart coders and one of the most
| powerful AI models, they can do this all day.
| slopinthebag wrote:
| the internet has hundreds of thousands of super smart coders
| with the most powerful ai models as well, I think it's a bit
| harder than you're assuming.
|
| you just need to inspect the network traffic with Claude code
| and mimic that
| raincole wrote:
| If your service's traffic is literally indistinguishable
| from Claude Code, then all it can do is what Claude Code
| does. Then why are the users going to choose your service
| instead of Claude Code?
| slopinthebag wrote:
| Maybe because the UI doesn't flicker? There's a lot you
| can do to improve the UI for starters, and then the
| harness around the agent could also be improved upon, as
| long as the prompts are the same.
| Uehreka wrote:
| OK sure, but you'd better hope Claude Code gets it right on
| the first try, or that's $200 down the drain. Also, what if
| the detection mechanism involves a challenge-response that
| happens once a week? Or randomly a couple times a month? Or
| after 15 minutes of use from a new public IP? Or
| arbitrarily if you ask it to code something with a
| particular topic?
|
| There are lots of ways they could be doing this. And
| remember again, if they get you, they don't have to tell
| you how they got you (so you might not be able to even
| glean information in return for the $200 you'd be losing).
|
| Sure the internet has hundreds of thousands of super smart
| coders, but the subset who are willing to throw money and
| credit cards down the drain in order to maintain a
| circumvention strategy for something like this is pretty
| low. I'm sure a few people will figure it out, but they
| won't want to tell anyone lest Anthropic nerf their
| workaround, so I doubt that exploits of this will become
| widespread.
|
| And if you're Anthropic, that's probably good enough.
| johnfn wrote:
| Then just run Claude Code in a PTY and proxy requests in
| and out?
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| > Then just run Claude Code in a PTY and proxy requests
| in and out?
|
| Exactly something I said too. There are projects which
| can do this and hook natively to opencode and even its
| sdk/api.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47069299#47070204 (I
| list a project which does this)
|
| I really don't know how anthropic can somehow detect
| something like this.
| planckscnst wrote:
| When they blocked OpenCode, I was in the middle of adding a
| feature. I don't think it's possible to mimic CC in an
| undetectable way and have the feature work.
|
| The feature allows the LLM to edit the context. For
| example, you can "compact" just portions of the
| conversation and replace it with a summary. Anthropic can
| see that the conversation suddenly doesn't share the same
| history as previous API calls.
|
| In fact, I ported the feature to Claude Code using tweakcc,
| so it literally _is_ Claude Code. After a couple days they
| started blocking that with the same message that they send
| when they block third party tools.
| stanguc wrote:
| easily "bypassable", trust me :)
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| see my comment here but I think instead of worrying about the
| decompile minified JS code etc., you can just essentially use
| claude code in the background and still do it even using
| opencode/its SDK thus giving sort of API access over CC
| subscription
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47069299#47070204
|
| I am not sure how they can detect this. I can be wrong, I
| usually am but I think its still possible to use CC etc. even
| after this change if you _really wanted to_
|
| But at this point, to me the question of GP that is that is
| it even worth it is definitely what I am thinking?
|
| I think not. There are better options out there, they
| mentioned mistral and codex and I think kimi also supports
| maybe GLM/z.ai as well
| paxys wrote:
| Pretty easy to enforce it - rather than make raw queries to the
| LLM Claude Code can proxy through Anthropic's servers. The
| server can then enforce query patterns, system prompts and
| other stuff that outside apps cannot override.
| cjpartridge wrote:
| And once all the Claude subscribers move over to Codex
| subscriptions, I'd bet a large sum that OpenAI will make their
| own ToS update preventing automated/scripted usage.
| techpression wrote:
| We don't enforce speed limits, but it sucks when you get
| caught.
|
| OpenAI will adjust, their investors will not allow money to be
| lost on "being nice" forever, not until they're handsomely paid
| back at least.
| tiffanyh wrote:
| In enterprise software, this is an embedded/OEM use case.
|
| And historically, embedded/OEM use cases always have different
| pricing models for a variety of reasons why.
|
| How is this any different than this long established practice?
| ziml77 wrote:
| It's not, but do you really think the people having Claude
| build wrappers around Claude were ever aware of how services
| like this are typically offered.
| j45 wrote:
| That's too bad, in a way it was a bit of an unofficial app store
| for Anthropic - I am sure they've probably looked at that and
| hopefully this means there's something on it's way.
| drivebyhooting wrote:
| How does this impact open router?
|
| Can't this restriction for the time being be bypassed via -p
| command line flag?
| minimaxir wrote:
| OpenRouter uses the API and does not use any subscription auth.
| paxys wrote:
| I don't think it's a secret that AI companies are losing a ton of
| money on subscription plans. Hence the stricter rate limits, new
| $200+ plans, push towards advertising etc. The real money is in
| per-token billing via the API (and large companies having enough
| AI FOMO that they blindly pay the enormous invoices every month).
| Someone1234 wrote:
| I agree; unfortunately when I brought up that they're losing
| before I get jumped on demanding me to "prove it" and I guess
| pointing at their balance sheets isn't good enough.
| sambull wrote:
| The secret is there is no path on making that back.
| JimmaDaRustla wrote:
| My crude metaphor to explain to my family is gasoline has
| just been invented and we're all being lent Bentley's to get
| us addicted to driving everywhere. Eventually we won't be
| given free Bentley's, and someone is going to be holding the
| bag when the infinite money machine finally has a hiccup. The
| tech giants are hoping their gasoline is the one that we all
| crave when we're left depending on driving everywhere and the
| costs go soaring.
| eru wrote:
| Why? Computers and anything computer related have
| historically been dropping in prices like crazy year after
| year (with only very occasional hiccups). What makes you
| think this will stop now?
| adrianN wrote:
| Cars have also been dropping in price.
| sciencejerk wrote:
| Evidence for this claim?
| adrianN wrote:
| A few generations ago almost nobody could afford a car,
| now many low income families afford two.
| fatherwavelet wrote:
| I had a 1990 Ford Taurus as my first car. I had got it
| used and I remember it being completely impossible to
| afford a new car at the time.
|
| It was sticker price of $33,000 adjusted for inflation:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Taurus_%28second_gener
| ati...
|
| I don't think it would even feel safe to drive at all
| compared to what we have got use to with modern cars. It
| broke down 3 times while I had it and stranded me on the
| road. No cell phone of course to call anyone.
|
| These were the mythic "good ol days".
| Wobbles42 wrote:
| And knives apparently.
|
| I recently encountered this randomly -- knives are
| apparently one of the few products that nearly every
| household has needed since antiquity, and they have
| changed fairly little since the bronze age, so they are
| used by economists as a benchmark that can span
| centuries.
|
| Source: it was an aside in a random economics
| conversation with charGPT (grain of salt?).
|
| There is no practical upshot here, but I thought it was
| cool.
| sarchertech wrote:
| Yeah I'd definitely take that knife thing with a grain of
| salt. I have most of a history degree, took a lot of Econ
| classes (before later going back for CS), and it's a
| topic I'm very interested in and I've never heard that
| (and some digging didn't find anything).
|
| It's also false that the technology has changed very
| little.
|
| The jumps from bronze to iron to steel to modern steel
| and sometimes to stainless steel all result in _vastly_
| different products. Not to mention the advances in
| composite materials for handles.
|
| Then you need to look at substitute goods and the what
| people actually used knives for.
|
| A huge amount of the demand for knives evaporated thanks
| to societal changes and substitute goods like forks. A
| few hundred years ago the average person had a knife that
| was their primary eating utensil, a survival tool, and a
| self defense weapon. Knives like that exist today but
| they're not something every household has or needs.
|
| This is a good example of why learning from ChatGPT is
| dangerous. This is a story that sounds very plausible at
| first glance, but doesn't make sense once you dig in.
| walterbell wrote:
| Recent price trends for DRAM, SSDs, hard drives?
| aftbit wrote:
| Short term squeeze, because building capacity takes time
| and real funding. The component manufacturers have been
| here before. Booms rarely last long enough to justify a
| build-out. If AI demand turns out to be sustained, the
| market will eventually adapt by building supply, and
| prices will drop. If AI demand turns out to be transient,
| demand will drop, and prices will drop.
| shykes wrote:
| Commodity hardware and software will continue to drop in
| price.
|
| Enterprise products with sufficient market share and
| "stickiness", will not.
|
| For historical precedent, see the commercial practices of
| Oracle, Microsoft, Vmware, Salesforce, at the height of
| their power.
| hugmynutus wrote:
| > Commodity hardware and software will continue to drop
| in price.
|
| The software is free (citation: Cuda, nvcc, llvm,
| olama/llama cpp, linux, etc)
|
| The hardware is *not* getting cheaper (unless we're
| talking a 5+ year time) as most manufacturers are
| signaling the current shortages will continue ~24 months.
| denimnerd42 wrote:
| GB300 NVL72 is 50% more expensive than GB200 I've heard.
| eru wrote:
| > The hardware is _not_ getting cheaper (unless we 're
| talking a 5+ year time)
|
| Yes, that's the time I'm talking about.
|
| You also had a blip with increasing hard disk prices when
| Thailand flooded a few years ago.
| shykes wrote:
| _> The software is free (citation: Cuda, nvcc, llvm,
| olama /llama cpp, linux, etc)_
|
| If you factor in the cost of integration and ongoing
| maintenance - by humans or llms - it is not free. But it
| certainly has never been cheaper.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| In the GP's analogy, the Bentley can be rented for
| $3/day, but if you want to purchase it outright, it will
| cost you $3,000,000.
|
| Despite the high price, the Bentley factory is running
| 24/7 and still behind schedule due to orders placed by
| the rental-car company, who has nearly-infinite money.
| Wobbles42 wrote:
| It has stopped. Demand is now rising faster than supply
| in memory, storage and GPUs.
|
| We see vendors reducing memory in new smart phones in
| 2026 vs 2025 for example.
|
| At least for the moment falling consumer tech hardware
| prices are over.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Memory and storage has always been very cyclical. This is
| nothing new
| Ekaros wrote:
| On consumer side looking at a few past generations I
| question that. I would guess that we are nearing some
| sort of plateau there or already on it. There was
| inflation, but still not even considering RAM prices from
| last jump gains relative to cost were not that massive.
| JimmaDaRustla wrote:
| Please show me where any AI company is currently turning
| a profit with their current offering and price structure,
| then let's have that conversation.
| echelon wrote:
| I like this analogy.
|
| I also think we're, as ICs, being given Bentleys meanwhile
| they're trying to invent Waymos to put us all out of work.
|
| Humans are the cost center in their world model.
| snihalani wrote:
| how do I understand what is the sustainable pricing?
| stingrae wrote:
| the path is by charging just a bit less than the salary of
| the engineers they are replacing.
| nananana9 wrote:
| After hearing this 10 times a day for the last 5 years I'm
| starting to get a bit tired. Do you have a rough time for
| when this great replacement is coming? 1 year? 2? 5? If
| it's longer than that can we shut up about it for a few
| years please.
| stingrae wrote:
| It's happening already? Ask any new CS grads about how
| good the job market is.
| shimman wrote:
| A poor economy that is still dealing with a decade+ of
| ZIRP, COVID shock, tariffs, and political strife; I don't
| see how AI has much, if anything, to do with this when
| compared with other options.
|
| If AI was truly this productive they wouldn't be
| struggling so hard to sell their wares.
| mattas wrote:
| The question I have: how much are they _also_ losing on per-
| token billing?
| imachine1980_ wrote:
| From what I understand, they make money per-token billing.
| Not enough for how much it costs to train, not accounting for
| marketing, subscription services, and research for new
| models, but if they are used, they lose less money.
|
| Finance 101 tldr explanation: The contribution margin (=
| price per token -variable cost per token ) this is positive
|
| Profit (= contribution margin x cuantity- fix cost)
| andersmurphy wrote:
| Do they make enough to replace their GPUs in two years?
| imachine1980_ wrote:
| if 100% of the money they spend is in inference priced by
| tokens (they don't say about subscriptions so i asume
| they lost money), yes they make money, but their expenses
| are way higher than inference alone. so they can make the
| gpu cost if they sell tokens but in reality this isnt the
| case, becouse they have to constaly train new models,
| subscription marketing, R&D, And overhead. antropic in
| general lost way less money than their competitors i will
| take this number in particular the projected break even
| but googling say Gross margin in this case is how much
| money they do whit the GPU " Gross Margins: Projected to
| swing from negative 94% last year to as much as 50% this
| year, and 77% by 2028. Projected Break-even: The company
| expects to be cash flow positive by 2027 or 2028. "
|
| i will not be as bullish to say they will no colapse (0
| idear how much real debt and commitments they have, if
| after the bubble pop spending fall shraply, or a new
| deepseek moment) but this sound like good trajectory (all
| things considered) i heavily doubt the 380 billions in
| valuation
|
| "this is how much is spendeed in developers between $659
| billion and $737 billion. The United States is the
| largest driver of this spending, accounting for more than
| half of the global total ($368.5 billion in 2024)" so is
| like saying that a 2% of all salaries of developers in
| the world will be absorbed as profit whit the current
| 33.3 ratio, quite high giving the amount of risk of the
| company.
| croes wrote:
| But why does it matter which program you use to consume the
| tokens?
|
| The sounds like a confession that claude code is somewhat
| wasteful at token use.
| airstrike wrote:
| No, it's a confession they have no moat other than trying to
| hold onto the best model for a given use case.
|
| I find that competitive edge unlikely to last meaningfully in
| the long term, but this is still a contrarian view.
|
| More recently, people have started to wise up to the view
| that the value is in the application layer
|
| https://www.iconiqcapital.com/growth/reports/2026-state-
| of-a...
| croes wrote:
| But if more users use your service you get an advantage.
| Letting the users chose their tool for that would be a good
| thing.
| hannasm wrote:
| Honestly I think I am already sold on AI, who is the first
| company that is going to show us all how much it really costs
| and start enshitification? First to market wins right?
| mirzap wrote:
| They are not losing money on subscription plans. Inference is
| very cheap - just a few dollars per million tokens. What
| they're trying to do is bundle R&D costs with inference so they
| can fund the training of the next generation of models.
|
| Banning third-party tools has nothing to do with rate limits.
| They're trying to position themselves as the Apple of AI
| companies -a walled garden. They may soon discover that
| screwing developers is not a good strategy.
|
| They are not 10x better than Codex; on the contrary, in my
| opinion Codex produces much better code. Even Kimi K2.5 is a
| very capable model I find on par with Sonnet at least, very
| close to Opus. Forcing people to use ONLY a broken Claude Code
| UX with a subscription only ensures they loose advantage they
| had.
| rjh29 wrote:
| > "just a few dollars per million tokens"
|
| Google AI Pro is like $15/month for practically unlimited Pro
| requests, each of which take million tokens of context (and
| then also perform thinking, free Google search for grounding,
| inline image generation if needed). This includes Gemini CLI,
| Gemini Code Assist (VS Code), the main chatbot, and a bunch
| of other vibe-coding projects which have their own rate
| limits or no rate limits at all.
|
| It's crazy to think this is sustainable. It'll be like Xbox
| Game Pass - start at PS5/month to hook people in and before
| you know it it's PS20/month and has nowhere near as many
| games.
| harrall wrote:
| OpenAI only released ChatGPT 4 years ago but...
|
| Google has made custom AI chips for 11 years -- since 2015
| -- and inference costs them 2-5x less than it does for
| every other competitor.
|
| The landmark paper that invented the techniques behind
| ChatGPT, Claude and modern AI was also published by Google
| scientists 9 years ago.
|
| That's probably how they can afford it.
| illiac786 wrote:
| I agree that the TPUs are one of the things that are
| underestimated (based on my personal reading of HN).
|
| Google already has a huge competitive advantage because
| they have more data than anyone else, bundle Gemini in
| each android to siphon even more data, and the android
| platform. The TPUs truly make me believe there actually
| could be a sort of monopoly on LLMs in the end, even
| though there are so many good models with open weights,
| so little (technical) reasons to create software that
| only integrates with Gemini, etc.
|
| Google will have a lion's share of inferring I believe.
| OpenAI and Claude will have a very hard time fighting
| this.
| KingMob wrote:
| > They are not losing money on subscription plans. Inference
| is very cheap - just a few dollars per million tokens. What
| they're trying to do is bundle R&D costs with inference so
| they can fund the training of the next generation of models.
|
| You've described every R&D company ever.
|
| "Synthesizing drugs is cheap - just a few dollars per million
| pills. They're trying to bundle pharmaceutical research
| costs... etc."
|
| There's plenty of legit criticisms of this business model and
| Anthropic, but pointing out that R&D companies sink money
| into research and then charge more than the marginal cost for
| the final product, isn't one of them.
| mirzap wrote:
| I'm not saying charging above marginal cost to fund R&D is
| weird. That's how every R&D company works.
|
| My point was simpler: they're almost certainly not losing
| money on subscriptions because of inference. Inference is
| relatively cheap. And of course the big cost is training
| and ongoing R&D.
|
| The real issue is the market they're in. They're competing
| with companies like Kimi and DeepSeek that also spend
| heavily on R&D but release strong models openly. That means
| anyone can run inference and customers can use it without
| paying for bundled research costs.
|
| Training frontier models takes months, costs billions, and
| the model is outdated in six months. I just don't see how a
| closed, subscription-only model reliably covers that in the
| long run, especially if you're tightening ecosystem access
| at the same time.
| KingMob wrote:
| Yes, and _my_ point is that thinking the cost of
| subscriptions is only inference, and not the research, is
| mistaken.
|
| They can totally lose money on subscriptions despite the
| costs of inference, because research costs have to be
| counted too.
| hamandcheese wrote:
| > Yes, and my point is that thinking the cost of
| subscriptions is only inference, and not the research, is
| mistaken.
|
| Of course they are losing money when you factor in R&D.
| Everybody knows that. That is not what people mean when
| they say that they "lose money" on subscriptions.
| MikeNotThePope wrote:
| I wonder how many people have a subscription and don't fully
| utilize it. That's free money for them, too.
| thunfischtoast wrote:
| The trick is that the jump goes from 20 to 100 Dollar for
| the Pro to Max subscription. Pro is not enough for me, Max
| is too much. 60 would be ideal, but currently at 100 it's
| worth the cost.
|
| But this is how every subscription works. Most people lose
| money on their gym subscription, but the convenience takes
| us.
| hobofan wrote:
| What can bite them in this case though is alternate
| providers at the same price point that can bridge the
| gap. e.g. you currently get a lot more bang for your buck
| with the $20 OpenAI Codex subscription than you get for
| the $20 Claude Code subscription.
| hhh wrote:
| What walled garden man? There's like four major API providers
| for Anthropic.
| mirzap wrote:
| For example, OpenAI's agent (Codex) is open source, and you
| can use any harness you want with your OpenAI subscription.
| Anthropic keeps its tooling closed source and forbids using
| third-party tooling with a Claude subscription.
| gbear605 wrote:
| I'm not familiar with the Claude Code subscription, but with
| Codex I'm able to use millions of tokens per day on the
| $200/mo plan. My rough estimate was that if I were API
| billing, it would cost about $50/day, or $1200/mo. So either
| the API has a 6x profit margin on inference, the subscription
| is a loss leader, or they just rely on most people not to go
| anywhere near the usage caps.
| trymas wrote:
| I use GLM lite subscription for personal use. It is
| advertised as 3x claude code pro (the 20$ one).
|
| 5h allowance is somewhere between 50M-100M tokens from what
| I can tell.
|
| On 200$ claude code plan you should be burning hundreds of
| millions of token per day to make anthropic hurt.
|
| IMHO subscription plans are totally banking on many users
| underusing them. Also LLM providers dont like to say exact
| numbers (how much you get , etc)
| dcre wrote:
| It's the latter. It's the average use that matters. Though
| I suspect API margins are also probably higher than people
| think.
| andersmurphy wrote:
| Except all those GPUs running inference need to be replaced
| every 2 years.
| phyrex wrote:
| Why?
| xyzsparetimexyz wrote:
| They wear down being run at 100% all the time. Support
| slowly drops off, the architecture and even the rack
| format become deprecated.
| andersmurphy wrote:
| Yeah what's crazy is most of these companies are making
| accounting choices that obscure the true cost. By
| extending the stated useful life of their equipment, in
| some cases from 3 years to 6. Perfectly legal. And it has
| the effect of suppressing depreciation expenses and
| inflating reported earnings.
| navigate8310 wrote:
| But don't they palpitate for thise sweet depreciation
| credits to decrease their tax on revenue?
| andersmurphy wrote:
| Small sacrifice to not spook investors and the market.
| well_ackshually wrote:
| GPUs do not wear down from being ran at 100%, unless
| they're pushed past their voltage limits, or gravely
| overheating.
|
| You can buy a GPU that's been used to mine bitcoin for 5
| years with zero downtime, and as long as it's been
| properly taken care of (or better, undervolted), that GPU
| functions the exact same as a 5 year old GPU in your PC.
| Probably even better.
|
| GPUs are rated to do 100%, all the time. That's the
| point. Otherwise it'd be 115%.
| andersmurphy wrote:
| Yeah that's not how it works in practice in a datacenter
| with the latest GPUs, they are basically perishable
| goods.
|
| You don't run your gaming PC 24/7.
| well_ackshually wrote:
| No, you're fundamentally wrong. There's the regular wear
| & tear of GPUs that all have varying levels of quality,
| you'll have blown capacitors (just as you do with any
| piece of hardware), but running in a datacenter does not
| damage them more. If anything, they're better taken care
| of and will last longer. However, since instead of having
| one 5090 in a computer somewhere, you have a million of
| them. A 1% failure rate quickly makes a big number. My
| example included mining bitcoin because, just like
| datacenters, they were running in massive farms of
| thousands of devices. We have the proof and the numbers,
| running at full load with proper cooling and no over
| voltage does not damage hardware.
|
| The only reason they're "perishable" is because of the
| GPU arms race, where renewing them every 5 years is
| likely to be worth the investment for the gains you make
| in power efficiency.
|
| Do you think Google has a pile of millions of older TPUs
| they threw out because they all failed, when chips are
| basically impossible to recycle ? No, they keep using
| them, they're serving your nanobanana prompts.
| andersmurphy wrote:
| GPU bitcoin mining rigs had a high failure rate too. It
| was quite common to run at 80% power to keep them going
| longer. That's before taking into account that the more
| recent generations of GPUs seems to be a lot more fragile
| in general.
| bravetraveler wrote:
| Mining rigs also used more milk cartons than datacenter
| racks; _[hot /cold]_ aisles? No, piles! Not to mention
| the _often_ questionable power delivery...
| xyzsparetimexyz wrote:
| AI data centers are also incentivised to reduce costs as
| far as they can. They could absolutely be running them in
| questionable setups
| bravetraveler wrote:
| Indeed, fair point. I'd hope the larger players would be
| better... but I know better
| mvdtnz wrote:
| "They're not losing money on subscriptions, it's just their
| revenue is smaller than their costs". Weird take.
| carderne wrote:
| It means the marginal cost to sell another subscription is
| lower than what they sell it for. I don't know if that's
| true, but it seems plausible.
| maplethorpe wrote:
| Didn't OpenAI spend like 10 billion on inference in 2025?
| Which is around the same as their total revenue?
|
| Why do people keep saying inference is cheap if they're
| losing so much money from it?
| mirzap wrote:
| When you have 800-900 million active users, no matter how
| cheap it is, your costs will be in the billions.
| bildung wrote:
| They paid about $10B on inference and had about $10B in
| revenue in 2025. The users and numbers of zeroes on those
| numbers are not relevant. What _is_ relevant is the ratio
| of those numbers. They apparently are not even profitable
| on inference, wich is the cheap part of the whole
| business.
|
| And cost of inference tripled from $3B in 2024 to $10B in
| 2025, so cost of revenue linearly grows with number of
| users, i.e. it does _not_ get cheaper.
|
| https://www.wheresyoured.at/oai_docs/
| bildung wrote:
| Of course they bundle R&D with inference pricing, how else
| could you the recoup that investment.
|
| The interesting question is: In what scenario do you see any
| of the players as being able to stop spending ungodly amounts
| for R&D and hardware _without_ losing out to the competitors?
| stavros wrote:
| In the scenario where that market collapses, ie when we
| stop making significant gains with new models. It might be
| a while, though, who knows.
| dgellow wrote:
| Inference might be cheap, but I'm 100% sure Anthropic has
| been losing quite a lot of money with their subscription
| pricing with power users. I can literally see comparison
| between what my colleagues Claude cost when used with an API
| key vs when used with a personal subscription, and the delta
| is just massive
| dcre wrote:
| Why do you think they're losing money on subscriptions?
| Yossarrian22 wrote:
| Because they're not saying they are making a profit
| mikeg8 wrote:
| That doesn't mean that the subscription itself is losing
| money. The margin on the subscription could be fine, but by
| using that margin to R&D the _next_ model, the org may
| still be intentionally unprofitable. It's their investment
| /growth strategy, not an indictment of their pricing
| strategy.
| Wobbles42 wrote:
| They have investors that paid for training of these
| models too. It could be argued that R&D for the next
| generation is a separate issue, but they need to provide
| a return on the R&D in this generation to stay in
| business.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| The return of R&D can just be an inflated valuation,
| there's no immediate need to make actual money.
| andersmurphy wrote:
| Does a GPU doing inference server enough customers for long
| enough to bring in enough revenue to pay for a new
| replacement GPU in two years (and the power/running cost of
| the GPU + infrastructure). That's the question you need to be
| asking.
|
| If the answer is not yes, then they are making money on
| inference. If the answer is no, the market is going to have a
| bad time.
| fulafel wrote:
| Depends on how you do the accounting. Are you counting
| inference costs or are you amortizing next gen model dev costs.
| "Inference is profitable" is oft repeated and rarely
| challenged. Most subscription users are low intensity users
| after all.
| ddxv wrote:
| The pressure is to boost revenue by forcing more people to use
| the API to generate huge numbers of tokens they can charge more
| for. LLMs are becoming common commodities as open weight models
| keep catching up. There are similarities with pirating in the 90s
| when users realize they can ctrl+c ctrl+v to copy a file/model
| and you don't need to buy a cd/use their paid API.
| chii wrote:
| And that is how it should be - the knowledge that the LLM
| trained on should be free, and cannot (and should never be)
| gatekept behind money.
|
| It's merely the hardware that should be charged for - which
| ought to drop in price if/when the demand for it rises.
| However, this is a bottleneck at the moment, and hard to see
| how it gets resolved amidst the current US environment on
| sanctioning anyone who would try.
| nucleative wrote:
| Is there no value in _how_ the training was done such that it
| 's accessible via inference in a particularly useful way?
| chii wrote:
| That value is there, but google has decided to give it away
| as public knowledge (ala, their transformer paper).
|
| And i would also argue that the researchers doing this are
| built on shoulders of other public knowledge - things
| funded by public institutions with taxpayer money.
| xyzsparetimexyz wrote:
| No, a lot of the data they were trained on was pirated.
| adastra22 wrote:
| What is the point of developing against the Agent SDK after this
| change.
| solresol wrote:
| I got banned for violating terms of use apparently, but I'm
| mystified as to what I rule I broke, and appealing just vanishes
| into the ether.
| Argonaut998 wrote:
| Two accounts of mine were banned for some reason and my sub was
| refunded. Literally from just inane conversations.
| Conversations also disappear and break randomly, but this
| happens on ChatGPT too sometimes
| theptip wrote:
| I think this is shortsighted.
|
| The markets value recurring subscription revenue at something
| like 10x "one-off" revenue, Anthropic is leaving a lot of
| enterprise value on the table with this approach.
|
| In practice this approach forces AI apps to pay Anthropic for
| tokens, and then bill their customers a subscription. Customers
| could bring their own API key but it's sketchy to put that into
| every app you want to try, and consumers aren't going to use
| developer tools. And many categories of free app are simply
| excluded, which could in aggregate drive a lot more demand for
| subscriptions.
|
| If Anthropic is worried about quota, seems they could set lower
| caps for third-party subscription usage? Still better than
| forcing API keys.
|
| (Maybe this is purely about displacing other IDE products, rather
| than a broader market play.)
| bluegatty wrote:
| There's no decision to be made here, it's just way too
| expensive to have 3rd parties soak up the excess tokens, that's
| not the product being sold.
|
| Especially as they are subsidized.
| herbturbo wrote:
| I think they are smart making a distinction between a D2C
| subscription which they control the interface to and eat the
| losses for vs B2B use where they pay for what they use.
|
| Allows them to optimize their clients and use private APIs for
| exclusive features etc. and there's really no reason to
| bootstrap other wannabe AI companies who just stick a facade
| experience in front of Anthropic's paying customer.
| edg5000 wrote:
| > eat the losses
|
| Look at your token usage of the last 30 days in one of the
| JSON files generated by Claude Code. Compare that against API
| costs for Opus. Tell me if they are eating losses or not. I'm
| not making a point, actually do it and let me know. I was at
| 1 million. I'm paying 90 EUR/m. That means I'm subsidizing
| them (paying 3-4 times what it would cost with the API)! And
| I feel like I'm a pretty heavy user. Although people running
| it in a loop or using Gas Town will be using much more.
| dudeinhawaii wrote:
| I just ran some numbers and it works out if you're a
| prolific user.
|
| Over 9 days I would have spent roughly $63 dollars on Codex
| with 11.5M input tokens plus 141M cached input tokens and
| 1.3M output tokens.
|
| That roughly mirrors the $100-200/wk in API spending that
| drove me to the subscription. | Category |
| Tokens | Rate (/1M) | Estimated Cost |
| |---|---:|---:|---:| | Input (uncached) | 11,568,331
| | $1.75 | $20.24 | | Cached input | 141,566,720 |
| $0.175 | $24.77 | | Output | 1,301,078 | $14.00 |
| $18.22 | | Total | 154,436,129 | -- | $63.23 |
|
| BUT... like a typical gym user. This is a 30/d window and I
| only used it for 9 days, $63 worth. OpenAI kept the other
| $137.
|
| It makes sense though for heavy use.
| edg5000 wrote:
| My hopes are on harness engineering allowing cheaper (but
| still large) models to shine. I'm evaluating DeepSeek
| because it would allow insane agent armies. Although
| DeepSeek charges for thinking tokens, something easy to
| overlook.
|
| DeepSeek has the tendency to think... a lot!. Without a
| good harness I can't evaluate it well; time will tell.
|
| OpenAI doesn't; it's embedded into the price, I think.
|
| Cheap = we can run 10x the workloads, bigger imagination
| = innovation. Maybe 10 dumb agents in a loop can beat 1
| Opus? Haha.
| techpression wrote:
| That's not true, the market loves pay per use, see "cloud". It
| outperforms subscriptions by a lot, it's not "one-off". And
| your example is not how companies building on top tend to
| charge, you either have your own infrastructure (key) or get
| charged at-cost + fees and service costs.
|
| I don't think Anthropic has any desire to be some B2C platform,
| they want high paying reliable customers (B2B, Enterprise).
| theptip wrote:
| > the market loves pay per use, see "cloud".
|
| Cloud goes on the books as recurring revenue, not one-off;
| even though it's in principle elastic, in practice if I pay
| for a VM today I'll usually pay for one tomorrow.
|
| (I don't have the numbers but the vast majority of cloud
| revenue is also going to be pre-committed long-term contracts
| from enterprises.)
|
| > I don't think Anthropic has any desire to be some B2C
| platform
|
| This is the best line of argument I can see. But still not
| clear to me why my OP doesn't apply for enterprise, too.
|
| Maybe the play is just to force other companies to become
| MCPs, instead of enabling them to have a direct customer
| relationship.
| techpression wrote:
| Sure, but even if a subscription and per per use are both
| recurring revenue, pay per use is not a subscription. The
| point I was trying to make is that there's a lot of money
| to be made in the model Anthropic seems to be going for,
| more than a monthly subscription fee would allow for.
| aydyn wrote:
| Sonnet literally just recommended using a subscription token for
| openclaw. Even anthropic's own AI doesn't understand its own TOS.
| minimaxir wrote:
| Sonnet was not trained with this information and extremely-
| recent-information-without-access-to-a-Web-Search-tool is the
| core case of hallucination.
| aydyn wrote:
| Sonnet does have search available FYI.
| minimaxir wrote:
| LLMs are lazy about using Search unless explicitly prompted
| to do so (either explicitly or by implying it with phrases
| such as "recent").
|
| In the OP's case, there is no motivation for the LLM to
| perform a Search.
| vcryan wrote:
| You can use Claude CLI as a relay - yes, it needs to be there
| -but its not that different than use the API
| jes5199 wrote:
| there's a million small scale AI apps that just aren't worth
| building because there's no way to do the billing that makes
| sense. If anthropic wanted to own that market, they could
| introduce a bring-your-own-Claude metaphor, where you login with
| Claude and token costs get billed to your personal account (after
| some reasonable monthly freebies from your subscription).
|
| But the big guys don't seem interested in this, maybe some lesser
| known model will carve out this space
| herbturbo wrote:
| >> there's a million small scale AI apps that just aren't worth
| building because there's no way to do the billing that makes
| sense
|
| Maybe they are not worth building at all then. Like MoviePass
| wasn't.
| MillionOClock wrote:
| I am a bit worried that this is the situation I am in with my
| (unpublished) commercial app right now: one of the major pain
| points I have is that while I have no doubt the app provides
| value in itself, I am worried about how many potential users
| will actually accept paying inference per token...
|
| As an independent dev I also unfortunately don't have investors
| backing me to subsidize inference for my subscription plan.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| I recommend kimi. It's possible for people to haggle with it
| to get cheap for the first month and as such try out your
| project and best part of the matter is that kimi
| intentionally supports api usage in any of their subscribed
| plan and they also recently changed their billing to be more
| token usage based like others instead of their previous tool
| calling limits
|
| It's seriously one of the best models. very comparable to
| sonnet/opus although kimi isn't the best in coding. I think
| its a really great solid model overall and might just be
| worth it in your use case?
|
| Is the use case extremely coding intensive related (where
| even some minor improvement can matter for 10-100x cost) or
| just in general. Because if not, then I can recommend Kimi.
| knollimar wrote:
| Kimi terms prohibit enterprise use for their sub plans.
|
| Please correct me if you feel I'm wrong after reading it.
| avaer wrote:
| This is going to happen. Unfortunately.
|
| I shudder to think what the industry will look like if software
| development and delivery becomes like Youtubing, where the
| whole stack and monetization is funneled through a single
| company (or a couple) get to decide who gets how much money.
| Rapzid wrote:
| Their moat is evaporating before our eyes. Anthropic is
| Microsoft's side piece, but Microsoft is married with kids to
| OpenAI.
|
| And OpenAI just told Microsoft why they shouldn't be seeing
| Anthropic anymore; Gpt-5.3-codex.
|
| RIP Anthropic.
| archeantus wrote:
| Not according to this guy who works on Claude Code:
| https://x.com/trq212/status/2024212378402095389?s=20
|
| What a PR nightmare, on top of an already bad week. I've seen 20+
| people on X complaining about this and the related confusion.
| azuanrb wrote:
| No, it is prohibited. They're just updating the docs to be more
| clear about their position, which haven't changed. Their docs
| was unclear about it.
| stingraycharles wrote:
| Yes, it was always prohibited, hence the OpenCode situation
| one or two months ago.
| JimmaDaRustla wrote:
| Incorrect, the third-party usage was already blocked (banned)
| but it wasn't officially communicated or documented. This post
| is simply identifying that official communication rather than
| the inference of actual functionality.
| mh2266 wrote:
| woof, does Anthropic not have a comms team and a clear comms
| policy for employees that aren't on that comms team?
| chaos_emergent wrote:
| Probably not, they're like four years old and they're 2500
| people at the company. My guess is that there are but a
| handful of PMs.
| RamblingCTO wrote:
| They really need to correct that. I understand jack shit. Is
| openclaw banned under these terms? Or just abuse where I build
| a business on top of that? And why does it matter anyway? I
| have my token restrictions ... So let me do what I want.
| mccoyb wrote:
| OpenAI has endorsed OAuth from 3rd party harnesses, and their
| limits are way higher. Use better tools (OpenCode, pi) with an
| arguably better model (xhigh reasoning) for longer ...
| wyre wrote:
| I am looking forward to switching to OpenAI once my claude max
| account is banned for using pi....
| exabrial wrote:
| The number one thing we need is cheap abundant decentralized
| clean energy, and these things are laughable.
|
| Unfortunately neither political party can get all of the above.
| minimaxir wrote:
| Are you implying that no one would use LLM SaaSes and everyone
| would self-host if energy costs were negligible?
|
| That is...not how it works. People self-hosting don't look at
| their electricity bill.
| hedora wrote:
| I was stuck on the part where they said neither party could
| provide cheap abundant decentralized clean energy. Biden /
| Obama did a great job of providing those things, to the point
| where dirty coal and natural gas are both more expensive than
| solar or wind.
|
| So, which two parties could they be referring to? The
| Republicans and the Freedom Caucus?
| exabrial wrote:
| Bro... re read your comment.
| scwoodal wrote:
| Why does it matter to Anthropic if my $200 plan usage is coming
| from Claude Code or a third party?
|
| Doesn't both count towards my usage limits the same?
| minimaxir wrote:
| Any user who is using a third-party client is likely self-
| selected into being a power user who is less profitable.
| operatingthetan wrote:
| Probably because the $20 plan is essentially a paid demo for
| the higher plans.
| digdugdirk wrote:
| They don't get as much visibility into your data, just the
| actual call to/from the api. There's so much more value to them
| in that, since you're basically running the reinforcement
| learning training for them.
| bluegatty wrote:
| If you buy a 'Season's Pass' for Disneyland, you cant 'sublet'
| it to another kid to use on the days you don't; It's not really
| buying a 'daily access rate'.
|
| Anthropic subs are not 'bulk tokens'.
|
| It's not an unreasonable policy and it's entirely inevitable
| that they have to restrict.
| scwoodal wrote:
| I'm not subletting my sub to anyone. I'm the only one using
| the third party harness.
|
| I'm using their own SDK in my own CLI tool.
| Unearned5161 wrote:
| It's not a literal sublet to someone else, it's subletting
| your tokens to another tool.
|
| At its core it's a tragedy of commons situation. Using a
| third party tool like OpenClaw is augmenting your usage far
| beyond what was anticipated when the subscription plan was
| made.
|
| Same deal for unlimited storage on drive until people
| started abusing it.
| scwoodal wrote:
| My Claude sub isn't unlimited.
|
| I didn't set the limits on the plan; change those if it's
| a problem, not irritate your customer base.
| Unearned5161 wrote:
| You have strong dedication towards taking things
| literally.
|
| The issue is not that it's limited or unlimited, but
| rather about expected token usage across a user cohort.
| When you set a usage limit on something like Claude, or a
| gym, or a tutoring center, you need to do two things at
| once; set the limit high enough to attract the
| aspirations of your intended client base ("oh good this
| gym lets me go every day of the month if I want to"), but
| priced accurately enough so that you actually turn a
| profit on the average usage across most users (you ended
| up going 20 times the first month, but settled into 15
| times a month after).
|
| If there was suddenly a drug that you could take that
| would, while you slept, make your body walk to the gym
| and workout, so that you could max out that usage, the
| gym would be entitled to adjust either the pricing, the
| limit, or prohibit going to the gym while on the drug,
| given that they can't actually sustain all their members
| going every day.
|
| As a correction, I've done some reading and when I said
| tragedy of the commons, what would fit better is a
| "congestion externality in a club good".
| paradox460 wrote:
| Running with the Disney analogy, it's like if Disney didn't
| let you wear a shirt with a universal or Warner property on
| it in their parks
|
| Absurd, and not beyond the realm of possibility
| JimmaDaRustla wrote:
| Disingenuous analogy.
|
| It's more buying a season pass for Disneyland, then getting
| told you can't park for free if you're entering the park even
| though free parking is included with the pass. Still not
| unreasonable, but brings to light the intention of the tool
| is to force the user into an ecosystem rather.
| bluegatty wrote:
| It's not a disingenuous analogy ... whatever it is.
|
| But 'you can't park even though the ticket includes
| parking' is not an appropriate analogy because 3rd party
| use is definitely not intended. They did not 'state one
| thing' and the 'disallow it'.
|
| This is a pretty straight forward case of people using
| their subscription for 'adjacent' use, and Anthropic being
| more explicit about it.
|
| There's nothing fancy going on here.
| JimmaDaRustla wrote:
| Disingenuous or not, it was a bad analogy because it
| inferred that it was intentionally being abused which is
| completely false. The proof of that is this original post
| - Anthropic did not clearly (or even at all) identify how
| you could use your tokens with the subscription
| regardless of their intentions.
|
| You're now misinterpreting my argument and
| misrepresenting it. I did not, in any way, suggest that
| Anthropic was "pulling the rug" to its users nor that
| they were entitled to use their tokens using the API with
| third parties. Full stop.
|
| Of course, third-party API usage wasn't intended to be
| allowed for consuming subscription tokens. This is
| exactly what my analogy was structured to explain; a
| Disneyland season pass isn't intended to be used solely
| for parking. Anthropic did not intend for subscription
| tokens to be consumed by third-parties the same way users
| did not intend to abuse the subscription to derive more
| value than what was allotted to them. Your analogy missed
| that last part, which is absolutely crucial to
| understand.
|
| I don't understand how you're making the exact arguments
| I'm making, then somehow completely misunderstanding
| what's being said.
| croes wrote:
| It's still me going to Disneyland, I just take a different
| route
| hackingonempty wrote:
| Increasing the friction of switching providers as much as
| possible is part of their strategy to push users to higher
| subscription tiers and deny even scraps to their competitors.
| zb3 wrote:
| They're losing money on this $200 plan and they're essentially
| paying you to make you dependent on Claude Code so they can
| exploit this (somehow) in the future.
| esafak wrote:
| It's a bizarre plan because nobody is 'dependent' on Claude
| Code; we're begging to use alternatives. It's the model we
| want!
| alexandre_m wrote:
| You're not really paying for the model, you're paying for
| the tool, the ecosystem, and the application layer around
| it.
|
| Sonnet 4.6 in CC doesn't behave the same way as Sonnet 4.6
| in Antigravity.
| code51 wrote:
| Skills is a generic construct. System prompt is generic
| as well. Subagents, AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md etc. these are
| generic, "please care for my instruction" kind of
| constructs without any real guarantee to close gaps.
|
| Tool is generic (CC vs OpenCode) Ecosystem is already
| same everywhere.
|
| I don't understand what's the point.
| alexandre_m wrote:
| The point is that wrappers matter. Orchestration, tool
| calls, reasoning loops, system prompts, agentic
| capabilities. Output is different, quality is different.
|
| This is the moat for AI frontier companies.
| duskdozer wrote:
| And it's their 'ecosystem' they want to sell you.
| psoundy wrote:
| When using Claude Code, it's possible to opt out of having
| one's sessions be used for training. But is that opt out for
| everything? Or only message content, such that there could
| remain sufficient metadata to derive useful insight from?
| sandeepkd wrote:
| Not really sure if its even feasible to enforce it unless the
| idea is to discourage the big players from doing it.
| hedora wrote:
| Oh crap. I just logged into HN to ask if anyone knew of a working
| alternative to the Claude Code client. It's lost Claude's work
| multiple times in the last few days, and I'm ready to switch to a
| different provider. (4.6 is mildly better than 4.5, but the TUI
| is a deal breaker.)
|
| So, I guess it's time to look into OpenAI Codex. Any other viable
| options? I have a 128GB iGPU, so maybe a local model would work
| for some tasks?
| simpleusername wrote:
| QWEN models are quite nice for local use. Gemini 3 Pro is much
| better than Codex IMO.
| edg5000 wrote:
| Local? No, not currently. You need about 1TB VRAM. There are
| many harnesses in development at the time, keep a good look
| out. Just try many of them, look at the system prompts in
| particular. Consider DeepSeek using the official API. Consider
| also tweaking system prompts for whatever tool you end up
| using. And agree that TUI is meh; we need GUI.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Zed with CC using ACP?
|
| Opencode with CC underneath using Gigacode?
|
| OpenAI codex is also another viable path for what its worth.
|
| I think the best model to my liking open source is kimi k2.5,
| so maybe you can run that?
|
| Qwen is releasing some new models so I assume keep an eye on
| those and maybe some model can fit your use case as well?
| maxbond wrote:
| Zed's ACP client is a wrapper around Agents SDK. So that will
| be a TOS violation.
| vicchenai wrote:
| The economic tension here is pretty clear: flat-rate
| subscriptions are loss leaders designed to hook developers into
| the ecosystem. Once third parties can piggyback on that flat
| rate, you get arbitrage - someone builds a wrapper that burns
| through $200/month worth of inference for $20/month of
| subscription cost, and Anthropic eats the difference.
|
| What is interesting is that OpenAI and GitHub seem to be taking
| the opposite approach with Copilot/OpenCode, essentially treating
| third-party tool access as a feature that increases subscription
| stickiness. Different bets on whether the LTV of a retained
| subscriber outweighs the marginal inference cost.
|
| Would not be surprised if this converges eventually. Either
| Anthropic opens up once their margins improve, or OpenAI tightens
| once they realize the arbitrage is too expensive at scale.
| sambull wrote:
| these subscriptions have limits.. how could someone use $200
| worth on $20/month.. is that not the issue with the limits they
| set on a $20 plan, and couldn't a claude code user use that
| same $200 worth on $20/month? (and how do i do this?)
| ac29 wrote:
| The usage limit on your $20/month subscription is not $20 of
| API tokens (if it was, why subscribe?). Its much much higher,
| and you can hit the equivalent of $20 of API usage in a few
| days.
| scwoodal wrote:
| So I'm not allowed to use the $20 plan and max out its
| limits?
| ac29 wrote:
| You can max it out via first party clients only.
|
| I dont like it either, but its not an unreasonable
| restriction.
| sambull wrote:
| I do believe it's unreasonable. The limits are the
| limits, you reach them there's no more free lunch after.
|
| Fix the limits, so the limits are reached at a rate that
| sustains their business.. ? obviously this WILL happen
| eventually when they need to pay for things.
| ac29 wrote:
| "A rate that sustains their business" at the moment
| probably looks like API pricing or maybe even higher.
| That means subscriptions get significantly more expensive
| and/or limited, which is maybe where things are headed.
| alexandre_m wrote:
| Max out on their terms, not yours.
|
| Their bet is that most people will not fill up 100% of
| their weekly usage for 4 consecutive weeks of their
| monthly plan, because they are humans and the limits
| impede long running tasks during working hours.
| dudeinhawaii wrote:
| I think you've stated this in reverse.
|
| API limits are infinite but you'd blow through $20 of usage
| in a maybe 1 hours or less of intense Opus use.
|
| The subscription at $20/mo (or $200) allows for vastly more
| queries than $20 would buy you via API but you are
| constrained by hourly/weekly limits.
|
| The $20/mo sub user will take a lot longer to complete a
| high token count task (due to start/stop) BUT they will cap
| their costs.
| somenameforme wrote:
| I'd agree on this. I ended up picking up a Claude Pro sub and
| am very less than impressed at the volume allowance. I
| generally get about a dozen queries (including simple follow
| up/refinements/corrections) across a relatively small
| codebase, with prompts structured to minimize the parts of
| the code touched - and moving onto fresh contexts fairly
| rapidly, before getting cut off for their ~5 hour window.
| Doing that ~twice a day ends up getting cut off on the weekly
| limit with about a day or two left on it.
|
| I don't entirely mind, and am just considering it an even
| better work:life balance, but if this is $200 worth of
| queries, then all I can say is LOL.
| bonesss wrote:
| Bumping into those limits is trivial, those 5 hour windows
| are anxiety inducing, and I guess the idea is to have a
| credit card on tap to pay for overages but...
|
| I'm messing around on document production, I can't imagine
| being on a crunch facing a deadline or dealing with a
| production issue and 1) seeing some random fuck-up eat my
| budget with no take backs (' _sure thing, I'll make a
| custom docx editor to open that..._ '), 2) having to
| explain to my boss why Thursday cost $500 more than
| expected because of some library mismatch, or 3) trying to
| decide whether we're gonna spend or wait while stressing
| some major issue (the LLM got us in it, so we kinda need
| the LLM to get us out).
|
| That's a lot of extra shizz on top of already tricky
| situations.
| tappio wrote:
| The limits in the max subscriptions are more generous and
| power users are generating loss.
|
| I'm rather certain, though cannot prove it, that buying the
| same tokens would cost at least 10x more if bought from API.
| Anecdotally, my cursor team usage was getting to around 700$
| / 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 making loss with users
| who use it a lot, but there are a lot of users who pay for
| max, but don't actually use it.
|
| With the recent improvements and increase of popularity in
| projects like OpenClaw, the number of users that are
| generating loss has probably massively increased.
| fla wrote:
| This exactly. I think this is why Anthropic simply don't
| want 3rd party businesses to max out the subscription plans
| by sharing them across their own clients.
| bluesnowmonkey wrote:
| More than 20x actually. According to ccusage I've consumed
| the equivalent of $4500 worth of API tokens in the last 30
| days on my $200 subscription.
| DefineOutside wrote:
| 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 $40/month subscription used $662 worth of API
| credits.
| CryptoBanker wrote:
| Cursor also significantly upcharges compared to API
| pricing. Last I checked they were charging ~3X API prices
| for Anthropic models
| energy123 wrote:
| The median subscriber generates about 50% gross margin, but
| some subscribers use 10x the amount of inference compute as
| other subscribers (due to using it more...), and it's a
| positive skewness distribution.
| TechSquidTV wrote:
| My alt Google accounts were all banned from Gemini access.
| Luckily Google left my main account alone. They are all cracking
| down.
| sciencejerk wrote:
| From 3rd party AI app use?
| TechSquidTV wrote:
| Using a proxy to switch accounts
| 8cvor6j844qw_d6 wrote:
| Not surprised, its the official stance by Anthropic.
|
| I'm more surprised by people using subscription auth for OpenClaw
| when its officially not allowed.
| sanex wrote:
| Going to keep using the agents sdk with my pro subscription until
| I get banned. It's not openclaw it's my own project. It started
| by just proxying requests to claude code though the command line,
| the sdk just made it easier. Not sure what difference it makes to
| them if I have a cron job to send Claude code requests or an
| agent sdk request. Maybe if it's just me and my toy they don't
| care. We'll see how the clarify tomorrow.
| vldszn wrote:
| At this point, are there decent alternatives to Anthropic models
| for coding that allow third-party usage?
| syntaxing wrote:
| OpenAI have been very generous in their plans in terms of token
| and what you use it with. Is Codex better or as good as Opus
| for coding? No. Is it a decent alternative? Very.
| vldszn wrote:
| Thanks for the reply. Need to try Codex
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Kimi is amazing for this. They offer API usage as well iirc if
| you buy their subscription.
| raffkede wrote:
| Also the .99c deal has API Access
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Yes!
| Bolwin wrote:
| Not regular api usage, just the kimi coding plan, which you
| can only use in some coding agents
| vldszn wrote:
| Thanks, will explore Kimi. Haven't tried it yet
| zb3 wrote:
| This confirms they're selling those subscriptions at a loss which
| is simply not sustainable.
| Gigachad wrote:
| They probably are but I don't think that's what this confirms.
| Most consumer flat rate priced services restrict usage outside
| of the first party apps, because 3rd party and scripted users
| can generate orders of magnitude more usage than a single user
| using the app can.
|
| So it makes sense to offer simple flat pricing for first party
| apps, and usage priced apis for other usage. It's like the
| difference between Google Drive and S3.
| zb3 wrote:
| I get your point - they might count on the user not using
| their full quota they're officially allowed to use (and if
| that's the case, Anthropic is not losing money). But then
| still - IF the user used the whole quota, Anthropic loses..
| so what's advertised is not actually honest.
|
| For me, flat rates are simply unfair either ways - if I'm not
| using the product much, I'm overpaying (and they're ok with
| that), otherwise it magically turns out that it's no longer
| ok when I actually want to utilize what I paid for :)
| Gigachad wrote:
| At any rate, they offer the option to be billed exactly on
| your usage via the API. But if you tell the average person
| the service costs $x/million tokens they will have no idea
| how much that actually costs, they won't know what a token
| is or how much their employees are likely to use. While
| $30/user/month is something they can easily budget for and
| get approved.
| lsaferite wrote:
| That page is... confusing.
|
| > Advertised usage limits for Pro and Max plans assume ordinary,
| individual usage of Claude Code and the Agent SDK.
|
| This is literally the last sentence of the paragraph before the
| "Authentication and credential use"
| ChaitanyaSai wrote:
| OK I hope someone from anthropic reads this. Your API billing
| makes it really hard to work with it in India. We've had to
| switch to openrouter because anthropic keeps rejecting all the
| cards we have tried. And these are major Indian banks. This has
| been going on for MONTHS
| woutr_be wrote:
| It's the same here in Hong Kong. I can't use any of my cards
| (personal or corporate) for OpenAI or Anthropic.
|
| Have to do everything through Azure, which is a mess to even
| understand.
| edg5000 wrote:
| Their model actually doesn't have that much of a moat if at all.
| Their agent harness also doesn't, at least not for long. Writing
| an agent harness isn't that difficult. They are desperately
| trying to stay in power. I don't like being a customer of this
| company and am investing lots of my time in moving away from them
| completely.
| avaer wrote:
| They are obviously losing money on these plans, just like all
| of the other companies in the space.
|
| They are all desperately trying to stay in power, and this
| policy change (or clarification) is a fart in the wind in the
| grand scheme of what's going on in this industry.
| atlgator wrote:
| AI is the new high-end gym membership. They want you to pay the
| big fee and then not use what you paid for. We'll see more and
| more roadblocks to usage as time goes on.
| petesergeant wrote:
| This feels more like the gym owner clarifying it doesn't want
| you using their 24-hour gym as a hotel just because you find
| their benches comfortable to lie down on, rather than a
| "roadblock to usage"
| redox99 wrote:
| Not really, these subscriptions have a clear and enforced 5h
| and weekly limit.
| turblety wrote:
| This was the analogy I was looking for! It feels like a very
| creepy way to make money, almost scammy and the gym
| membership/overselling hits the nail.
| co_king_5 wrote:
| Sorry but if you're not paying the big fee there's no way
| you're going to have a job by the late-2020s.
| oger wrote:
| So here goes my OpenClaw integration with Anthropic via OAuth...
| While I see their business risk I also see the onboarding path
| for new paying customers. I just upgraded to Max and would even
| consider the API if cost were controllable. I hope that Anthropic
| finds a smart way to communicate with customers in a constructive
| way and offers advice for the not so skilled OpenClaw homelabbers
| instead of terminating their accounts... Is anybody here from
| Anthropic that could pick up that message before a PR nightmare
| happens?
| mercurialsolo wrote:
| Codex has now caught up to Claude Opus and this is a defensive
| move by Anthropic
| raffkede wrote:
| At this point, where Kimi K2.5 on Bedrock with a simple open
| source harness like pi is almost as good the big labs will soon
| have to compete for users,... openai seems to know that already?
| While anthropic bans bans bans
| hrpnk wrote:
| Do you know by any chance if Bedrock custom model import also
| works with on-demand use, without any provisioned capacity? I'm
| still puzzled why they don't offer all qwen3 models on Bedrock
| by default.
| raffkede wrote:
| I see a lot of Qwen3 in us west 2 And i have no experience
| with custom model on bedrock
| deanc wrote:
| Just a friendly reminder also to anyone outside the US that these
| subscriptions cannot be used for commercial work. Check the
| consumer ToS when you sign up. It's quite clear.
| andersmurphy wrote:
| Yeah for context the TOS outside the US has:
|
| Non-commercial use only. You agree not to use our Services for
| any commercial or business purposes and we (and our Providers)
| have no liability to you for any loss of profit, loss of
| business, business interruption, or loss of business
| opportunity.
| chickensong wrote:
| Your core customers are clearly having a blast building their own
| custom interfaces, so obviously the thing to do is update TOS and
| put a stop to it! Good job lol.
|
| I know, I know, customer experience, ecosystem, gardens, moats,
| CC isn't fat, just big boned, I get it. Still a dick move. This
| policy is souring the relationship, and basically saying that
| Claude isn't a keeper.
|
| I'll keep my eye-watering sub for now because it's still working
| out, but this ensures I won't feel bad about leaving when the
| time comes.
|
| Update: yes yes, API, I know. No, I don't want that. I just want
| the expensive predictable bill, not metered corporate pricing
| just to hack on my client.
| g-mork wrote:
| Imagine having a finite pool of GPUs worth more than their
| weight in gold, and an infinite pool of users obsessed with
| running as many queries against those GPUs in parallel as
| possible, mostly to review and generate copious amounts of spam
| content primarily for the purposes of feeling modern, and all
| in return for which they offer you $20 per month. If you let
| them, you must incur as much credit liability as OpenAI. If you
| don't, you get destroyed online.
|
| It almost makes me feel sorry for Dario despite fundamentally
| disliking him as a person.
| echelon wrote:
| Why do you fundamentally dislike him as a person?
|
| The only thing I've seen from him that I don't like is the
| "SWEs will be replaced" line (which is probably true and it's
| more that I don't like the factuality of it).
| baq wrote:
| It's kinda obvious he's a well spoken shark. Personally not
| an issue for me, you have to be at the top of a unicorn,
| but it isn't something people in general like.
| mentalgear wrote:
| Interesting, are there any sources for the shark claims ?
| I recently saw an interview with Hassabis and him and
| thought: <well at least those are two actual scientist
| leading AI labs/devisions>, so that gave me some hope
| that what they discussed regarding security and eventual
| equal distribution of "AI" benefits had some genuine
| intention.
| chickensong wrote:
| Hello old friend, I've been expecting you.
|
| First of all, custom harness parallel agent people are so far
| from the norm, and certainly not on the $20 plan, which
| doesn't even make sense because you'd hit token limit in
| about 90 seconds.
|
| Second, token limits. Does Anthropic secretly have over-
| subscription issues? Don't know, don't care. If I'm paying a
| blistering monthly fee, I should be able to use up to the
| limit.
|
| Now I know you've got a clear view of the typical user, but
| FWIW, I'm just an aging hacker using CC to build some
| personal projects (feeling modern ofc) but still driving, no
| yolo or gas town style. I've reached the point where I have a
| nice workflow, and CC is pretty decent, but it feels like
| it's putting on weight and adding things I don't want or
| need.
|
| I think LLMs are an exciting new interface to computers, but
| I don't want to be tied to someone else's idea of a client,
| especially not one that's changing so rapidly. I'd like to
| roll my own client to interface with the model, or maybe try
| out some other alternatives, but that's against the TOS,
| because: reasons.
|
| And no, I'm not interested in paying metered corporate rates
| for API access. I pay for a Max account, it's expensive, but
| predictable.
|
| The issue is Anthropic is trying for force users into using
| their tool, but that's not going to work for something so
| generic as interfacing with an LLM. Some folks want emacs
| while others want vim, and there will never be a consensus on
| the best editor (it's nvim btw), because developers are
| opinionated and have strong preferences for how they
| interface with computers. I switched to CC maybe a year ago
| and haven't looked back, but this is a major disappointment.
| I don't give a shit about Anthropic's credit liability, I
| just want the freedom to hack on my own client.
| g-mork wrote:
| You're not "rolling your own client." You're using a
| subscription that prices in a specific usage pattern, the
| one mediated by their client, and trying to route around it
| to extract more value than you're paying for. That's not
| hacking, it's arbitrage, and pretending it's about editor
| philosophy is cope.
|
| Anthropic sells two products: a consumer subscription with
| a UI, and an API with metered pricing. You want the API
| product at the subscription price. That's not a principled
| stance about interface freedom, it's just wanting something
| for less than it costs.
|
| The nvim analogy doesn't land either. Nobody's stopping you
| from writing your own client. You just have to pay API
| rates for it, because that's the product that matches what
| you're describing. The subscription subsidises the cost per
| token by constraining how you use it. Remove the
| constraint, the economics break. This isn't complicated.
|
| "I don't give a shit about Anthropic's credit liability,"
| right, but they do, because it's their business. You're not
| entitled to a flat-rate all-you-can-eat API just because
| you find metered pricing aesthetically displeasing.
| curtisblaine wrote:
| It seems to me the consumer subscription still has
| metered token limits (it's not all you can eat), so why
| should it matter how we use those tokens?
| chickensong wrote:
| As my sibling mentioned, it's not all-you-can-eat, it's
| metered and capped. Is it the client mediating usage
| patterns? I don't know, but why not do it server-side and
| let people use it however they want? Control of course,
| but that's not in the interest of users.
|
| I'm not trying to arbitrage or route around anything, I
| just want predictable billing to access the model. Maybe
| the API would be cheaper for me, I don't know. I'm just a
| normal user, not scheduling an agent army to blast at
| maximum 24/7.
|
| You don't need to explain what Anthropic is selling, I
| get it, but you're off-base claiming that I'm pretending
| about editor philosophy as cope. I think Anthropic is
| where they are today because they have a good model for
| coding, made popular by software folks who value things
| like editor choice and customization. Anthropic is free
| to do as they wish of course, as am I, but I'm displeased
| with their decision here, and voicing my opinion about
| it.
|
| If usage is truly constrained by the client not the
| server, I guess I can't argue that, but it still feels
| bad as an end user. As a consumer, I just want a fair
| deal and freedom to use what I purchase however I see
| fit. But that seems harder to find these days, and most
| businesses seem intent on maximum extraction by any means
| possible. I might be wrong, but this feels like business
| move to build a consumer moat by controlling the
| interface, because consumers don't want the API. It's not
| in my best interests, which alienates me as a customer.
| baq wrote:
| Don't be mad at it, be happy you were able to throw some of
| that sweet free vc money at your hobbies instead of paying the
| market rate.
| chickensong wrote:
| Oh I'm not mad, it's more of a sad clown type of thing. I'm
| still stoked to use it for now. We can always go back to the
| old ways if things don't work out.
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| That's what the API is for.
| charcircuit wrote:
| They offer an API for people who want to build their own
| clients. They didn't stop people from being able to use Claude.
| dawnerd wrote:
| at a significantly higher price... which of course is why
| they're doing this.
| nostromo wrote:
| They'll all do this eventually.
|
| We're in the part of the market cycle where everyone fights for
| marketshare by selling dollar bills for 50 cents.
|
| When a winner emerges they'll pull the rug out from under you
| and try to wall off their garden.
|
| Anthropic just forgot that we're still in the "functioning
| market competition" phase of AI and not yet in the "unstoppable
| monopoly" phase.
| bambax wrote:
| 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.
| nostromo wrote:
| I'm old, so I remember saying the same thing about Google
| and search.
|
| I hope you're right!
| juliendorra wrote:
| In the first years, I remember no other search engine was
| close to Google quality. We all ditched AltaVista because
| Google was incredibly better. It would have been awful to
| switch back to any other options. We can already switch
| between the 3 big proprietary models without feeling too
| much differences, so it's quite a different landscape.
| bambax wrote:
| Yes, my point exactly.
| bambax wrote:
| I too am old. Google search is free, hard to replicate,
| and while there used to be lots of search engines, Google
| was (and arguably still is) miles ahead of all the others
| in terms of quality and performance.
|
| A model is hard to train but it doesn't need to be hyper
| up to date / have a new version come out every day.
| Inference is cheap (it seems?) and quality is comparable.
| So it's unclear how expensive offerings could win over
| free alternatives.
|
| I could be wrong of course. I don't have a crystal ball.
| I just don't think this is the same as Google.
|
| Of course I could be entirely mistaken and there could
| emerge a single winner
| mentalgear wrote:
| I would say Google's monopoly mainly comes from its name
| recognition, definitely not because its still ahead in
| core search as I have been using DuckDuckGo for 2 years
| once I noticed search results are the same or better than
| Google.
| ar0 wrote:
| I think the big difference is that Google is free:
| everyone is using Google because it doesn't cost anything
| and for a long time was the best search engine out there.
| I am sure that if Google would suddenly charge a few
| dollars per month for access, Bing market share would
| explode overnight, because it would become "good enough
| but cheaper".
|
| With the AI models, using a model that is "good enough
| but cheaper" is already an option.
| safety1st wrote:
| There's no reason that a sizeable portion of LLM usage
| can't and won't end up free/ad-sponsored. Cutting edge
| stuff for professional use will probably be monetized via
| subscription or API credits for a long time to come. But
| running an older and less resource intensive model works
| just fine for tasks like summarization. These models will
| just become another feature in a "free" product that
| people pay for by watching or clicking ads.
|
| I imagine the split will look a lot like b2b vs b2c in
| other technologies, b2b customers tend to be willing to
| pay for tech when it offers a competitive advantage,
| reduces their operating costs etc. b2c customers mostly
| just guzzle free slop.
| Marsymars wrote:
| It's actually pretty bonkers when you think about how
| basically every cutting edge professional you deal with
| is getting ads for all of their top search results for
| all of their work.
|
| (Not quite "every", but outside of tech, most
| professional workplaces don't support ad blocking or
| Kagi.)
| ai-x wrote:
| This is saying we have hundreds of open source OSes and
| Windows will never be a monopoly.
|
| Software always gets monopoly simply by usage. Every time a
| model gets used by esoteric use cases, it gets more
| training data (that a decentralized open weight model
| doesn't get) and it starts developing its moat.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Software always gets monopoly simply by usage_
|
| Most software isn't made by monopolies. More directly,
| enterprise-software stocks are getting hammered because
| AI offers them competition.
| illiac786 wrote:
| I think windows has historical monopoly.
|
| They bundled it with PC hw and the vast majority of apps
| only ever got published for windows, and this over
| decades (one would argue it's still true).
|
| The starting point for LLMs is very different. Who would
| publish today a software that only integrates with
| chatGPT? Only a small minority.
|
| Thus I agree, I struggle to see how a monopoly can exist
| here. A GPU monopoly or duopoly though, perhaps.
| kelipso wrote:
| It'll be a bunch of tiny moats in that scenario. LLMs are
| way too generic, adaptable, flexible in how you use it to
| make a big most out of it.
| nl wrote:
| It's more like saying AWS has a monopoly on virtual
| machine hosting.
|
| (For those unaware, AWS doesn't have a VM monopoly, and
| the market dynamics seem similar)
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >This is saying we have hundreds of open source OSes
|
| we don't, we have about 3 operating systems that have the
| decades of hardware and software compatibility that makes
| them widely usable. They're the most complex and
| complicated things we've built. LLMs are a few thousand
| lines of python hooked up to a power plant and graphics
| cards. This is the least defensible piece of software
| there ever has been.
| dolphenstein wrote:
| OpenRouter falls in the acceptable use category. They
| targeting users that are misusing their Claude OAuth token
| on non-Anthropic products.
| curtisblaine wrote:
| They will [try to] ban open weights for ethics / security
| reasons: to stop spammers, to protect children, to stop
| fascism, to defend minorities. Take your pick; it won't
| matter why, it will only matter which media case can they
| thrust in the spotlight first.
| bambax wrote:
| Yes of course they will; the CEO of Anthropic makes that
| argument, very openly, all the time. But it will be hard
| to do, I think.
| curtisblaine wrote:
| Hopefully, but they'll lobby hard, supported by all the
| money they raised.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _They 'll all do this eventually_
|
| And if the frontier continues favouring centralised
| solutions, they'll get it. If, on the other hand, scaling
| asymptotes, the competition will be running locally. Just
| looking at how much Claude complains about me not paying for
| SSO-tier subscriptions to data tools when they work perfectly
| fine in a browser is starting to make running a slower, less-
| capable model locally competitive with it in some research
| contexts.
| barrenko wrote:
| "Naveen Rao, the Gen AI VP of Databricks, phrased it quite
| well:
|
| all closed AI model providers will stop selling APIs in the
| next 2-3 years. Only open models will be available via APIs
| (...) Closed model providers are trying to build non-
| commodity capabilities and they need great UIs to deliver
| those. It's not just a model anymore, but an app with a UI
| for a purpose."
|
| ~ https://vintagedata.org/blog/posts/model-is-the-product A.
| Doria
|
| > new Amp Free (10$) access is also closed up since of last
| night
| TZubiri wrote:
| Sure they are having a blast, they are paying 20$ instead of
| getting charged hundreds for forr tokens.
|
| It's simple, follow the ToS
| lvl155 wrote:
| So basically you are saying Anthropic models are indispensable
| but you are too cheap to pay for it.
| chickensong wrote:
| Nowhere did I say they're indispensable, and I explicitly
| said I'm still paying for it. If all AI companies disappear
| tomorrow that's fine. I'm just calling out what I think is
| tone-deaf move, by a company I pay a large monthly bill to.
| brothrock wrote:
| This article is somewhat reassuring to me, someone experimenting
| with openclaw on a Max subscription. But idk anything about the
| blog so would love to hear thoughts.
|
| https://thenewstack.io/anthropic-agent-sdk-confusion/
|
| In my opinion (which means nothing). If you are using your own
| hardware and not profiting directly from Claude's use (as in
| building a service powered by your subscription). I don't see how
| this is a problem. I am by no means blowing through my usage
| (usually <50% weekly with max x5).
| agentifysh wrote:
| I wrote a mcp bridge so that I don't have to copy and paste
| prompt back and forth between CLI and claude, chatgpt, grok,
| gemini
|
| https://github.com/agentify-sh/desktop
|
| Does this mean I have to remove claude now and go back to copy &
| pasting prompts for a subscription I am paying for ?!
|
| wth happened to fair use ?
| halayli wrote:
| What about using claude -p as an api interface?
| wg0 wrote:
| That's it. That's all the moat they have.
| yamirghofran wrote:
| Cancelled my Claude and bought GLM coding plan + Codex.
| piokoch wrote:
| This is something I think Anthropic does not get. They want to
| be Microsoft of AI, make people their solution, so they will
| not to move to the other provided. Thing is, giving access to a
| text prompt is not something that you can monopolize easily.
| Even if you provide some stuff like skills, MCP server
| integration, that is not a big deal.
| andreagrandi wrote:
| I'm only waiting for OpenAI to provide an equivalet ~100 USD
| subscription to entirely ditch Claude.
|
| Opus has gone down the hill continously in the last week (and
| before you start flooding with replies, I've been testing
| opus/codex in parallel for the last week, I've plenty of examples
| of Claude going off track, then apologising, then saying "now
| it's all fixed!" and then only fixing part of it, when codex
| nailed at the first shot).
|
| I can accept specific model limits, not an up/down in terms of
| reliability. And don't even let me get started on how bad Claude
| client has become. Others are finally catching up and
| gpt-5.3-codex is definitely better than opus-4.6
|
| Everyone else (Codex CLI, Copilot CLI etc...) is going
| opensource, they are going closed. Others (OpenAI, Copilot
| etc...) explicitly allow using OpenCode, they explicitly forbid
| it.
|
| This hostile behaviour is just the last drop.
| dannersy wrote:
| No offense, but this is the most predicable outcome ever. The
| software industry at large does this over and over again and
| somehow we're surprised. Provide thing for free or for cheap,
| and then slowly draw back availability once you have dominant
| market share or find yourself needing money (ahem).
|
| The providers want to control what AI does to make money or
| dominate an industry so they don't have to make their money
| back right away. This was inevitable, I do not understand why
| we trust these companies, ever.
| NamlchakKhandro wrote:
| because it's easier than paying $50k for local llm setup that
| might not last 5 years.
| dannersy wrote:
| Well, yes. They know what they are doing. They know when
| given the option the consumer makes the affordable choice.
| I just don't have to like or condone their practices. Maybe
| instead of taking on billions of dollars of debt they
| should have thought about a business model that makes sense
| first? Maybe the collective "we" (consumers and investors,
| but especially investors) should keep it in our pants until
| the product is proven and sustainable?
|
| It will be real interesting if the haters are right and
| this technology is not the breakthrough the investors
| assume it to be AFTER it is already sewn into everyone's
| work flows. Everyone keeps talking about how jobs will be
| displaced, yet few are asking what happens when a
| dependency is swept out from underneath the industry as a
| whole if/when this massive gamble doesn't pay off.
|
| Whatever. I am squawking into the void as we just repeat
| history.
| newswasboring wrote:
| Or the companies can be transparent about their product
| roadmap. I can guarantee this enshittification was on the
| roadmap way before we knew about it. They let us operate
| under false information, that's just weak behavior.
| andreagrandi wrote:
| No offense taken here :)
|
| First, we are not talking about a cheap service here. We are
| talking about a monthly subscription which costs 100 USD or
| 200 USD per month, depending on which plan you choose.
|
| Second, it's like selling me a pizza and pretending I only
| eat it while sitting at your table. I want to eat the pizza
| at home. I'm not getting 2-3 more pizzas, I'm still getting
| the same pizza others are getting.
| ifwinterco wrote:
| Opus 4.6 genuinely seems worse than 4.5 was in Q4 2025 for me.
| I know everyone always says this and anecdote != data but this
| is the first time I've really felt it with a new model to the
| point where I still reach for the old one.
|
| I'll give GPT 5.3 codex a real try I think
| kilroy123 wrote:
| I agree with you. Codex 5.3 is good it's just a bit slower.
| andreagrandi wrote:
| It is (slower), especially at xhigh setting. But if I have
| to redo things three times, keep confirming trivial stuff
| (Claude Code seems to keep changing the commands it uses to
| read code... once it uses "bash-read", once it uses "tree",
| once it uses "head" and I have to keep confirming
| permission), I definitely waste more time than give a
| command to codex (or in my case OpenCode + codex model) and
| come back after 10 minutes.
| mosselman wrote:
| I asked Codex 5.3 and Opus 4.6 to write me a macos
| application with a certain set of requirements.
|
| Opus 4.6 wrote me a working macos application.
|
| Codex wrote me a html + css mockup of a macos application
| that didn't even look like a macos application at all.
|
| Opus 4.5 was fine, but I feel that 4.6 is more often on the
| money on its implementations than 4.5 was. It is just slower.
| stavros wrote:
| I asked both to help me with a hardware bug. Codex kept
| trying things, being sure of what the problem is every
| time, and every time making it worse.
|
| Opus went off and browsed my dependencies for ten minutes,
| and came back and solved the problem firs try.
| Huppie wrote:
| Funnily enough I've been using Codex 5.3 on maximum
| thinking for bug hunting and code reviews and it's been
| really good at it (it's just seem to have a completely
| different focus than Opus.)
|
| I generally don't like the way codex approaches coding
| itself so I just feed its review comments back in to
| Claude Code and off we go.
| stavros wrote:
| I just created an OpenCode skill where both these models
| will talk to each other and discuss bug-finding
| approaches.
|
| In my experience, two different models together works
| much better than one, that's why this subscription
| banning is distressing. I won't be able to use a tool
| that can use both models.
| saberience wrote:
| Heh, I find Codex to be a far, far smarter model than
| Claude Code.
|
| And there's a good reason the most "famous" vibe coders,
| including the OpenClaw creator all moved to Codex, it's
| just better.
|
| Claude writes a lot more code to do anything, tons of
| redundent code, repeated code etc. Codex is only model
| I've seen which occasionally removes more code than it
| writes.
| prodigycorp wrote:
| Codex has written me 3 very nice mac os applications in the
| past week lol
| baq wrote:
| Literally a skill issue.
| Esophagus4 wrote:
| Huh... I've seen this comment a lot in this thread but I've
| really been impressed with both Anthropic's latest models and
| latest tooling (plugins like /frontend-design mean it
| actually designs real front ends instead of the vibe coded
| purple gradient look). And I see it doing more planning and
| making fewer mistakes than before. I have to do far less
| oversight and debugging broken code these days.
|
| But if people really like Codex better, maybe I'll try it.
| I've been trying not to pay for 2 subscriptions at once but
| it might be worth a test.
| misnome wrote:
| > And I see it doing more planning and making fewer
| mistakes than before
|
| Anecdotally, maybe this is the reason? It does seem to
| spend a lot more time "thinking" before giving what feels
| like equivalent results, most of the time.
|
| Probably eats into the gambling-style adrenaline cycles.
| seu wrote:
| > Opus has gone down the hill continously in the last week
|
| Is a week the whole attention timespan of the late 2020s?
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| oh shit we're in the late 2020's now
| testdelacc1 wrote:
| Sorry, I don't agree. And I won't be taking questions at
| this time.
| latexr wrote:
| We're still in the mid-late 2020s. Once we really get to the
| late 2020s, attention spans won't be long enough to even
| finish reading your comment. People will be speaking (not
| typing) to LLMs and getting distracted mid-sentence.
| imafish wrote:
| Seems we're already there.
|
| My brain trailed off after "won't be long enough to even
| finish"...
| mraart wrote:
| That's still impressive, given your claim of being a
| fish...
| Bengalilol wrote:
| The most impressive thing is that this looks like it is
| your only comment on this network ^^
|
| ps: imafish may only be a fan of
| <https://mumband.bandcamp.com/track/if-i-were-a-fish>
| eamag wrote:
| Reminded https://www.baen.com/Chapters/9781618249203/978161
| 8249203___...
| willguest wrote:
| thanks. i really enjoyed it
| sharperguy wrote:
| I would even call it mid 2020s. I think in a couple years
| people's attention spans will be so short they won't even
| finish reading comments.
| _kb wrote:
| Unfortunately, and "Attention Is All You Need".
| neya wrote:
| It's the most overrated model there is. I do Elixir development
| primarily and the model sucks balls in comparison to Gemini and
| GPT-5x. But the Claude fanboys will swear by it and will attack
| you if you ever say even something remotely negative about
| their "god sent" model. It fails miserably even in basic chat
| and research contexts and constantly goes off track. I wired it
| up to fire up some tasks. It kept hallucinating and swearing it
| did when it didn't even attempt to. It was so unreliable I had
| to revert to Gemini.
| resiros wrote:
| It might simply be that it was not trained enough in Elixir
| RL environments compared to Gemini and gpt. I use it for both
| ts and python and it's certainly better than Gemini. For
| Codex, it depends on the task.
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| No developer writes the same prompt twice. How can you be sure
| something has changed?
| kasey_junk wrote:
| I regularly run the same prompts twice and through different
| models. Particularly, when making changes to agent metadata
| like agent files or skills.
|
| At least weekly I run a set of prompts to compare
| codex/claude against each other. This is quite easy the
| prompt sessions are just text files that are saved.
|
| The problem is doing it enough for statistical significance
| and judging the output as better or not.
| baq wrote:
| Ralph Wiggum would like a word
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| Same prompt assumes same context state. But I think you get
| what I mean.
| andreagrandi wrote:
| I suspect you may not be writing code regularly... If I have
| to ask Claude the same things three times and it keeps saying
| "You are right, now I've implemented it!" and the code is
| still missing 1 out of 3 things or worse, then I can
| definitely say the model has become worse (since this wasn't
| happening before).
| co_king_5 wrote:
| What model were you using where this wasn't happening
| before?
| andreagrandi wrote:
| I haven't experiences this with gpt-5.3-codex (xhigh) for
| example. Opus/Sonnet usually work well when just
| released, then they degrade quite regularly. I know the
| prompts are not the same every day or even across the
| day, but if the type of problems are always the same (at
| least in my case) and a model starts doing stupid things,
| then it means something is wrong. Everyone I know who
| uses Claude regularly, usually have the same esperience
| whenever I notice they degrade.
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| > I suspect you may not be writing code regularly...
|
| You have no reason to suspect this.
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| When I use Claude daily (both professionally and personally
| with a Max subscription), there are things that it does
| differently between 4.5 and 4.6. It's hard to point to any
| single conversation, but in aggregate I'm finding that
| certain tasks don't go as smoothly as they used to. In my
| view, Opus 4.6 is a lot better at long standing conversations
| (which has value), but does worse with critical details
| within smaller conversations.
|
| A few things I've noticed:
|
| * 4.6 doesn't look at certain files that it use to
|
| * 4.6 tends to jump into writing code before it's fully
| understood the problem (annoying but promptable)
|
| * 4.6 is less likely to do research, write to artifacts, or
| make external tool calls unless you specifically ask it to
|
| * 4.6 is much more likely to ask annoying (blocking)
| questions that it can reasonably figure out on it's own
|
| * 4.6 is much more likely to miss a critical detail in a
| planning document after being explicitly told to plan for
| that detail
|
| * 4.6 needs to more proactively write its memories to file
| within a conversation to avoid going off track
|
| * 4.6 is a lot worse about demonstrating critical details.
| I'm so tired of it explaining something conceptually without
| it thinking about how it implements details.
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| Just hit a situation where 4.6 is driving me crazy.
|
| I'm working through a refactor and I explicitly told it to
| use a block (as in Ruby Blocks) and it completely
| overlooked that. Totally missed it as something I asked it
| to do.
| abm53 wrote:
| I'm unsure exactly in what way you believe it has gone "down
| the hill" so this isn't aimed at you specifically but more a
| general pattern I see.
|
| That pattern is people complaining that a particular model has
| degraded in quality of its responses over time or that it has
| been "nerfed" etc.
|
| Although the models may evolve, and the tools calling them may
| change, I suspect a huge amount of this is simply confirmation
| bias.
| super256 wrote:
| OpenAI forces users to verify with their ID + face scan when
| using Codex 5.3 if any of your conversations was redeemed as
| high risk.
|
| It seems like they currently have a lot of false positives:
| https://github.com/openai/codex/issues?q=High%20risk
| andreagrandi wrote:
| They haven't asked me yet (my subscription is from work with
| a business/team plan). Probably my conversations as too
| boring
| bbstats wrote:
| all this because of a single week?
| andreagrandi wrote:
| No, it's not the first time their models degrade for some
| time.
| GorbachevyChase wrote:
| I was underwhelmed by Opus4.6. I didn't get a sense of
| significant improvement, but the token usage was excessive to
| the point that I dropped the subscription for codex. I am
| suspect that all the models are so glib that they can create a
| quagmire for themselves in a project. I have not yet found a
| satisfying strategy for non-destructive resets when the systems
| own comments and notes poisons new output. Fortunately,
| deleting and starting over is cheap.
| trillic wrote:
| The rate limit for my $20 OpenAI / Codex account feels 10x
| larger than the $20 claude account.
| choilive wrote:
| YES. I hit the rate limit in about ~15 mins on Claude. But it
| will take me a few hours with Codex. A/B testing them on the
| same tasks. Same $20/mo.
| WarmWash wrote:
| My favorite conspiracy explanation:
|
| Claude has gotten a lot of popular media attention in the last
| few weeks, and the influx of users is constraining
| compute/memory on an already compute heavy model. So you get
| all the suspected "tricks" like quantization, shorter thinking,
| KV cache optimizations.
|
| It feels like the same thing that happened to Gemini 3, and
| what you can even feel throughout the day (the models seem
| smartest at 12am).
|
| Dario in his interview with dwarkesh last week also lamented
| the same refrain that other lab leaders have: compute is
| constrained and there are big tradeoffs in how you allocate it.
| It feels safe to reason then that they will use any trick they
| can to free up compute.
| thepasch wrote:
| > I'm only waiting for OpenAI to provide an equivalet ~100 USD
| subscription to entirely ditch Claude.
|
| I have a feeling Anthropic might be in for an _extremely_ rude
| awakening when that happens, and I don't think it's a matter of
| "if" anymore.
| submain wrote:
| > And don't even let me get started on how bad Claude client
| has become
|
| The latest versions of claude code have been freezing and then
| crashing while waiting on long running commands. It's pretty
| frustrating.
| bothlabs wrote:
| I would expect, it still is only enforced in a semi-strict way.
|
| I think what they want to achieve here is less "kill openclaw" or
| similar and more "keep our losses under control in general". And
| now they have a clear criteria to refer when they take action and
| a good bisection on whom to act on.
|
| In case your usage is high they would block / take action.
| Because if you have your max subscription and not really losing
| them money, why should they push you (the monopoly incentive
| sounds wrong with the current market).
| ed_mercer wrote:
| Openclaw is unaffected by this as the Claude Code CLI is called
| directly
| Veen wrote:
| Many people use the Max subscription OAuth token in OpenClaw.
| The main chat, heartbeat, etc., functionality does not call
| the Claude Code CLI. It uses the API authenticated via
| subscription OAuth tokens, which is precisely what Anthropic
| has banned.
|
| There are many other options too: direct API, other model
| providers, etc. But Opus is particularly good for "agent with
| a personality" applications, so it's what thousands of
| OpenClaw users go with, mostly via the OAuth token, because
| it's much cheaper than the API.
| bob1029 wrote:
| I'm a bit lost on this one.
|
| I can get a ridiculous amount of tokens in and out of something
| like gpt-5.2 via the API for $100.
|
| Is this primarily about gas town and friends?
| jongjong wrote:
| I have no issues with this. Anthropic did a great job with Claude
| Code.
|
| It's a little bit sleazy as a business model to try to wedge
| one's self between Claude and its users.
|
| OpenAI acquiring OpenClaw gives me bad vibes. How did OpenClaw
| gain so much traction so quickly? It doesn't seem organic.
|
| I definitely feel much more aligned with Anthropic as a company.
| What they do seems more focused, meritocratic, organic and
| genuine.
|
| OpenAI essentially appropriated all their current IP from the
| people... They basically gutted the non-profit and stole its IP.
| Then sold a huge chunk to Microsoft... Yes, they literally sold
| the IP they stole to Microsoft, in broad daylight. Then they used
| media spin to make it sound like they appropriated it from Elon
| because Elon donated a few millions... But Elon got his tax
| deduction! The public footed the bill for those deductions... The
| IP belonged to the non-profit; to the public, not Elon, nor any
| of the donors. I mean let's not even mention Suchir Balaji, the
| OpenAI researcher who supposedly "committed suicide" after trying
| to warn everyone about the stolen IP.
|
| OpenAI is clearly trying to slander Anthropic, trying to present
| themselves as the good guys after their OpenClaw acquisition and
| really rubbing it in all over HN... Over which they have much
| influence.
| singularity2001 wrote:
| important they have clarified that it's OK to use it for personal
| experimentation if you don't build a business out of it!
| jspdown wrote:
| I pay a Max subscription since a long time, I like their model
| but I hate their tools:
|
| - Claude Desktop looks like a demo app. It's slow to use and so
| far behind the Codex app that it's embarassing.
|
| - Claude Code is buggy has hell and I think I've never used a CLI
| tool that consume so much memory and CPU. Let's not talk about
| the feature parity with other agents.
|
| - Claude Agent SDK is poorly documented, half finished, and is
| just thin wrapper around a CLI tool...
|
| Oh and none of this is open source, so I can do nothing about it.
|
| My only option to stay with their model is to build my own tool.
| And now I discover that using my subscription with the Agent SDK
| is against the term of use?
|
| I'm not going to pay 500 USD of API credits every months, no way.
| I have to move to a different provider.
| mihau wrote:
| I agree that Claude Code is buggy as hell, but:
|
| > Let's not talk about the feature parity with other agents.
|
| What do you mean feature parity with other agents? It seems to
| me that other CLI agents are quite far from Claude Code in this
| regard.
| skerit wrote:
| Which other CLI agents are that? Because I've found OpenCode
| to be A LOT better than Claude-Code.
| baby wrote:
| Whats better with opencode? Never tried it. I like that
| claude code has double escape, shift + tab, team of agents
| WXLCKNO wrote:
| I had a Claude code instance using 55 GB of RAM yesterday.
| co_king_5 wrote:
| > Claude Code is buggy has hell and I think I've never used a
| CLI tool that consume so much memory and CPU
|
| FWIW this aligns completely with the LLM ethos. Inefficiency is
| a virtue.
| deadbabe wrote:
| I regret ever promoting that Claude Code crap. I remember when
| it was nothing but glowing reviews everywhere. Honestly AI
| companies should stick to what they are good at: direct API
| interface to powerful models.
|
| We are heading toward a $1000/month model just to use LLMs in
| the cloud.
| DefineOutside wrote:
| I got so tired of cursor that I started writing down every bug
| I encountered. The list is currently at 30 entries, some of
| them major bugs such as pressing "apply" on changes not
| actually applying changes or models getting stuck in infinite
| loops and burning 50 million tokens.
| chick3ndinn3r wrote:
| I tried to have Cursor change a list of US States and
| Provinces from a list to a dictionary and it did, but it also
| randomly deleted 3 states.
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| >I'm not going to pay 500 USD of API credits every months, no
| way. I have to move to a different provider
|
| It's funny, you are probably in the cohort that made Antropic
| have to pursue this type of decision so aggressively.
| bilekas wrote:
| 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 screaming at cloud about APIs used
| to being actually useful and intuitive?
| cryptoegorophy wrote:
| Can you sell ads via api? If answer is no then this "feature"
| would be at the bottom of the list
| 3D30497420 wrote:
| Plus, use of the API is a way to _avoid_ ads. So double-
| strike against good /available APIs.
| prinny_ wrote:
| There is a world where approaches like HTTP 402 are
| implemented to monetize API usage.
| rawling wrote:
| Please get this token signed by our ad partner to enable
| your next ten requests.
| input_sh wrote:
| They can sell API access via transparent pricing.
|
| Instead, many, _many_ websites (especially in the music
| industry) have some sort of funky API that you can only get
| access to if you have enough online clout. Very few are
| transparent about what "enough clout" even means or how much
| it'd cost you, and there's like an entire industry of third-
| party API resellers that cost like 10x more than if you went
| straight to the source. But you can't, because you first have
| to fulfill some arbitrary criteria that you can't even know
| about ahead of time.
|
| It's all very frustrating to deal with.
| miroljub wrote:
| Of course they can [1].
|
| Though, in this case, you get free API access to the model.
|
| [1]: https://x.com/badlogicgames/status/2017063228094709771
| admx8 wrote:
| What kind of ads they sell in terminal Claude code? Are you
| bor?
| sbarre wrote:
| Every garden eventually becomes a walled garden once enough
| people are inside.
| butlike wrote:
| #earthisamoat
| simianwords wrote:
| I'm predicting that there would be a new movement to make
| everything an MCP. It's now easier to consume an api by non
| technical people.
| mamami wrote:
| I don't it's particularly hard to figure it out: APIs have been
| particularly at risk of being exploited for negative purposes
| due the explosion of AI powered bots
| throwaway24778 wrote:
| This trend well predates widespread use of chatbots.
| pirsquare wrote:
| Facebook doing that is actually good, to protect consumers from
| data abuse after incidents like cambridge analytica. They are
| holding businesses who touches your personal data responsible.
| wiseowise wrote:
| Is it? I've never touched Facebook api, but it sounds
| ridiculous that you need to provide tax details for
| DEVELOPMENT. Can't they implement some kind of a sandbox with
| dummy data?
| beAbU wrote:
| WhatsApp takes bot spam very very seriously, and as a
| result, there is zero bot spam.
|
| Before you can sign up to build a WhatsApp bot, you need to
| jump through a million hoops, and after that, every
| automated message template must be vetted by Meta before it
| can be sent out, apple style.
|
| I'm glad of this, because unlike SMS and other messaging
| platforms, WhatsApp is spam free and a pleasure to use.
| bilekas wrote:
| > WhatsApp is spam free and a pleasure to use.
|
| At least here in Italy whatsapp is a spam house unless
| you actively update the default privacy settings in-app.
| There is no discernable difference between SMS and
| WhatsApp to spammers.
| msh wrote:
| WhatsApp is certainly not spam free. I get spam over
| WhatsApp, less than on telegram but still more than zero.
| closewith wrote:
| You can mock their API all you want for development and
| there are many pre-built options for that, but it you want
| to touch their systems, they're sending a very clear
| signal. You must be a corporate with an RBO. Seems prudent
| to me.
| bilekas wrote:
| > Facebook doing that is actually good, to protect consumers
| from data abuse after incidents like cambridge analytica.
|
| There is nothing here stopping cambridge analytica from doing
| this again, they will provide whatever details needed. But a
| small pre launch personal project work that might use a
| facebook publishing application can't be developed or tested
| without first going through all the bureaucracy.
|
| Nevermind the non profit 'free' application you might want to
| create on the FB platform, lets say a share chrome extension
| "Post to my FB", for personal use, you can't do this because
| you can't create an application without a company and IVA/TAX
| documents. It's hostile imo.
|
| Before, you could create an app, link your ToS, privacy
| policy etc, verify your domain via email, and then if users
| wanted to use your application they would agree, this is how
| a lot of companies still do it. I'm actually not sure why FB
| do this specifically.
| wobfan wrote:
| Facebook knew very early and very well about the data
| harvesting that was going on at Cambridge Analytica through
| their APIs. They acted so incredibly slowly and not-harsh
| that it's IMO hard to believe that they did not implicitly
| support it.
|
| > to protect consumers
|
| We are talking about Meta. They have never, and will never,
| protect customers. All they protect is their wealth and their
| political power.
| is_true wrote:
| They just want people to use facebook. If you can see
| facebook content without being signed in they have a harder
| time tracking you and showing you ads.
| matdehaast wrote:
| Spotify are probably reacting to https://annas-
| archive.li/blog/backing-up-spotify.html where basically the
| whole archive was downloaded
| notrealyme123 wrote:
| that was later.
| throwaway920102 wrote:
| It was known publicly later.
| Loic wrote:
| They put no limits on the API usage, as long as you pay.
|
| Here, they put limits on the "under-cover" use of the
| subscription. If they can provide a relatively cheap
| subscription against the direct API use, this is because they
| can control the stuff end-to-end, the application running on
| your system (Claude Code, Claude Desktop) and their systems.
|
| As you subscribe to these plans, this is the "contract", you
| can use only through their tools. If you want full freedom, use
| the API, with a per token pricing.
|
| For me, this is fair.
| arghwhat wrote:
| Their subscriptions aren't cheap, and it has nothing really
| to do with them controlling the system.
|
| It's just price differentiation - they know consumers are
| price sensitive, and that companies wanting to use their APIs
| to build products so they can slap AI on their portfolio and
| get access to AI-related investor money can be milked. On the
| consumer-facing front, they live off branding and if you're
| not using _claude code_ , you might not associate the tool
| with Anthropic, which means losing publicity that drives API
| sales.
| throwaway24778 wrote:
| I don't and would never pay for an LLM, but presumably they
| also want for force ads down your throat eventually, yea?
| Hard to do if you're just selling API access.
| k8sToGo wrote:
| Compared to the heavily subsidized subscriptions, I don't
| think API is sold at loss.
|
| Also why would you create a throwaway for this question?
| Are you trying to rage bait?
| bilekas wrote:
| > Also why would you create a throwaway for this
| question? Are you trying to rage bait?
|
| You should never question anyone's route to privacy :)
| throwaway24778 wrote:
| > Are you trying to rage bait?
|
| If you have to ask, it's probably not rage bait. I'm just
| too lazy to come up with a username.
| bilekas wrote:
| But the idea of an API is more to encourage creativity and
| other people/companies building products and services on or
| around your systems. This used to be seen as a positive as
| it would mean you were an important cog in other peoples
| products and so more users, exposure, brand awareness etc.
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| Anthropic do of course sell API access and you can of
| course use any product with it.
| butlike wrote:
| 1:29 until you're able to push to the `main` branch.
|
| Please enjoy these messages from our sponsors.
| stavros wrote:
| I don't see how it's fair. If I'm paying for usage, and I'm
| using it, why should Anthropic have a say on which client I
| use?
|
| I pay them $100 a month and now for some reason I can't use
| OpenCode? Fuck that.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| You aren't paying for usage, you are paying for the product
| that the subscription is offered to. If you are paying for
| usage, well, that's their billed by token-usage API plan,
| which they are quite happy for you to use with any client
| you want.
| stavros wrote:
| Even worse, if I'm paying a subscription for the product,
| and I don't want to use the product, what's it to them?
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| You are free to not use it. You are not free to use _the
| API provided specifically for the product,_ which you are
| _not_ explicitly paying for, for a _different_ product.
|
| You can of course use OpenCode or any other project with
| the API, which is also offered as a separate product.
| People just don't want to do that because it's not
| subsidized, ie. more expensive. But the entire reason
| it's subsidized is that Anthropic can use the data to
| _improve their product._
| rglullis wrote:
| > But the entire reason it's subsidized is that Anthropic
| can use the data to improve their product.
|
| This is grade A, absolute crap. It's subsidized because
| everyone else is subsidizing it, and everyone is doing it
| because they are trying to lock their consumer share.
|
| The solution is quite simple. Just get the FTC to forbid
| tie-in sales so that we don't get the huge corporations
| using their infinite resources to outlive the
| competition. Anthropic/Amazon/Google/OpenAI/Facebook can
| offer any type of service they want, but if the access to
| the API costs $X when offered standalone, then that is
| the _baseline_ price for anything that depends on the API
| to work.
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| I'm fine with this as well. I just dislike everyone here
| presenting it like this is Anthropic being unreasonable.
| Given the product that is offered and why it's being
| offered, this is completely reasonable to do.
|
| I don't use the Anthropic subscriptions either.
| xvector wrote:
| Do you not understand that they run the regular
| subscription at a huge loss? In exchange they require you
| to stick with Claude Code.
|
| You are free to use the API.
| regenschutz wrote:
| Why can't they run the API at a huge loss too then??
| hluska wrote:
| I'm not saying this is a bubble; I don't know whether
| than it is or not. But if it is a bubble, I've only seen
| one bubble this big in tech. When that bubble popped, the
| only companies that survived kept their costs in check.
| Some raised a round right before the bubble popped but
| cost control was always part or their survival.
| duskdozer wrote:
| To be honest the fact that they are already clamping down
| makes me think their situation is getting strained.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Because if you do everything at a huge loss, you run out
| of runway very quickly.
| hobofan wrote:
| > If I'm paying for usage
|
| You are not paying for usage. You are paying for usage via
| their application.
|
| If their business plan is based on how quickly a human can
| enter requests and react to the results, and Claude Code is
| optimized for that, why should you be allowed to use an
| alternative client that e.g. always tries to saturate the
| token limits?
| stavros wrote:
| But a) I'm not doing that and b) they can just ban that,
| like they have rate limits. Why ban OpenCode?
| PierceJoy wrote:
| The speculative reasoning I've seen is that they have
| optimizations in their CC client that reduces their
| costs. If that's true, I think it's fair that they can
| limit subscription usage to their client. If you don't
| want those optimizations and prefer more freedom, use the
| API.
| heliumtera wrote:
| They rather have yolo permissions to run arbitrary code
| on your machine and phone home all the time, then
| opencode having it and phoning home all the time.
| barrkel wrote:
| They have rate limits, but they also want to control the
| nozzle, and not all their users use all their allocation
| all the time.
|
| In reality, heavy subscription users are subsidized by
| light subscription users. The rate limits aren't
| everything.
|
| If agent harnesses other than Claude Code consume more
| tokens than average, or rather, if users of agent
| harnesses other than CC consume more tokens than average,
| well, Anthropic wouldn't be unhappy if those consumers
| had to pay more for their tokens.
| notpushkin wrote:
| > If agent harnesses other than Claude Code consume more
| tokens than average, or rather, if users of agent
| harnesses other than CC consume more tokens than average
|
| Do they, though?
| admx8 wrote:
| Btw API is not for coding, it's designed for pipelines,
| automation, products. They just kill competition making
| better software like opencode.
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| Is that your belief to what their API should be used for?
| terminalbraid wrote:
| Stop giving money to the company that doesn't give you what
| you want.
| amelius wrote:
| It is important that the company knows why they are
| losing customers, though.
| kalleboo wrote:
| I canceled my Claude subscription (other reasons) and
| they had an "exit interview" question of why you
| canceled. They know why.
| brookst wrote:
| Internal sales data is probably a lot more effective and
| attended to than HN posts.
| TZubiri wrote:
| Read the ToS, you are paying to use their products. If you
| want to use other products that integrate with the
| Anthropic LLMs they offer a product which is the API. You
| can use Opencode by connecting your API and being charged
| per token.
|
| Doesn't that make sense? If you use it more you get charged
| more, if you use it less you get charged less.
| stavros wrote:
| But you understand that they changed the ToS today, and
| that's what I'm complaining about, right? "Read the ToS"
| isn't an answer to "I don't like this ToS change".
| TZubiri wrote:
| I didn't see today's ToS change. But this was always
| against ToS. OpenClaw specifically is built against tech
| that breaks ToS.
|
| Probably the ToS change was to make it more clear.
|
| To be fair, the developer is the one breaking the ToS in
| the most significant way, breaking boilerplate reverse
| engineering clauses.
|
| But the user also is very aware that they are doing
| something funny, in order to authenticate, the user is
| asked to authorize Claude Code, n ot Opencode or
| OpenClaw, it's clearly a hack and there is no
| authorization from Anthropic to OpenClaw, and you are not
| giving Anthropic authorization to give access to OC, the
| user asks Anthropic to give access to Claude Code, the
| only reason this works is because OC is pretending to be
| Claude Code.
|
| The bottom line issue is that as a user you are paying
| for a subscription to a package that includes an expected
| usage. That package is not metered, but it is given on
| the condition that you will use it as it is expected to
| be used, by chatting manually with the chatbot, which
| results in a reasonable expected token usage. By using a
| program that programatically calls the chat interface,
| the token consumption increases beyond what was part of
| the original deal, and so the price should be different.
|
| A similar scenario would be if you go to an all you can
| eat buffet, you pay for a single person, but then you
| actually unload an army of little clones that start
| eating the whole buffet. Technically it was an all you
| can eat buffet and you paid the price right? Well no,
| come on, don't play dumb.
| admx8 wrote:
| Sure, that's why I'm cancelling my max subscription
| because I'm tied to opencode :)
| everdrive wrote:
| Now just imagine the rug-pull if you ever get really
| dependent on the product.
| butlike wrote:
| You're touching on the eternal App Store debate. "It's my
| phone, I should be able to install whatever I want on it!"
| Which is true, but also hasn't been true since the mid-90s
| (early 2000s at the latest).
| skeledrew wrote:
| Not quite though. You can install Claude's apps wherever
| they're supported, and maybe even fiddle with the source
| code (I'm unsure). And you can use any other coding apps
| that you want. The only real restriction is how those
| apps are allowed to connect to the providers' services,
| which are running on their servers, etc. There's a
| movement from "my local domain" to "their remote domain",
| and they're allowed to have full control of theirs as you
| - would prefer, I think - full control of yours.
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| It doesn't really make sense to me because the subscriptions
| have limits too.
|
| But I agree they can impose whatever user hostile
| restrictions they want. They are not a monopoly. They compete
| in a very competitive market. So if they decide to raise
| prices in whatever shape or form then that's fine.
|
| Arbitrary restrictions do play a role for my own purchasing
| decisions though. Flexibility is worth something.
| narrator wrote:
| I think what most people don't realize is running an agent
| 24/7 fully automated is burning a huge hole in their
| profitability. Who even knows how big it is. It could be
| getting it on the 8/9 figures a day for all we know.
|
| There's this pervasive idea left over from the pre-llm days
| that compute is free. You want to rent your own H200x8 to run
| your Claude model, that's literally going to cost $24/hour.
| People are just not thinking like that. I have my home PC, it
| does this stuff I can run it 24/7 for free.
| notpushkin wrote:
| This is honestly the key difference here. I'm morally okay
| with using Claude Max Whatever with something like OpenCode
| because it's literally the same thing from the usage
| pattern perspective. Plugging Nanoclaw into it is a whole
| another thing.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| It probably doesn't help that the creator of OpenClaw
| just got hired by Anthropic's competitor.
|
| This sounds like engineering, finance, and legal got
| together and decided they were in an untenable position
| if OpenAI started nudging OpenClaw to burn even more
| tokens on Anthropic (or just never optimize) +
| continually updated workarounds to using subscription
| auth. But I'm sure OpenAI would never do something like
| that...
|
| At the end of the day, it's the same 'fixed price plan
| for variable use on a constrained resource' cellular
| problem: profitability becomes directly linked to
| _actual_ average usage.
| skeledrew wrote:
| > OpenAI started nudging OpenClaw to burn even more
| tokens on Anthropic
|
| Not possible: OpenClaw is run by a foundation, and is
| open source, which means OpenAI has no leverage to do
| such a thing.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Because open source has always been completely
| independent of unrelated corporate entities who employ
| people to work on it?
| skeledrew wrote:
| Because anyone can actually check the code, which means
| if there's any funny business, someone will come across
| it eventually and blow it open.
| Xunjin wrote:
| I understand you mean for free in the sense that you don't
| pay a third party to use it, however let's no forget that
| you still use the power grid and that's not free. Also
| worth to note that energy prices have increased worldwide.
| dspillett wrote:
| Depending on utilisation and good use of low-power or
| sleep (or full off) states when things aren't actively
| processing, it can still be a _lot_ cheaper to run things
| at home than on a rented service. Power costs have
| increased a lot in recent years, but so have compute-per-
| watt ratios and you are not paying the that indirect
| compute price when the processors are asleep or off
| whereas with subscription access to LLMs you are paying
| at least the base subscription each month even if you
| don't use it at all in that period. Much the same as the
| choice between self-hosting an open-source project or
| paying for a hosted instance - and in both cases people
| don't tend to consider the admin cost (for some of us the
| admin is "play time"!) so the self-hosted option it does
| practically feel free.
| regenschutz wrote:
| Maintaining hardware also isn't free. Time is money.
| darkwater wrote:
| Time is money if you have another good use of that time.
| If you like spending that time doing something, then it's
| literally free.
| mickeyp wrote:
| Sure it's $24/hour, but it'll crank through tens of
| thousands of tokens per second --- those beefy GPUs are
| meant for large amounts of parallel workflow. You'll never
| _get_ that many tokens for a single request. That's why the
| mathematics work when you get dozens or hundreds of people
| using it.
|
| No. The sauce is in KV caching: when to evict, when to
| keep, how to pre-empt an active agent loop vs someone who
| are showing signs of inactivity at their pc, etc.
| starkgoose wrote:
| there are usage limits preventing you from running it 24/7
| on all subscriptions tiers
| butlike wrote:
| This bolster's OP's point, to an extent
| admx8 wrote:
| Coder doing the coding should use subscription, and now
| they ban the choice of your preferred ide for agentc
| coding. API is for automation not coding. I'm going to
| cancel their subscription today, I already use codex with
| opencode.
| rglullis wrote:
| > If they can provide a relatively cheap subscription against
| the direct API use
|
| Except they can't. Their costs are not magically lower when
| you use claude code vs when you use a third-party client.
|
| > For me, this is fair.
|
| This is, plain and simple, a tie-in sale of claude code. I am
| particularly amused by people accepting it as "fair" because
| in Brazil this is an illegal practice.
| pigpop wrote:
| While the cost may not be lower the price certainly can be
| if they are operating like any normal company and adding
| margin.
| theturtletalks wrote:
| I've heard they actually cache the full Claude Code system
| prompt on their servers and this saves them a lot of money.
| Maybe they cache the MCP tools you use and other things. If
| another harness like Opencode changes that prompt or adds
| significantly to it, that could increase costs for them.
|
| What I don't understand is why start this game of cat and
| mouse? Just look at Youtube and YT-DLP. YT-DLP, and the
| dozens of apps that use it, basically use Youtube's
| unofficial web API and it still works even after Youtube
| constantly patches their end. Though now, YT-DLP has to use
| a makeshift JS interpreter and maybe even spawn Chromium
| down the line.
| duskdozer wrote:
| Some people drop out of the game as it gets harder. I've
| basically stopped looking at youtube videos unless I want
| it enough to download it (and wait if the current
| workarounds broke) with how much they've clamped down on
| no-account usage. Most I suspect just give in to the
| company's terms.
| skeledrew wrote:
| I just use NewPipe all the way.
| regularfry wrote:
| > Except they can't. Their costs are not magically lower
| when you use claude code vs when you use a third-party
| client.
|
| I don't have a dog in this fight but is this actually true?
| If you're using Claude Code they can know that whatever
| client-side model selection they put into it is active. So
| if they can get away with routing 80% of the requests to
| Haiku and only route to Opus for the requests that really
| need it, that _does_ give them a cost model where they can
| rely on lower costs than if a third-party client just
| routes to Opus for everything. Even if they aren 't doing
| that sort of thing now, it would be understandable if they
| wanted to.
| joseda-hg wrote:
| It (CC) does have a /models command, you can still decide
| to route everything to Opus if you just want to burn
| tokens I guess it's not default so most wouldn't, but
| still, people willing to go to a third party client are
| more likely that kind of power user anyway
|
| They still have the total consumption under their control
| (*bar prompt caching and other specific optimizations)
| where in the past they even had different quotas per
| model, it shouldn't cost them more money, just be a
| worse/different service I guess
| ac29 wrote:
| > It (CC) does have a /models command, you can still
| decide to route everything to Opus if you just want to
| burn tokens I guess it's not default so most wouldn't
|
| Opus is claude code's default model as of sometime
| recently (around Opus 4.6?)
| skeledrew wrote:
| > it shouldn't cost them more money
|
| As things are currently, better models mean bigger models
| that take more storage+RAM+CPU, or just spend more time
| processing a request. All this translates to higher
| costs, and may be mitigated by particular configs
| triggered by knowledge that a given client, providing
| particular guarantees, is on the other side.
| joseda-hg wrote:
| That's kind of the point. Even if users can choose which
| model to use (and apparently the default is the largest
| one), they could still say (For roughly the same cost):
| your Opus quota is X, your Haiku quota is Y, go ham.
| We'll throttle you when you hit the limit.
| skeledrew wrote:
| But they don't want the subscription to be quota'd like
| that. The API automatically does that though, as
| different models use different amounts of tokens when
| generating responses, and the billing is per token. And
| quite literally is having the user account for the actual
| costs of usage, which is the thing said users are trying
| to avoid, on their own terms, and getting upset about
| when they aren't.
| brookst wrote:
| That's not how Claude Code works. It's not like a web
| chatbot with a layer that routes based on complexity of
| request.
| skeledrew wrote:
| You don't control what happens when a request hits their
| endpoint though.
| cma wrote:
| > Their costs are not magically lower when you use claude
| code vs when you use a third-party client.
|
| If subsidizing that offering is a good hook to get higher
| paying API users on board, then some of that cost is a
| customer aquisition cost, whereas the cost to them of
| providing the API doesn't have the same proportion that
| they can justify as a customer acquisition cost.
| rglullis wrote:
| I absolutely have _zero_ concerns about their cost to
| acquire new customers. As a (former) customer, all I am
| concerned is the freedom to consume the service I am
| paying for however I see fit.
| brookst wrote:
| Is there any service in the world that gives you complete
| freedom on how you consume it? I can't think of one.
|
| Netflix: limits number of devices and stream quality and
| offline use.
|
| AWS: does not allow any number of applications (spamming,
| crypto mining, adult content)
|
| Airlines: do not allow smoking, boom boxes
|
| Is there any service that gives complete freedom?
| rglullis wrote:
| I am not asking for "complete" freedom, am I? Can you
| please argue in good faith and not resort to cheap
| rhetoric tricks?
| nerdjon wrote:
| > This is, plain and simple, a tie-in sale of claude code.
| I am particularly amused by people accepting it as "fair"
| because in Brazil this is an illegal practice
|
| I am very curious what is particularly illegal about this.
| On the sales page nowhere do they actually talk about the
| API https://claude.com/pricing
|
| Now we all know obviously the API is being used because
| that is how things work, but you are not actually paying a
| subscription for the API. You are paying for access to
| Claude Code.
|
| Is it also illegal that if you pay for Playstation Plus
| that you can't play those games on an Xbox?
|
| Is it illegal that you can't use third party netflix apps?
|
| I really don't want to defend and AI company here but this
| is perfectly normal. In no other situation would we expect
| access to the API, the only reason this is considered
| different is because they also have a different service
| that gives access to the API. But that is irrelevant.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Imagine if video service came with a free TV that watched
| you, and was really opinionated about what you watch, and
| you could only watch your videos on the creeper TV.
| nerdjon wrote:
| Then I would not use it because it does not work the way
| I want it to work...
|
| But if that is the service they are making and they are
| clear about what it is when you sign up... That does not
| make it illegal.
|
| I can see why people think they should be entitled to do
| this, but it does not align with how they are selling the
| service or how many other companies sell services. In
| most situations you don't get unlimited access to the
| individual components of how a service works (the API),
| you are expected to use the service (in this case Claude
| Code) directly.
| rglullis wrote:
| > That does not make it illegal.
|
| "Both parties are okay with the terms" is far from being
| sufficient to make something "legal".
|
| Tie-in sales between software and services is not
| different from price dumping. If any of the Big Tech
| corporations were from any country that is not the US,
| the FTC would be doing anything in their power to stop
| them.
| nerdjon wrote:
| > Tie-in sales between software and services is not
| different from price dumping.
|
| I disagree, in many cases what you are specifically
| paying for is the combination of the software and the
| service that are designed to work together. And in many
| cases do not work independent of eachother.
|
| There are countless cases of this, that what you are
| paying for is a thing that is made up of a piece of
| software and a serverside component. MMO's (and gaming in
| general) being a major example of this, but so are many
| of the apps I pay for subscriptions for on my phone.
|
| The actual technical implementation of how it works is
| irrelevant when it is clear what it is you are paying
| for.
|
| > "Both parties are okay with the terms" is far from
| being sufficient to make something "legal".
|
| True but the opposite is also true, just because you
| don't like the terms it does not make it illegal.
| rglullis wrote:
| > in many cases what you are specifically paying for is
| the combination of the software and the service that are
| designed to work together
|
| And in many cases like Claude Code and the Anthropic
| models, they can and do work perfectly independently.
|
| > True but the opposite is also true, just because you
| don't like the terms it does not make it illegal.
|
| This is not me "not liking it". Like I said somewhere
| else in this thread: these types of tie-in _are_ illegal
| in Brazil. This practice is clearly not done to favor the
| consumer. You can bet that if the US was anything closer
| to a functional democracy and the laws were not written
| by lobbyists, this would be illegal in the US as well.
| nerdjon wrote:
| What law is actually being broken in Brazil?
|
| Are MMO's illegal in Brazil? Is PlayStation Plus illegal
| in Brazil? Is Spotify, Apple Music, etc etc etc also
| illegal in Brazil?
|
| It would be ridiculous to argue that I could pay for a
| subscription to World of Warcraft and make my own third
| party client to play the game with. (Obviously you are
| free to argue it all you want but I would be very
| surprised if this was actually illegal).
|
| > And in many cases like Claude Code and the Anthropic
| models, they can and do work perfectly independently.
|
| Unless I am mistaken Claude Code does not have a local
| model built into it, so it requires a server side
| component to work?
|
| As far as the Anthropic models, yes like many other
| services they ALSO have a public API that is separate
| from the subscription that you are paying for.
|
| The critical difference here being that in the
| subscription it is very clear that you are paying for
| "Claude Code" which is a combination of an application
| and a server side component. It makes no claims about API
| usage as part of your subscription, again the technical
| implementation of the service you are actually paying for
| "Claude Code" is irrelevant.
|
| When it comes to "Claude Code" for all that we should
| care about, again given that "Claude Code" is what you
| are paying for, they could be sending the information to
| Gemini or or a human looks at it. Because it's irrelevant
| to the end user when it comes to the technical
| implementation since you are not being granted access to
| any other parts of the system directly.
| rglullis wrote:
| > What law is actually being broken in Brazil?
|
| "Tie-in sale": the business practice where a seller
| conditions the sale of one product (the tying good) on
| the buyer's agreement to purchase a different product
| (the tied good).
|
| The examples you are giving are not "tie-in" sales
| because the service from Playstation Plus, Spotify, Apple
| Music, etc is the _distribution_ of digital goods.
|
| > Unless I am mistaken Claude Code does not have a local
| model built into it, so it requires a server side
| component to work?
|
| Which part are you not understanding?
|
| I don't _care_ about Claude Code. I do not want it and do
| not need it. All I care about is the access to the models
| through the client that I was _already using_!
|
| > When it comes to "Claude Code" for all that we should
| care about, again given that "Claude Code" is what you
| are paying for.
|
| No, it is not! I paid for Claude Pro. Claude != Claude
| Code.
| wrs wrote:
| 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.
| rglullis wrote:
| > 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 at a loss now, because they believe they
| will make up for it later. I understand the reasoning
| from a business point of view, but this doesn't mean they
| are _entitled_ to their profits. I do not understand
| people that think we simply _accept_ their premise and
| assume they can screw us over just because they asked and
| put it on a piece of paper.
| skeledrew wrote:
| > All I care about is the access to the models through
| the client that I was already using!
|
| But that's not a product that they're offering. That
| ability was an undesired (from their business
| perspective) trait that they're now rectifying.
| rglullis wrote:
| > But that's not a product that they're offering
|
| Of course it was. - It was possible to do
| it. - OpenCode did not break any security protocol
| in order to integrate with them. - OAuth is
| *precisely* a system to let third-party applications use
| their resources.
|
| It's not what they _wanted_ , but it's not my problem.
| The fact that I was a customer does not mean that I need
| to protective of their profits.
|
| > (from their business perspective)
|
| So what?!
|
| Basically, they set up an strategy they thought it was
| going to work in their favor (offer a subsidized service
| to try to lock in customers), someone else found a way to
| turn things around and you believe that we should be okay
| with this?!
|
| Honestly, I do not understand why so many people here
| think it is fine to let these huge corporations run the
| same exploitation playbook over and over again. Basically
| they set up a mouse trap full of cheese and now that the
| mice found a way to enjoy the cheese without getting
| their necks broken, they are crying about it?
| skeledrew wrote:
| > Of course it was.
|
| You'd have to point me to an authoritative source on that
| (explicitly saying users are allowed to use their models
| via private APIs in apps of the user's choosing). If
| something isn't explicitly provided in the contract, then
| it can be changed at any point in any way without notice.
|
| Honestly, I'm not big on capitalism in general, but I
| don't understand why people should expect companies to
| provide things exactly the way they want at exactly the
| prices they would like to be charged (if at all). That's
| just not how the world/system works, or should,
| especially given there are so many alternatives
| available. If one doesn't like what's happening with some
| service, then let the wallet do the talking and move to
| another. Emigration is a far more effective message than
| complaining.
| rglullis wrote:
| > I don't understand why people should expect companies
| to provide things exactly the way they want at exactly
| the prices they would like to be charged
|
| This is a gross misrepresentation of my argument.
|
| I wouldn't be complaining at all if they went up and said
| "sorry, we are not going to subsidize anyone anymore, so
| the prices are going up", and I wouldn't be complaining
| if they came up and said "sorry, using a third party
| client incurs an extra cost of on our side, so if you
| want to use that you'd have to pay extra".
|
| What I _am_ against is the anti-competitive practice of
| price discrimination and the tie-in sale of a service. If
| they are going to play this game, then they better be
| ready for the case the strategy backfires. Otherwise it
| 's just a game of "heads I win, tails you lose" where
| they always get to make up the rules.
|
| > Emigration is a far more effective message than
| complaining.
|
| Why not both? I cancelled my Pro subscription today. I
| will stick with just Ollama cloud.
| skeledrew wrote:
| It's not tie-in. They give users 2 choices: a) use their
| service via their public API, with the client(s) of their
| choice, at the regular price point; b) use the apps they
| provide, which use a private API, at a discounted price
| point. The apps are technically negative value for them
| from a purely upfront cost perspective as their use
| trigger these discounts and they're free by themselves.
|
| Good on you re that cancel. May you find greener grass
| elsewhere.
| rglullis wrote:
| > They give users 2 choices: a) use their service via
| their public API, with the client(s) of their choice, at
| the regular price point; b) use the apps they provide,
| which use a private API, at a discounted price point.
|
| There was a _third_ choice, which was better than both of
| the ones presented: use any other client that can talk
| with our API, at whatever usage rate they deemed
| acceptable. If the "private API" was accessible via
| OAuth, then it's hardly "private".
|
| We can argue all day, when I signed up there was nothing
| saying that access was exclusive via the tools they
| provided. They changed the rules not because it was
| costing them more (or even if does, they are losing money
| on Pro customers anyway so arguing about that is silly)
| but because they opened themselves for some _valid_ and
| _fair_ competition.
| nerdjon wrote:
| > "Tie-in sale": the business practice where a seller
| conditions the sale of one product (the tying good) on
| the buyer's agreement to purchase a different product
| (the tied good)
|
| I will keep my response to this part in particular
| limited because I have limited understanding of this law.
| However based on doing a little bit of searching around
| the law is not as cut and dry as you are presenting it to
| be. It is possible that Claude code would fall under
| being fine under that law or no one has gone after them.
| I honestly don't know and I don't feel like having an
| argument that it is highly likely both of us don't fully
| understand the law.
|
| That being said I do question how exactly "Claude code"
| differs from those services as a digital good.
|
| > I don't care about Claude Code. I do not want it and do
| not need it. All I care about is the access to the models
| through the client that I was already using!
|
| OK! That is not what you're paying for as part of Claude
| Pro, end of story. You are not paying for the API. It is
| no different that the people that have a free plan and
| can only chat through the web and the app also don't get
| access to the API even though it is obviously using an
| API to access those endpoints as well.
|
| Or are you also going to argue that free users should
| have access to the API because they are already using
| them in the browser.
|
| > No, it is not! I paid for Claude Pro. Claude != Claude
| Code.
|
| Claude Code is one of the features you are paying for as
| part of Claude Pro so yes in a way you are paying for it.
| And again not on that list is the API.
| TruePath wrote:
| Could you clarify exactly what you think is an illegal
| tie-in? Because it seems like what you are upset about is
| literally the opposite -- Anthropic unbundling their
| offerings so you aren't required to buy the ability to
| offer third party access when you purchase the ability to
| use Claude code and their other models. Unless I really
| misunderstand you, your complaint is literally thaf
|
| The laws prohibiting tie-ins don't make it illegal to
| sell two products that work well together. That's
| literally what the laws are designed to make you do --
| seperate products into seperate pieces. The problem tie-
| in laws were designed to combat was situations like
| Microsoft making a popular OS then making a mediocre
| spreadsheet program and pushing the cost of that
| spreadsheet program into the cost of buying the OS. That
| way consumers would go "well it's expensive but I get
| excel with it so it's ok" and even if someone else made a
| slightly better spreadsheet they didn't have the chance
| to convince users because they had to buy it all as one
| package.
|
| Anthropic would be doing something much closer to that if
| they did what you wanted. They'd be saying: hey we have
| this neat Claude code thing you all want to use but you
| can't buy that without also purchasing third party
| access. Now some company offering a cheaper/better third
| party usage product doesn't get the chance to convince
| you because anthropic forced you to buy that just to get
| claude code.
|
| Ultimately this change unbundled products the opposite of
| a tie-in. What is upsetting about it is that it no longer
| feels to you like you are getting a good deal because you
| now have to fork over a bunch more cash to keep getting
| what you want. But that's not illegal, that's just not
| offering good value for money.
| skeledrew wrote:
| > Tie-in sales between software and services
|
| Look at it this way: the service that you're accessing is
| really a (primarily desired) side-effect of the software.
| So re subscriptions, what they're actually providing are
| the apps (web, desktop, etc), and the apps use their
| service to aid the fulfillment of their functionality.
| Those wanting direct access to the internal service can
| get an API key for that purpose. That's just how their
| product offering is structured.
| joombaga wrote:
| The Telly comes with a second screen for ads that you're
| not allowed to shut off. https://www.telly.com/
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| That's definitely a pitch lol
| smileysteve wrote:
| I think you just described American cable boxes... Except
| they charge us a monthly fee and an additional monthly
| fee for the box.
|
| Or any smart tv with free ip tv.
| pocksuppet wrote:
| Video service does work like that. They call it DRM.
| Reddit_MLP2 wrote:
| Is that not most if not all smart TVs today? Basically
| nearly every TV made and sold right now?
| jltsiren wrote:
| 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 pricing tier, as the benefits from increased
| competition outweigh the imposed restrictions to business
| practices. The pro-business position is that Anthropic
| must be allowed to choose which tiers can use the API, as
| the benefits from increased freedom outweigh the reduced
| competition in the market.
| nerdjon wrote:
| Like I mentioned somewhere else I can see why some people
| think they are entitled to do this and I also fully
| understand wanting to do it from a cost standpoint.
|
| While I do personally disagree with thinking that you
| should be able to do this when it was never sold in that
| way, at the end of the day as a customer you can choose
| if you want to use the product in the way that they are
| saying or use something else if you don't want to support
| that model.
|
| However the person I was responding too brought up
| legality which is a very different discussion.
| canibal wrote:
| But they could charge the third-party client for access to
| the API.
| rogerthis wrote:
| Unless it's illegal in more places, I think they won't
| care. In my experience, the percentage of free riders in
| Brazil is higher (due to circumstances, better said).
| skerit wrote:
| It would be less of an issue if Claude-Code was actually the
| best coding client, and would actually somehow reduce the
| amount of tokens used. But it's not. I get more things done
| with less tokens via OpenCode. And in the end, I hit 100%
| usage at the end of the week anyway.
| cik wrote:
| The problem is incentives. The organization selling the
| per-token model doesn't have the incentive, at scale to
| have you reduce token consumption. Other technologies do,
| hence adding value.
| tom_m wrote:
| They tier it. So you are limited until you pay more. So you
| can't just right away get the access you need.
| randusername wrote:
| I'm with the parent comment. It was inevitable Netflix would
| end password-sharing. It was inevitable you'd have to pick
| between freeform usage-based billing and a constrained
| subscription experience. Using the chatbot subscription as an
| API was a weird loophole. I don't feel betrayed.
| mdrzn wrote:
| APIs are the best when they let you move data out and build
| cool stuff on top. A lot of big platforms do not really want
| that anymore. They want the data to stay inside their silo so
| access gets slower harder and more locked down. So you are not
| just yelling at the cloud this feels pretty intentional.
| sceptic123 wrote:
| It's just the continued slow death of the open internet
| mmasu wrote:
| I think that these companies are understanding that as the
| barrier to entry to build a frontend gets lower and lower, APIs
| will become the real moat. If you move away from their UI they
| will lose ad revenue, viewer stats, in short the ability to
| optimize how to harness your full attention. It would be great
| to have some stats on hand and see if and how much active API
| user has increased decreased in the last two years, as I would
| not be surprised if it had increased at a much faster pace than
| in the past.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| > the barrier to entry to build a frontend gets lower
|
| My impression is the opposite: frontend/UI/UX is where the
| moat is growing because that's where users will (1) consume
| ads (2) orchestrate their agents.
| mmasu wrote:
| I agree with you - we are saying the same thing, by
| restricting their API or making less developer friendly,
| they want you to be captive in their UI. This might not be
| true for Anthropic or OpenAI - another child commenter made
| a comment about ads in CLI, I would not be surprised if in
| a while we will have product placements in LLM responses
| exactly as we have it in movies - not a plain ad but just a
| slightly less subliminal suggestion.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| I don't think we'll get ads in the enterprise version.
| There will be ads for individuals and usual business
| pricing for businesses.
|
| I just think that OAI/Anthropic will try to keep both
| types of users locked into their walled garden via the
| UI.
|
| The APIs may have a future, but at our own peril and zero
| guarantees. It's a tool to create traction and
| demonstrate capabilities to devs.
| tomasphan wrote:
| It's objectively easier to build a frontend now and
| therefore that moat is disappearing. What you can argue is
| the moat is in incumbent advantage at the UI layer, not the
| UI itself.
| admx8 wrote:
| What ad revenue? In their terminal cli?
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| This is sort of true!
|
| Spotify in particular is just patently the very worst. They
| released an amazing and delightful app sdk, allowing for making
| really neat apps in the desktop app in 2011. Then cancelled it
| by 2014. It feels like their entire ecosystem has only ever
| gone downhill. Their car device was cancelled nearly
| immediately. Every API just gets worse and worse. Remarkable to
| see a company have only ever such a downward slide. The Spotify
| Graveyard is, imo, a place of singnificantly less honor than
| the Google Graveyard.
| https://web.archive.org/web/20141104154131/https://gigaom.co...
|
| But also, I feel like this broad repulsive trend is such an
| untenable position now that AI is here. Trying to make your app
| an isolated disconnected service is a suicide pact. Some
| companies will figure out how to defend their moat, but
| generally people are going to prefer apps that allow them to
| use the app as they want, increasingly, over time. And they are
| not going to be stopped even if you do try to control terms!
|
| Were I a smart engaged company, I'd be trying to build WebMCP
| access as soon as possible. Adoption will be slow, this isn't
| happening fast, but people who can mix human + agent activity
| on your site are going to be delighted by the experience, and
| that you will spread!
|
| WebMCP is better IMHO than conventional APIs because it layers
| into the experience you are already having. It's not a separate
| channel; it can build and use the session state of your
| browsing to do the things. That's a huge boon for users.
| TZubiri wrote:
| But this ban is precisely on circumventing the API.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| APIs leak profit and control vs their counterpart
| SDK/platforms. Service providers use them to bootstrap
| traffic/brand, but will always do everything they can to reduce
| their usage or sunset them entirely if possible.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| Given the Cambridge Analytica scandal, I don't take too much
| issue to FB making their APIs a little tougher to use
| windexh8er wrote:
| Everyone has heard the word "enshittification" at this point
| and this falls in line. But if you haven't read the book [0]
| it's a great deep dive into the topical area.
|
| But the real issue is that these companies, once they have any
| market leverage, do things in their best interest to protect
| the little bit of moat they've acquired.
|
| [0] https://www.mcdbooks.com/books/enshittification
| baby wrote:
| Not sure how relevant this comment is
| nananana9 wrote:
| See [1] for a solution.
|
| [1]
| https://i.programmerhumor.io/2025/03/778c56a79115a582edb9949...
| BoredPositron wrote:
| There is no moat except market saturation and gate keeping for
| most platforms.
| xnx wrote:
| What is given can be taken away. Despite the extra difficult
| this is why unofficial methods (e.g. scraping) are often
| superior. Soon we'll see more fully independent data scraping
| done by cameras and microphones.
| canibal wrote:
| You're not wrong. Reddit & Elon started it and everyone laughed
| at them and made a stink. But my guess is the "last dying gasp
| of the freeloader" /s wasn't enough to dissuade other companies
| from jumping on the bandwagon, cause fiduciary responsibility
| to shareholders reigns supreme at the end of the day.
| endymi0n wrote:
| ,,Open Access APIs are like a subway. You use them to capture a
| market and then you get out."
|
| -- Erdogan, probably.
| systemBuilder wrote:
| Google now wants $30,000 a month for customsearch (minimum
| charge), up from 1c per search or thereabouts in January
| 2026...
| DataSpace wrote:
| You're correct in your observations. In the age of agents, the
| walls are going up. APIs are no longer a value-add; they're a
| liability. MCP and the equivalent will be the norm interface.
| IMO.
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| It's because AI is being trained on all of these APIs and the
| platforms are at risk of losing what makes them valuable (their
| data). So they have to take the API down or charge enough that
| it wouldn't be worth it for an AI.
| mns wrote:
| Does this mean that in an absurd way you can get banned if you
| use CodexBar https://github.com/steipete/CodexBar to keep track
| of your usage? It does use your credentials to fetch the usage,
| could they be so extreme that this would be an issue?
| mchaver wrote:
| !Quick reminder! We are in the golden era of big company
| programming agents. Enjoy it while you can because it is likely
| going to get worse over time. Hopefully, there were will be
| competitive open source agents and some benevolent nerds put
| together a reasonable service. Otherwise I can see companies
| investing in their own AI infrastructure and developers who build
| their own systems becoming the top performers.
|
| This is the VC funded startup playbook. It has been repeated many
| times, but maybe for the younger crowd it is new. Start a new
| service that is relatively permissive, then gradually restrict
| APIs and permissions. Finally, start throwing in ads and/or
| making it more expensive to use. Part of the reason is in the
| beginning they are trying to get as many users as possible and
| burning VC money. Then once the honey moon is over, they need to
| make a profit so they cut back on services, nerf stuff, increase
| prices and start adding ads.
| ramon156 wrote:
| This month was the first month i spent >$100 on it and it didn't
| feel like it was money well spent. I feel borderline scammed.
|
| I'm just going to accept that my EUR15 (which with vat becomes
| EUR21) is just enough usage to automate some boring tasks.
| atla_ wrote:
| at least there seems to be some clarification regarding Agent SDK
| ... unclear whats happening with OpenClaw
| https://x.com/atla_/status/2024399329310511426
| kosolam wrote:
| May we still use the agent sdk for our own private use with the
| max account? I'm a bit confused.
| ksec wrote:
| In the old days, think Gmail, or before the "unlimited" marketing
| scam. People genuinely are smart enough to know they are doing
| something that they are not suppose to be doing. Even Pirating
| software, say Windows or Adobe. I mean who can afford those when
| they were young?
|
| Things get banned, but that is OK along as they give us weeks or
| days to prep for alternative solution. Users ( Not Customers )
| are happy with it. Too bad, the good days are over.
|
| Somewhere along the line, no just in software but even in
| politics, the whole world on entitlement. They somehow believe
| they deserve this, what they were doing were wrong but if it is
| allowed in the first place they should remain allowed to do so.
|
| Judging from account opening time and comments we can also tell
| the age group and which camp they are on.
| wiseowise wrote:
| I don't understand which camp are you on?
| NamlchakKhandro wrote:
| The one you're not in
| wiseowise wrote:
| Who pissed in your coffee?
| gdorsi wrote:
| I think that their main problem is that they don't have enough
| resources to serve too many users, so they resort to this kind of
| limitations to keep Claude usage under control. Otherwise I
| wouldn't be able to explain a commercial move that limits their
| offer so strongly in comparison to competitors.
| cedws wrote:
| The reason I find this so egregious is because I don't want to
| use Claude Code! It's complete rubbish, completely sidelines
| security, and nobody seems to care. So I'm forced to use their
| slop if I want to use Claude models without getting a wallet
| emptying API bill? Forget it, I will use Codex or Gemini.
|
| Claude Code is not the apex. We're still collectively figuring
| out the best way to use models in software, this TOS change kills
| innovation.
| giamma wrote:
| So even simple apps that are just code usage monitors are banned?
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Always have been, unless you're using the API meant for apps.
|
| But if you're doing something very basic, you might be able to
| slop together a tool that does local inferencing based on a
| small, local model instead, alleviating the need to call Claude
| entirely.
| avereveard wrote:
| Too bad will stick with codex as thinker and glm5 as hands, at a
| fraction of the cost.
| miroljub wrote:
| Anthropic is dead. Long live open platforms and open-weight
| models. Why would I need Claude if I can get Minimax, Kimi, and
| Glm for the fraction of the price?
| piokoch wrote:
| To get comparable results you need to run those models on at
| least prosumer hardware and it seems that two beef-up Mac
| Studios are the minimum. Which means that instead of buying
| this hardware you can purchase Claude, Codex and many other
| subscriptions for next 20 years.
| miroljub wrote:
| Or you purchase a year's worth of almost unlimited MiniMax
| coding plan for a price you'd pay for 15 days of limited
| Claude usage.
|
| And as a bonus, you can choose your harness. You don't have
| to suffer CC.
|
| And if something better appears tomorrow, you switch your
| model, while still using your harness of choice.
| small_model wrote:
| And do you think Claude won't have released a few models by
| then, which will be way ahead of any open model? you are
| paying for SOTA.
| ac29 wrote:
| Being 3-6 months behind SOTA may be less of a hindrance
| than not being able to use the tools you want, though.
| gregjw wrote:
| And because of this i'll obviously opt to not subscribe to a
| Claude plan, when i can just use something like Copilot and use
| the models that way via OpenCode.
| anhner wrote:
| how comparable are the usage limits?
| arjunchint wrote:
| Honestly seeing throttling of AI usuage across all providers:
|
| - Google reduced AI Studio's free rate limits by 1/10th
|
| - Perplexity imposing rate limits, card filing to continue free
| subscriptions
|
| - Now Anthropic as well
|
| There has been a false narrative that AI will get cheaper and
| more ubiquitous, but model providers have been stuck in a race
| for ever more capabilities and performance at higher costs.
| lvl155 wrote:
| People on here are acting like school children over this. It's
| their product that they spent billions to make. Yet here we are
| complaining about why they should let you use third party
| products specifically made to compete against Anthropic.
|
| You can still simply pay for API.
| seyz wrote:
| This is how you gift wrap the agentic era to the open source
| chinese LLMs. devs don't need the best model, they need one
| without lawyers attached.
| 4d4m wrote:
| introducing moderation, steerage and censorship in your LLM is
| a great way to not even show up to the table with a competitive
| product. builders have woken up to this reality and are
| demanding local models
| cranberryturkey wrote:
| They really ficked up by not embracing openclaw now I use codex
| 5.3
| saneshark wrote:
| OpenClaw, NanoClaw, et al all use AgentSDK which will from now on
| be forbidden.
|
| They are literally alienating a large percentage of OpenClaw,
| NanoClaw, PicoClaw, customers because those customers will surely
| not be willing to pay API pricing, which is at least 6-10x Max
| Plan pricing (for my usage).
|
| This isn't too surprising to me since they probably have a direct
| competitor to openclaw et al in the works right now, but until
| then I am cancelling my subscription and porting my nanoclaw fork
| with mem0 integration to work with OpenAI instead.
|
| Thats not a "That'll teach 'em" statement, it is just my own cost
| optimization. I am quite fond of Anthropic's coding models and
| might still subscribe again at the $20 level, but they just
| priced me out for personal assistant, research, and 90% of my
| token use case.
| Tepix wrote:
| What does Anthropic have to gain from users who use a very high
| amount of tokens for OpenClaw, NanoClaw etc and pay them only
| $20?
| neya wrote:
| Anthropic is just doing this out of spite. They had a real
| scenario to win mindshare and marketshare and they fucked up
| instead. They could have done what Open AI did - hired the
| OpenClaw/d founder. Instead, they sent him a legal notice for
| trademark violation. And now they're just pissed he works for
| their biggest competitor. Throw all tantrums you want, you're on
| the wrong side of this one, Anthropic.
| skerit wrote:
| Agreed! I don't understand how so many people on here seem to
| think it is completely reasonable for Anthropic to act like
| this.
| neya wrote:
| Apple/OpenAI = god
|
| Anthropic = good
|
| Google = evil
|
| That's pretty much HN crowd logic to be honest
| OJFord wrote:
| Seems fair enough really, not that I like it either, but they
| could easily _not_ offer the plans and only have API pricing.
| Makes it make more sense to have the plans be 'the Claude Code
| pricing' really.
| qwertox wrote:
| It's a bit unclear to me. I'm building a system around the Claude
| Agent SDK. Am I allowed to use it or not? Apparently not.
| small_model wrote:
| Not sure what the problem is, I am on Max and use Claude Code,
| never get usage issues, that's what I pay for and want that to
| always be an option (capped monthly cost). For other uses it
| makes sense to go through their API service. This is less
| confusing and provides clarity for users, if you are a first
| party user use Claude's tools to access's the models otherwise
| API
| troyvit wrote:
| I think I've made two good decisions in my life. The first was
| switching entirely to Linux around '05 even though it was a giant
| pain in the ass that was constantly behind the competition in
| terms of stability and hardware support. It took awhile but wow
| no regrets.
|
| The second appears to be hitching my wagon to Mistral even though
| it's apparently nowhere as powerful or featureful as the big
| guys. But do you know how many times they've screwed me over? Not
| once.
|
| Maybe it's my use cases that make this possible. I definitely
| modified my behavior to accommodate Linux.
| WXLCKNO wrote:
| They're too small to screw you over. But you've got more time
| until they do at least.
| whs wrote:
| The analogy I like to use when people say "I paid" is that you
| can't pay for a buffet then get all the food take-home for free.
| rglullis wrote:
| I just cancelled my Pro subscription. Turns out that Ollama Cloud
| with GLM-5 and qwen-coder-next are very close in quality to Opus,
| I never hit their rate limits even with two sessions running the
| whole day and there zero advantage for me to use Claude Code
| compared to OpenCode.
| obsidianbases1 wrote:
| Product usage subsidized by company, $100. Users inevitably
| figure out how to steal those subsidies, agents go brrrrr. Users
| mad that subsidy stealing gets cut off and completely ignore why
| they need to rely on subsidies in the first place, priceless.
| okokwhatever wrote:
| You guys are acting like coke addicts... dont you see?
| bluelightning2k wrote:
| Reading these comments aren't we missing the obvious?
|
| Claude Code is a lock in, where Anthropic takes all the value.
|
| If the frontend and API are decoupled, they are one benchmark
| away from losing half their users.
|
| Some other motivations: they want to capture the value. Even if
| it's unprofitable they can expect it to become vastly profitable
| as inference cost drops, efficiency improves, competitors die out
| etc. Or worst case build the dominant brand then reduce the
| quotas.
|
| Then there's brand - when people talk about OpenCode they will
| occasionally specify "OpenCode (with Claude)" but frequently
| won't.
|
| Then platform - at any point they can push any other service.
|
| Look at the Apple comparison. Yes, the hardware and software are
| tuned and tested together. The analogy here is training the
| specific harness,caching the system prompt, switching models,
| etc.
|
| But Apple also gets to charge Google $billions for being the
| default search engine. They get to sell apps. They get to sell
| cloud storage, and even somehow a TV. That's all super
| profitable.
|
| At some point Claude Code will become an ecosystem with preferred
| cloud and database vendors, observability, code review agents,
| etc.
| thenaturalist wrote:
| ???
|
| Use an API Key and there's no problem.
|
| They literally put that in plain words in the ToS.
| 9cb14c1ec0 wrote:
| Using an API key is orders of magnitude more expensive.
| That's the difference here. The Claude Code subscriptions are
| being heavily subsidized by Anthropic, which is why people
| want to use their subscriptions in everything else.
| naveen99 wrote:
| They are subsidized by people who underuse their
| subscriptions. There must be a lot of them.
| noosphr wrote:
| There is a lot more vc cash.
| tom_m wrote:
| There are. It's like healthcare, the healthy don't use it
| as much and pay for the sick.
| bloppe wrote:
| I think the people who use more than they pay for vastly
| outnumber those who pay for more than they use. It takes
| intention to sign up (not the default, like health care)
| and once you do, you quickly get in the habit of using
| it.
| naveen99 wrote:
| Of course, like gym memberships. VC's subsidizing
| powerlifters...
| canibal wrote:
| This move feels poorly timed. Their latest ad campaigns
| about not having ads, and the goodwill they'd earned
| lately in my book was just decimated by this. I'm sure
| I'm not the only one who's still just dipping their toes
| into the AI pool. And am very much a user that under
| utilizes what I pay for because of that. I have several
| clients who are scrambling to get on board with cowork.
| Eliminating API usage for subscription members right
| before a potentially large wave of turnover not only
| chills that motivation it signals a lack of faith in
| their marketing, which from my POV, put out the only AI
| super bowl campaign to escape virtually unscathed.
| mcherm wrote:
| > the goodwill they'd earned lately in my book was just
| decimated by this
|
| That sounds absurd to me. Committing to not building in
| advertising is very important and fundamental to me.
| Asking people who pay for a personal subscription rather
| than paying by the API call to use that subscription
| themselves sounds to me like it is. Just clarifying the
| social compact that was already implied.
|
| I _WANT_ to be able to pay a subscription price. Rather
| like the way I pay for my internet connectivity with a
| fixed monthly bill. If I had to pay per packet
| transmitted, I would have to stop and think about it
| every time I decided to download a large file or watch a
| movie. Sure, someone with extremely heavy usage might not
| be able to use a normal consumer internet subscription;
| but it works fine for my personal use. I like having the
| option for my AI usage to operate the same way.
| skeledrew wrote:
| The problem with fixed subscriptions in this model is
| that the service has an actual consumption cost. For
| something like internet service, the cost is primarily
| maintenance, unless the infrastructure is being expanded.
| But using LLMs is more like using water, where the more
| you use it, the greater the depletion of a resource
| (electricity in this case, which is likely being produced
| with fossil fuel which has to be sourced and transported,
| etc). Anthropic et al would be setting themselves up for
| a fall if they allow wholesale use at a fixed price.
| thenaturalist wrote:
| Be the economics as they may, there is no lock in as OP
| claims.
|
| This statement is plainly wrong.
|
| If you boost and praise AI usage, you have to face the real
| cost.
|
| Can't have your cake and eat it, too.
| anonym29 wrote:
| The people mad about this feel they are entitled to the
| heavily subsidized usage in any context they want, not in the
| context explicitly allowed by the subsidizer.
|
| It's kind of like a new restaurant started handing out
| coupons for "90% off", wanting to attract diners to the
| restaurant, customers started coming in and ordering bulk
| meals then immediately packaging them in tupperware
| containers and taking it home (violating the spirit of the
| arrangement, even if not the letter of the arrangement), so
| the restaurant changed the terms on the discount to say
| "limited to in-store consumption only, not eligible for take-
| home meals", and instead of still being grateful that they're
| getting food for 90% off, the cheapskate customers are
| getting angry that they're no longer allowed to exploit the
| massive subsidy however they want.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Anthropic is going to be on the losing side with this. Models
| are too fungible, it's really about vibes, and Claude Code is
| far too fat and opinionated. Ironically, they're holding back
| innovation, and it's burning the loyalty the model team is
| earning.
| eshaham78 wrote:
| The competition angle is interesting - we're already seeing
| models like Step-3.5-Flash advertise compatibility with
| Claude Code's harness as a feature. If Anthropic's
| restrictions push developers toward more open alternatives,
| they might inadvertently accelerate competitor adoption. The
| real question is whether the subscription model economics can
| sustain the development costs long-term while competitors
| offer more flexible terms.
| tom_m wrote:
| I thought Anthropic would fall after OpenAI, but they just
| might be racing to the bottom faster here.
| burnte wrote:
| Maybe for coding but the number of normie users flooding to
| Claude over OAI is huge.
| empath75 wrote:
| I think you have it exactly backwards, and that "owning the
| stack" is going to be important. Yes the harness is
| important, yes the model is important, but developing the
| harness and model together is going to pay huge dividends.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| That was true more mid last year, but now we have a fairly
| standard flow and set of core tools, as well as better
| general tool calling support. The reality is that in most
| cases harnesses with fewer tools and smaller system prompts
| outperform.
|
| The advances in the Claude Code harness have been more
| around workflow automation rather than capability
| improvements, and truthfully workflows are very user-
| dependent, so an opinionated harness is only ever going to
| be "right" for a narrow segment of users, and it's going to
| annoy a lot of others. This is happening now, but the sub
| subsidy washes out a lot of the discontent.
| quikoa wrote:
| If Claude Code is so much better why not make users pay to
| use it instead of forcing it on subscribers?
| popcorncowboy wrote:
| You're right, because owning the stack means better options
| for making tons of money. Owning the stack is
| _demonstrably_ not required for good agents, there are
| several excellent (frankly way better than ol ' Claude
| Code) harnesses in the wild (which is in part why so many
| people are so annoyed by Anthropic about this move - being
| forced back onto their shitty cli tool).
| athrowaway3z wrote:
| https://mariozechner.at/posts/2025-11-30-pi-coding-agent/
|
| This coding agent is minimal, and it completely changed how
| I used models and Claude's cli now feels like extremely
| slow bloat.
|
| I'd not be surprised if you're right in that this is
| companies / management will prefer to "pay for a complete
| package" approach for a long while, but power-users should
| not care for the model providers.
|
| I have like 100 lines of code to get me a tmux controls &
| semaphore_wait extension in the pi harness. That gave me a
| better orchestration scheme a month ago when I adopted it,
| than Claude has right now.
|
| As far as I can tell, the more you try to train your model
| on your harness, the worse they get. Bitter lesson #2932.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| > I'd not be surprised if you're right in that this is
| companies / management will prefer to "pay for a complete
| package" approach for a long while
|
| I mean I suspect for corporate usage Microsoft already
| has this wrapped up with Microsoft & GitHub Co-Pilots.
| AJ007 wrote:
| OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft certainly desire
| path dependence but the very nature of LLMs and
| intelligence itself might make that hard unless they can
| develop models which truly are differentiated (and
| better) from the rest. The Chinese open source models
| catching up make me suspect that won't happen. The models
| will just be a commodity. There is a countdown clock for
| when we can get Opus 4.6+ level models and its measured
| in months.
|
| The reason these LLM tools being good is they can "just
| do stuff." Anthropic bans third party subscription auth?
| I'll just have my other tool use Claude Code in tmux. If
| third party agents can be banned from doing stuff (some
| advanced always on spyware or whatever), then a large
| chunk of the promise of AI is dead.
|
| Amp just announced today they are dumping IDE
| integration. Models seem to run better on bare-bones
| software like Pi, and you can add or remove stuff on the
| fly because the whole things open source. The software
| writes itself. Is Microsoft just trying to cram a whole
| new paradigm in to an old package? Kind of like a
| computer printer. It will be a big business, but it isn't
| the future.
|
| At scale, the end provider ultimately has to serve the
| inference -- they need the hardware, data centers & the
| electricity to power those data centers. Someone like
| Microsoft can also provide a SLA and price such
| appropriately. I'll avoid a $200/month customer
| acquisition cost rant, but one user, running a bunch of
| sub agents, can spend a ton of money. If you don't own a
| business or funding source, the way state of the art LLMs
| are being used today is totally uneconomical (easy $200+
| an hour at API prices.)
|
| 36+ months out, if they overbuild the data centers and
| the revenue doesn't come in like OpenAI & Anthropic are
| forecasting, there will be a glut of hardware. If that's
| the case I'd expect local model usage will scale up too
| and it will get more difficult for enterprise providers.
|
| (Nothing is certain but some things have become a bit
| more obvious than they were 6 months ago.)
| AJ007 wrote:
| Thinking about this a little more -> "nature of LLMs and
| intelligence"
|
| Bloated apps are a material disadvantage. If I'm in a
| competitive industry that slow down alone can mean
| failure. The only thing Claude Code has going for it now
| is the loss making $200 month subsidy. Is there any
| conceivable GUI overlay that Anthropic or OpenAI can add
| to make their software better than the current terminal
| apps? Sure, for certain edge cases, but then why isn't
| the user building those themselves? 24 months ago we
| could have said that's too hard, but that isn't the case
| in 2026.
|
| Microsoft added all of this stuff in to Windows, and it's
| a 5 alarm fire. Stuff that used to be usable is a mess
| and really slow. Running linux with Claude Code, Codex,
| or Pi is clearly superior to having a Windows device with
| neither (if it wasn't possible to run these in Windows;
| just a hypothetical.)
|
| From the business/enterprise perspective - there is no
| single most important thing, but having an environment
| that is reliable and predictable is high up there. Monday
| morning, an the Anthropic API endpoint is down, uh oh! In
| the longer term, businesses will really want to control
| both the model and the software that interfaces with it.
|
| If the end game is just the same as talking to the Star
| Trek computer, and competitors are narrowing gaps rather
| than widening them (e.g. Anthropic and OpenAI releases
| models minutes from each other now, Chinese frontier
| models getting closer in capability not further), then it
| is really hard to see how either company achieves a
| vertical lock down.
|
| We could actually move down the stack, and then the real
| problem for OpenAI and Anthropic is nVidia. 2030, the
| data center expansion is bust, nVidia starts selling all
| of these cards to consumers directly and has a huge
| financial incentive to make sure the performant local
| models exist. Everyone in the semiconductor supply chain
| below nvidia only cares about keeping sales going, so it
| stops with them.
|
| Maybe nvidia is the real winner?
|
| Also is it just me or does it now feel like hn comments
| are just talking to a future LLM?
| keeganpoppen wrote:
| the fat and opinionated has always been true for them
| (especially compared to openai), and to all appearances
| remains a feature rather than a bug. i can't say the approach
| makes my heart sing, personally, but it absolutely has
| augured tremendous success among thought workers / the
| intelligensia
| rurp wrote:
| I don't think many are confused about why Anthropic wants to do
| this. The crux is that they appear to be making these changes
| solely for their own benefit at the expense of their users and
| people are upset.
|
| There are parallels to the silly Metaverse hype wave from a few
| years ago. At the time I saw a surprising number of people
| defending the investment saying it was important for Facebook
| to control their own platform. Well sure it's beneficial for
| _Facebook_ to control a platform, but that benefit is purely
| for the company and if anything it would harm current and
| future users. Unsurprisingly, the pitch to please think of this
| giant corporation 's needs wasn't a compelling pitch in the
| end.
| mccoyb wrote:
| "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 ... there will
| be no generalist take-all model, I just don't believe RL
| scaling works like that.
|
| I'm not convinced that a single company can own the best
| performing model in all categories, I'm not even sure the
| economics make it feasible.
|
| Good for us, of course.
| thepasch wrote:
| > 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 does - I'll keep using pi. If
| they think they need to ban me for that, then, oh well. I'll
| just _continue_ to keep using pi. Just no longer with Claude
| models.
| ksec wrote:
| >Claude Code is a lock in, where Anthropic takes all the value.
|
| I wouldn't _all_ the value, but how else are you going to run
| the business? Allow other to take all the value you provide?
| marscopter wrote:
| > Reading these comments aren't we missing the obvious?
|
| AI companies: "You think you own that code?"
| chasd00 wrote:
| > At some point Claude Code will become an ecosystem with
| preferred cloud and database vendors, observability, code
| review agents, etc.
|
| i've been wondering how anthropic is going to survive long
| term. If they could build out an infrastructure and services to
| complete with the hyperscalers but surfaced as a tool for
| claude to use then maybe. You pay Anthropic $20/user/month for
| ClaudeCode but also $100k/month to run your applications.
| chazftw wrote:
| You need a company with a market cap in the trillions to succeed
| here
| tallesborges92 wrote:
| Thanks codex allows using their subscription and it's working
| very well for me. I will not miss anything from Anthropic. BTW
| bad move, shame on you
| stiiv wrote:
| I'm wondering: why now, in early 2026? Why not last year? Why not
| in July? What changed? What does this teach us about Anthropic
| and what can we infer about their competition?
| ac29 wrote:
| Especially how generous Anthropic has been recently with
| subscribers - extra usage in December, $50 credit earlier this
| month, $20 subscription getting access to Opus.
|
| It suggests to me Anthropic is less concerned with the
| financial impact of letting subscribers use alternative tools
| and more concerned with creating lock in to their products and
| subscriptions. It very well might backfire though, I was not
| considering alternative models yesterday, but today I am
| actively exploring other options and considering cancelling my
| sub. I've been using my subscription primarily through pi
| recently, so if they aren't interested in me as a customer,
| pretty much everyone else is.
| infecto wrote:
| Am I the only one perplexed why folks find this stunning or
| meaningful. While LLMs are novel and different in that the
| subscription gives you access to compute, it does not feel
| foreign from the subscription, free or paid, landscape. I cannot
| recall many (if any?) companies that would freely let you use
| compute, private internal APIs or anything similar just because
| you have a login. Maybe I come from a different era of tech but
| it seems both reasonable and not surprising.
|
| Why now? It would not surprise me that this was simply an after
| thought and once it hit critical mass (opencode) they locked it
| down.
| Frannky wrote:
| I feel like they want to be like Apple, and open-code + open-
| source models are Linux. The thing is, Apple is (for some) way
| better in user experience and quality. I think they can pull it
| off only if they keep their distance from the others. But if
| Google/Chinese models become as good as Claude, then there won't
| be a reason -- at least for me -- to pay 10x for the product
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| Hot take: trying to restrict what front end people use to access
| your service is almost always an anti-competitive, anti-consumer
| freedom move which should be legally prohibited for those
| reasons. (Not just for AI, I'm talking about any and all cloud
| services.)
|
| Regarding consumer freedom, I believe software running on user
| machines should serve the interests of the user, not the company
| who wrote the software or anyone else for that matter. Trying to
| force users to run a particular client written by your company
| violates this principle.
|
| Regarding competition, forcing users to run a particular client
| is a form of anti competitive bundling, a naked attempt to
| prevent alternative clients from being able to enter the market
| unless they are able to build a competing backed as well. Such
| artificial "moats" are great for companies but harmful to
| consumers.
| dgdosen wrote:
| Is it me, or will this just speed up the timeline where a 'good
| enough' open model (Qwen? Deepseek? - I'm sure the Chinese will
| see a value in undermining OpenAI/Anthropic/Google) combined with
| good enough/cheap hardware (10x inference improvement in a M7
| Macbook Air?) makes running something like opencode code locally
| a no brainer?
| irishcoffee wrote:
| People running models locally has always been the scare for the
| sama's of the world. "Wait, I don't need you to generate these
| responses for me? I can get the same results myself?"
| trillic wrote:
| He can't buy all the RAM
| ac29 wrote:
| The good enough alternative models are here or will be soon,
| depending on your definition of good enough. MiniMax-M2.5 looks
| really competitive and its a tenth of the cost of Sonnet-4.6
| (they also have subscriptions).
|
| Running locally is going to require a lot of memory, compute,
| and energy for the foreseeable future which makes it really
| hard to compete with ~$20/mo subscriptions.
| kevstev wrote:
| Personally I am already there- I go to Qwen and Deepseek
| locally via ollama for my dumb questions and small tasks, and
| only go to Claude if they fail. I do this partially because I
| am just so tired of everything I do over a network being
| logged, tracked, mined and monetized, and also partially
| because I would like my end state to be using all local tools,
| at least for personal stuff.
| shortsunblack wrote:
| Anthropic has no authority to do as such. Users and third apps
| are protected by interoperability exceptions found in copyright
| case law.
|
| Trying to prevent competitors from interoperating with the
| service also may be construed as anticompetitive behaviour.
|
| The implementation details of an authentication process do not
| beget legal privileges to be a monopolist. What an absurd
| thought.
| bad_haircut72 wrote:
| This is a signal that everyone making AI apps should build on
| Gemini/OpenAI, and since there is a dance of code and model to
| get good results, inevitably Anthropic are now writing themselves
| out of being the backend for everyone elses AI apps going forward
| butlike wrote:
| Sounds like a panicking company grasping and clawing for a moat
| lucasyvas wrote:
| Isn't this flawed anyway? If an application communicates with
| Claude Code over ACP (like Zed), it works fine?
|
| Instead of using SDKs, this will just shift the third party
| clients to use ACP to get around it - Claude Code is still under
| the hood but you're using a different interface.
|
| This all seems pretty idiotic on their part - I know why they're
| trying it but it won't work. There will always be someone working
| around it.
| thepasch wrote:
| The people who they're going to piss off the most with this are
| the exact people who are the _least_ susceptible to their walled
| garden play. If you're using OpenCode, you're not going to stop
| using it because Anthropic tells you to; you're just going to
| think 'fuck Anthropic', press whatever you've bound "switch
| model" to, _and just continue using OpenCode_. I think most power
| users have realized by now that Claude Code is sub-par software
| and probably actively _holding back_ the models because Anthropic
| thinks they can't work right without 20,000 tokens worth of
| system prompt (my own system prompt has around 1,000 and
| outperforms CC at every test I throw it at).
|
| They're losing the exact crowd that they _want_ in their corner
| because it's the crowd that's far more likely to be making the
| decisions when companies start pivoting their workflows en-masse.
| Keep pissing on them and they'll remember the wet when the time
| comes to decide whom to give a share from the potentially massive
| company's potentially massive coffers.
| ogimagemaker wrote:
| The fundamental tension here is that AI companies are selling
| compute at a loss to capture market share, while users are trying
| to maximize value from their subscriptions.
|
| From a backend perspective, the subscription model creates
| perverse incentives. Heavy users (like developers running agentic
| workflows) consume far more compute than casual users, but pay
| the same price. Third-party tools amplify this asymmetry.
|
| Anthropic's move is economically rational but strategically
| risky. Models are increasingly fungible - Gemini 3.1 and Claude
| 4.5 produce similar results for most tasks. The lock-in isn't the
| model; it's the tooling ecosystem.
|
| By forcing users onto Claude Code exclusively, they're betting
| their tooling moat is stronger than competitor models. Given how
| quickly open-source harnesses like pi have caught up, that's a
| bold bet.
| chasd00 wrote:
| is the tooling moat and secret sauce in Claude Code the client?
| That's super risky given the language it was written in (
| javascript ). I bet Claude Code itself can probably reverse
| engineer the minimized javascript, trace the logic, and then
| name variables something sensible for readability. Then the
| secret sauce is exposed for all to see.
|
| Also, can you not setup a proxy for the cert and a packet
| sniffer to watch whatever ClaudeCode is doing with respect to
| API access? To me, if you have "secret sauce" you have to keep
| it server side and make the client as dumb as possible.
| Especially if your client is executes as Javascript.
| blueprint wrote:
| Why do I get the nagging suspicion their 1 million LOC codebase
| is backdoored?
| techgnosis wrote:
| This feels perfectly justifiable to me. The subscription plans
| are super cheap and if they insist you use their tool I
| understand. Ya'll seem a bit entitled if I'm being honest.
| Ghost609 wrote:
| For what it's worth, I built an alternative specifically because
| of the ToS risk. GhostClaw uses proper API keys stored in
| AES-256-GCM + Argon2id encrypted vault -no OAuth session tokens,
| no subscription credentials, no middleman. Skills are signed with
| Ed25519 before execution. Code runs in a Landlock + seccomp
| kernel sandbox. If your key gets compromised you rotate it; if a
| session token gets compromised in someone else's app you might
| not even know.
|
| t's open source, one Rust binary, ~6MB.
| https://github.com/Patrickschell609/ghostclaw
| 0x500x79 wrote:
| The telemetry from claude code must be immensely valuable for
| training. Using it is training your replacement!
| kevincloudsec wrote:
| the subscription already has usage caps. if the caps are the
| caps, why does the client matter. if the caps aren't actually the
| caps, that's a different conversation.
| 2001zhaozhao wrote:
| There is a new breed of agent-agnostic tools that call the Claude
| Code CLI as if it's an API (I'm currently trying out vibe-
| kanban).
|
| This could be used to adhere to Claude's TOS while still allowing
| the user to switch AI companies at a moment's notice.
|
| Right now there's limited customizability in this approach, but I
| think it's not far-fetched to see FAR more integrated solutions
| in the future if the lock-in trend continues. For example: one
| MCP that you can configure into a coding agent like Claude Code
| that overrides its entire behavior (tools, skills, etc.) to a
| different unified open-source system. Think something similar to
| the existing IntelliJ IDEA's MCP that gives a separate file edit
| tool, etc. than the one the agent comes with.
|
| Illustration of what i'm talking about:
|
| - You install Claude Code with no configuration
|
| - Then you install the meta-agent framework
|
| - With one command the meta-agent MCP is installed in Claude
| Code, built-in tools are disabled via permissions override
|
| - You access the meta-agent through a different UI (similar to
| vibe-kanban's web UI)
|
| - Everything you do gets routed directly to Claude Code, using
| your Claude subscription legally. (Input-level features like
| commands get resolved by meta-agent UI before being sent to
| claude code)
|
| - Claude Code must use the tools and skills directly from meta-
| agent MCP as instructed in the prompt, and because its own tools
| are permission denied (result: very good UI integration with the
| meta-agent UI)
|
| - This would also work with any other CLI coding agent (Codex,
| Gemini CLI, Copilot CLI etc.) should they start getting ideas of
| locking users in
|
| - If Claude Code rug-pulls subscription quotas, just switch to a
| competitor instantly
|
| All it requires is a CLI coding agent with MCP support, and the
| TOS allowing automatic use of its UI (disallowing that would be
| massive hypocrisy as the AI companies themselves make computer
| use agents that allow automatic use of other apps' UI)
| chasd00 wrote:
| Could you think of it as ClaudeCode is just a tool used by
| another agent and that other agent is instructed to use the
| ClaudeCode tool for everything? Makes sense, i don't see why we
| can't have agents use these agents for us, just like the AI
| companies are proposing to use their agents in place of
| everything else we currently use.
|
| Also, why not distribute implementation documentation so
| claudecode can write OpenCode itself and use your oauth token.
| Now you have opencode for personal use, you didn't get it from
| anywhere your agent created it for you and only you.
| gandreani wrote:
| This is funny. This change actually pushes me into using a
| competitor more (https://www.kimi.com). I was trying out this
| provider with oh-my-pi (https://github.com/can1357/oh-my-pi) and
| was lamenting that it didn't have web search implemented using
| kimi.
|
| Well a kind contributor just added that feature specifically
| because of this ban(https://github.com/can1357/oh-my-
| pi/pull/110).
|
| I'm happy as a clam now. Yay for competition!
| tstrimple wrote:
| The entitlement from many HN posters is astounding. "Companies
| must provide services in the way I want billed how I want and
| with absolutely zero restrictions at all!" Get over yourselves.
| You're not that important. Don't like it. Don't use it. Seems
| pretty straightforward.
| motbus3 wrote:
| That's should be illegal. They used the excuse it was there to
| take or just burnt evidence literally of pirated books.
|
| What they are doing is implicitly changing the contract of usage
| of their services.
| tmo9d wrote:
| Claude Code is a lock-in play. Use Cursor or OpenCode.
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