I'm really struggling to understand how Anthropic is benefited by not allowing this. Its bad PR for no good reason. The only thing I can figure is that Claude Code is hemorrhaging money, they're too afraid to actually enforce reasonable token limits, and the only thing that's keeping it from totally bankrupting the company tomorrow is: controlling the harness and having the harness dynamically route toward Haiku or Sonnet over Opus when Opus is overloaded, without telling the user. Or maybe, they're extremely interested in observability of the exact prompts users are typing, and third party harnesses muck that data in with the rest of the context that gets sent, so its harder to detangle the prompt from the noise?
Like, in any event, I seriously get the feeling that Anthropic doesn't just not care about their users, but actively dislikes them. Like, they must be losing so much money on each Claude Code subscriber that if a million people all said "we're switching" they just wouldn't care. I get this vibe even from watching videos of people working on the Antrhopic team; like they all think they're Gods above mere mortals, serving some higher purpose, and nothing matters to them except Building the Machine God.
OpenCode is awesome. Claude Code is nothing special at all. Last month I switched to just using OpenCode with a Codex $200/mo subscription, and that's been great. Let the weirdos at Anthropic do what weirdos do, and hopefully one day their name is never mentioned again in polite society.
This is analogous to when Google launched Gmail with 1GB of storage and then a bunch of third-party apps cropped up that took advantage of it to use it as a generic online file storage drive.
There was GMailFS[0] and Gmail Drive[1] - this is before S3, dropbox, and a time where web hosting would give you ~10MB or so of space.
Google updated their ToS and shut down accounts using their service in ways they weren't intended via these apps - because obviously the 1GB of storage was a loss-leader into Google's ecosystem (and it worked)
Same thing today - "unauthorized" third parties taking advantage of a loss-leading[2] deal - complete with similar trademark violations to boot[3].
Google have more cash to burn in the AI race so can be more forgiving today in how their codex plans are used. Anthropic are still a private company and can't.
[2] it's a big q just how large a loss leader the max plans are considering a fixed harness, prompt caching etc. but point still stands. you're getting up to $5k of RRP tokens for $200
> Google have more cash to burn in the AI race so can be more forgiving today in how their codex plans are used.
Even despite the larger cash pile to burn, Google is in the middle of their own controversy around what many feel is a rug-pull around how Gemini "AI credits" work and are priced.
Or can you? It's my understanding that you cannot use your subscription with the Agent SDK, that's what the docs say:
> Unless previously approved, Anthropic does not allow third party developers to offer claude.ai login or rate limits for their products, including agents built on the Claude Agent SDK. Please use the API key authentication methods described in this document instead.
Though there was that tweet [0] a while back by someone from Anthropic that just muddied the water. It's frustrating because I feel like the line between the Agent SDK and `claude -p` is not that large but one can use the subscription and one can't... or we don't know, the docs seem unambiguous but the tweet confuses things and you can find many people online saying you can, or you can't.
I'd love to play around with the Agent SDK and try out some automations but it seems I can only do that if I'm willing to pay for tokens, even though I could use Claude Code to write the code "for" the Agent SDK, but not "run" the Agent SDK.
Where is the line? Agent SDK is not allowed with subscription, but if I write a harness around passing data to and parsing the JSON response from `claude -p '<Your Prompt>' --output-format json` would that be allowed? If I run it on a cron locally? I literally have no idea and, not wanting my account to be banned, I'm not interested in finding out. I wish they would clarify it.
Why would they have that feature in claude code cli if it goes against the ToS? You can use Claude Code programatically. This is not the issue. The issue is that Anthropic wants to lock you in within their dev ecosystem (like Apple does). Simple as that.
I don't know why this is downvoted, see my nephew (?) comment [0] for a longer version, but this is not at all clear IMHO. I'm not sure if a "claude -p" on a cron is allowed or not with my subscription, if I run it on another server is it? Can I parse the output of claude (JSON) and have another "claude -p" instance work on the response? It's only a hop, skip, and a jump over to OpenClaw it seems, which is _not_ allowed. But at what point did we cross the line?
It feels like the only safe thing to do is use Claude Code, which, thankfully, I find tolerable, but unfortunate.
You can easily automate OpenCode - more so than the basic Claude Code or Claude desktop app - in a way that automatically uses the maximum amount of subscription quota every cycle. And in an inefficient way that Anthropic can't cache on their end.
If you know anything about subscription models, you know that ALL of them are built on the fact that most of the users don't use the full capacity available all the time.
1. If alternate UX exists, the user can easily replace them with another model as soon as it comes out.
2. All 'all-you-can-eat' plans everywhere comes with clause. Whether it is lunch at a restaurant or it is token-proxy-providers who might think of reselling Max plan to individuals at 20% markup.
> Let the weirdos at Anthropic do what weirdos do, and hopefully one day their name is never mentioned again in polite society.
Woof, that is a bit harsh... :) OpenAI will also face the same problem. They are doing it right now because they need to stand out in some way.
I disagree that this path is inevitable for any service provider. Case in point: Google Drive offers substantially better per-terabyte pricing for storage than Google Cloud Storage; like 100x+ cheaper. Yet, Google Drive has a beautiful API that is used by everything from the Google Drive desktop client to rclone. This is how most apps work, and this frame of thinking about the internet has worked for 40 years because of course 95% of users are going to use the frontend the company makes for their backend; but that 5% of users left on the fringe are oftentimes the most valuable, they're the ones that are going to pay Google an extra $1000/mo for 50TB of storage, and as long as the internal unit economics are good to go, Google should want that. Less edge-cases they have to deal with on drive.google.com, more revenue, all good things.
I do fully expect the limits on these subscriptions to be brought down. But that's not the problem people have with Anthropic today, nor the problem we'd have with OpenAI when they have to eventually do it. That's just the way of things.
The problem is: These actions by Anthropic scream: "Our internal unit economics are going nuclear and we need to do anything we can to regain control."
Low-key: I think the DoW situation was an inflection point for their usage internally. It spiked up hard after that. Dario spent all of 2025 being told "you're not investing enough into compute", but really didn't listen because he wanted to be "responsible" or whatever, and now they're shopping to every provider trying to find compute and are being told that there isn't any.
My guess is that the telemetry data they can collect from interacting with claude code is the "secret sauce" behind a lot of the improvements we're seeing with coding models right now. Look at cursors Composer-2 release today. Clicking "accept" during plan mode, committing changes and pushing to a remote repo, etc. is a really strong reward signal.
Can't collect telemetry from applications you don't control.
Yup, agreed with this as well. Probably also why they've been investing so heavily in the desktop Claude Code experience; very hard to gather great telemetry from a terminal app.
Literally everyone is desperately trying to figure out why it's so bad and how to make it work consistently using harness etc. But in spite of this massive effort things always go awry after a while. Maybe in a year or two someone figures it out.
This is my theory. They don't want other harnesses to use this because it costs them more. I don't know exactly how OpenCode works, but I'm assuming when people are using this plugin they are mostly using Opus for everything while Claude Code really only uses Opus for writing the actual code. It uses Haiku and Sonnet for almost all of the tasks outside of writing code.
So it hard for them to control and understand the costs of subscriptions if people are using them on different hardnesses that do things that they have no control over.
Since I discovered pi I cancelled my Claude subscription and subscribed to ChatGPT. On one hand, the competition is making miracles. On the other hand, it's pretty dooming that there is only one (1) company that keeps my agent cost reasonable.
They're trying for the vertical integration monopoly.
The times it works, it works well for the company at great cost to society.
Imagine the world we'd have if comcast got to control your web browsing experience.
If ISPs got started today, they'd sell the open web at API prices that no one can afford. Then sell the ISP's lock-in 'internet' for a low monthly fee.
My question is why people who don't want comcast's internet think other vertical integrated lock-in is fine.
Our markets game only works for the benefit of society if we have fair markets.
VC-backed loss-leader dumping to starve competition model breaks the game.
They want lock-in for their UI/X, presumably. If Photoshop ran in the cloud, I doubt Adobe would let you make an alternative front-end either. Not that I'm sympathetic to them.
Yes, this. They need as much lock-in as possible before IPO. Most likely less about cash flow and more about IPO story telling.
We'll know for sure when they add full OpenClaw-like features to Claude Code like remote channels & heartbeat support. Both are partially implemented already.
One possible factor is reinforcement training: by forcing users to use their own CLI, they gather usage and training data which serves as feedback training data for their own tools. Users operating with a different agent with different tool implementation and quirks might poison that data.
The sibling reply given by strictnein is very likely a factor.
The business driver I assume is not lock-in on UX (as some say here) but the additional signal Anthropic gets when using their harness vs a 3P one. It makes sense to discount the price if that signal helps you improve your models, but that discount makes no sense if the user is running your model in another harness and you just get regular API usage signal.
Agreed. What I suspect is: the dynamic model routing on CC is way stronger than people realize, and that "Percent-based usage" is intentionally vague because while it is probably measuring "200M tokens per week" or something, they don't want you asking questions about whether you're getting 200M Haiku tokens or 200M Opus tokens. A token is a token to the usage limit, where it comes from doesn't matter to the usage limit. But, to OpenCode it might, because OpenCode can just fire-and-forget everything at Opus (and probably does).
> they must be losing so much money on each Claude Code subscriber that if a million people all said "we're switching" they just wouldn't care.
You're looking at it completely wrong. Claude Code is Anthropic's flagship product, not the API. They want to attract as many users as possible to Claude Code and lock them into their ecosystem, so they can squeeze them later. All of their questionable actions surrounding Claude Code and its subscription are ultimately in service of this goal.
The subscription isn't some kind of charity, it exists specifically because they know the average user isn't willing to pay the exorbitant API prices to vibe code their groundbreaking new B2B SaaS idea, but they want to capture that market share anyway, because it's the core of their long-term strategy. The subscription arose from that: it's a form of predatory pricing designed to attract as many users as possible while they still have VC money to burn.
Once that runs out and the time comes to IPO and start making real profits, they are going to increase the price drastically, and what's where the lock-in comes into play. If everyone is using some open-source alternative that natively supports every other provider on earth, they will be far less likely to continue paying for Claude specifically instead of just switching to a competitor. Not to mention, they'd also lose out on the free advertising from things like CLAUDE.md and the commit co-signing (because that's all those things are, the only reason Claude Code doesn't support AGENTS.md is because CLAUDE.md serves as an advertisement in public repositories).
> like they all think they're Gods above mere mortals, serving some higher purpose, and nothing matters to them except Building the Machine God.
This is all just part of their marketing strategy, and you shouldn't read too much into it.
This seems harsh and unfair. You aren’t allowed to stream Netflix through a third party streaming service because then the experience is controlled by the third party and there is no lock in to using Netflix and thus no benefit to the subsidy they give you in the plan.
OpenAI is allowing it as a PR stunt and because they have seemingly unlimited cash they can throw at user growth.
Anthropic doesn't care and it is all to look good for their IPO.
They are still losing billions of dollars and will do anything to keep people hooked onto the API and will litigate against their own customers.
They will even lobby against open-weight models which is their biggest threat and want to make them illegal to run in the US just for them to succeed.
Anthropic are not your friends and want you to become addicted / over-reliant on Claude Code (hence the free $20 spins at the roulette until March, 27 2026) and charging others on their overpriced API.
Anthropic sells a service that bundles server and client. They are not wild about people taking their server part and using their own clients because the business model relies on both client behaviors (Claude code does a lot of work to achieve > 95% cache hit rates; third party clients likely don’t) and flywheel of usage data.
If Microsoft went after third party clients that emulated M365 and used their backend, would that also “make friends” in open source somehow?
I mean, Microsoft started out by 'not making friends' in open source at the start. Then migrated to the embrace, extend, extinguish days. The current Microsoft is rather friendly towards open source compared to those days.
Typically services that try to gatekeep standard http don't get very far with the kind of people that like to modify their software.
Dario has stated multiple times he doesn't believe there is any value in open-weight models. Not surprised. This is not the behavior of an innovative company - it is fear-driven. They are seeing a rapidly shrinking moat.
This exactly. Kimi 2.5 has coding performance hardly discernible from Claude. The only way to maintain a business edge is to crush open source clients to force people into a closed ecosystem. Once there, create context moat where people are not in control of their own context data (cannot export it to open tooling). Maybe we can call it the Oracle play?
It’ll be interesting to see if companies get tricked. I think it’s inevitable that it goes like MySQL/Postgres, where the open tools gets way better
thats only because kimi 2.5 was trained using data stolen from claude. it wouldnt exist without riding claudes coat tails. none of the so called 'open source' models would
That's not true, some open weight models didn't distill Claude or other then frontier models. E.g Llama. Yet achieved comparable performance (back then in llama's case).
If distillation wasn't a thing, they would certainly exist, they would have trained them from scratch or via a decent base models to remain economically viable.
What's for sure is that Claude wouldn't exist if it wasn't for data stolen from millions of creators. As they found themselves admittedly guilty of.
Boo hoo. Claude was trained using data stolen from the collective works of all of humanity. If someone does it faster and cheaper by skimming the cream off the top of Claude then surely that’s just a market efficiency in the thieves business?
The dude built a mass plagiarism machine and wants to now profit off of his mass plagiarism machine, of course he's going to have antidemocratic ideas regarding people + technology.
His engineers told him "I don't write code anymore. Claude writes the code, I edit it, I code around it".
In 6 months, people won't work anymore. They will all use my products, outsource the thinking, why bother.
Oh and open weight models have no value...
There is a paper out there showing 30% of CEOs/C-suite have some psychopath tendencies. Not sure if they even used the term narcissistic , but I would add delusional.
IIRC it was called Clawdbot when Anthropic complained. IANAL but I believe the holder of a trademark is obligated to defend it against infringement. Hard to say that Clawdbot was not potentially infringing, given its purpose. It's not clear how much leeway Anthropic had given his initial choice of name.
I still think Anthropic should've bought Clawdbot/OpenClaw. Feels like a missed business opportunity to expand your market share by capitalizing on the hype.
The OpenCode guys have really surprised me in the way they've reacted to Anthropic shutting down the side-loaded auth scheme. Very petty and bitter. It's clearly just a business decision from Anthropic and a rational one at that, usage subsidization to keep people on the first party product surface is practically the oldest business move in the book and is completely valid.
Ever since the shutdown of the side-load they've been pretty vocally anti-anthropic on twitter. Paranoid that anthropic is going to torpedo them via some backdoor now that they own bun, insinuating that anthropic shut down the auth from a position of weakness since OpenCode is a superior product, etc.
The thing is OpenCode IS a great product, I'm not sure it's "superior", but unfortunately the way things are evolving where the model + harness pairing is so important, it does seem like they are in a similar position to Cursor (and do not have the resources to try to pivot into developing their own foundational model).
I wouldn't call OpenCode a "great" product tbh. It's nice that it's FLOSS of course, but the overall quality is a bit underwhelming and it's clearly possible to build much better open agentic harnesses. It would be nice if more people tried to do this.
I think frankly OpenCode is delusional to think that Anthropic is actually "concerned" with them in any way. Anthropic's concerns at this point are on the geopolitical level. I doubt stamping out ToS-violating usage of their subscription services is even on executive radar. OpenAI only allows it because it's a cheap PR win and they take those where they can get them.
Yeah, I recognized the PR author from Twitter (same avatar) and man he really does come across as incredibly juvenile. Shamelessly talking up OpenAI while shitting on Claude models and the motivation is just so transparent.
If you use Claude through an interface that’s not Claude Code, you’ll only stick with it for as long as it proves itself the best. With other interfaces, you can experiment with multiple models and switch from one to another for different tasks or different periods of time.
Those tokens going to other providers are tokens not going to Anthropic, so they want to lock you in with Claude Code. And it clearly works, since a lot of people swear by it.
Why does Netflix care how the movies they stream to you are consumed? Shouldn't your $8/mo allow you to stream any movie to OpenFlix and consume however you like?
You are also not allowed to show these Netflix movies on a big screen in front of your house and charge people. The 8 dollar are for a specific use case, just like the tokens in the subscription.
Because models are quickly moving toward commoditization, whether the big three like it or not. The differentiator now is tooling around those models. By eliminating OpenCode's auth stuff, they prevent leaking customers onto another platform that allows model choice (they will likely lose paying customers to one of the major inference catalogs like OpenRouter once they move from Claude Code to OpenCode).
because he is giving them at 90% discount in their subscription.
they are more than happy if you use the tokens at api pricing, but when subsidized they want you to use their claude code surface.
Source: i run pretty much all of these agents (codex, cc, droid, opencode, amp, etc) side-by-side in agentastic.dev and opencode had basically 0 win-rate over other agents.
Anthropic provides subsidized access to Claude models through Claude Code. It is well understood to be 'a loss leader' so that they can incentivize people to use Claude Code.
OpenCode lets people take the Claude-Code-only-API-Key, and lets them use it in a different harness. Anthropic's preferred way for such interaction is getting a different, Claude API key (and not Claude Code SDK API key).
---
A rough analogy might be something like getting subsidized drinks from a cafe, provided you sit there a eat food. What if someone says, go to the cafe and get free drink and come sit over at our cafe and order food. It is a loose analogy, but you get the idea.
If it wasn't the case, the Claude API pricing would be the same, $200 for unlimited use. But it's metered.
We don't know if Claude Code bleeds money for every user that touches it. Probably not. But the different pricing is a strong enough clue that it's an appeal product with subsidized tokens consumption.
API is intended for a different audience - companies with a big pocket who aren't as price sensitive as private users. So the pricing will be different than for a private subscription.
There is huge value in getting people to subscribe to recurring payments. Giving people a discount to do so makes sense and does not mean that the subscription service loses money.
Is this what the legal request demanded or is this just something that OpenCode is doing out of spite? Seems unclear. To me the meat of this change is that they're removing support for `opencode-anthropic-auth` and the prompt text that allows OpenCode to mimic Claude Code behavior. They have been skirting the intent of the original C&D for awhile now with these auth plugins and prompt text.
Using your API key in third-party harnesses has always been allowed. They just don't like using the subsidized subscription plan outside of first-party harnesses. So this seems to be out of spite
"Legal action" means you filed a lawsuit. This looks more like someone sent a list of requested changes, backed up by an implicit or explicit threat of legal action.
That's how these things usually (should) go; a good legal system (be it civil suits, insurance claims, mediation, etc) will only actually take on cases if you've tried a reasonable approach first, e.g. asking nicely.
Fun fact: In Germany, the civil courts will usually take the case anyways if it has merit, but the winner ends up paying for the whole lawsuit if they failed to make an effort to resolve the case before suing.
Since there's a lot of questions about what this means, let me explain.
Anthropic has two different products that are relevant here: the Claude API and Claude Code. The Claude API has usage based pricing. The more you use, the more you pay. With Claude Code, you can get a monthly subscription which gives you a fixed amount of usage. Comparing equivalent token generation between the Claude API and Claude Code, Claude Code with a subscription is much cheaper.
When it comes to third party products such as OpenClaw and OpenCode, Anthropic has made it clear those products should be using the Claude API and not the internal Claude Code APIs. OpenClaw and OpenCode have both been using the internal Claude Code APIs as when a user has a Claude Code subscription, the internal Claude Code API gives you tokens at a much cheaper rate than the Claude API. Presumably Anthropic makes Claude Code cheaper than the Claude API because they are willing to give users a discount for them to use Claude Code vs a competing product such as OpenCode.
It looks like until recently OpenCode tried to get around Anthropic's requirements by offering "plugins" in OpenCode that would allow users to use their Claude Code subscription in OpenCode. This PR mentions as much at[0][1]:
> There are plugins that allow you to use your Claude Pro/Max models with OpenCode. Anthropic explicitly prohibits this.
> Previous versions of OpenCode came bundled with these plugins but that is no longer the case as of 1.3.0
This PR seems to be in response to Anthropic threatening OpenCode with legal action if they keep using the internal Claude Code APIs.
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Businesses exercise power and control in the market. The purpose of this is to set a precedent (perceived or actual) — the auth system was a product, not an API. Anthropic is drawing the line between 'built on us' and 'built around us.'
I don't necessarily see this as an evil action. It doesn't inhibit open source, it sets terms of service and practice boundaries.
Granted this is a wildly unpopular approach, worse has happened in the OSS world...
It's not clear what exactly the "legal action" is based on this github link. My pure speculation is Anthropic's lawyers have come up with a liability story boiling down to OpenCode helping end users violate the Anthropic ToS (i.e. tortious interference with contract).
Doesn't even need to be threatening, a notice of "this thing you're doing is in violation of our terms of service" should be enough... although I suppose that can be construed as threatening already.
OpenCode is an agentic coding CLI, similar to Claude Code, Codex etc. It supports different LLM providers, including Claude.
It originally had support for copying over your Claude subscription token and calling the same backend APIs as Claude Code, which meant you could use OpenCode with your Claude Pro/Max plans, but Anthropic came out and said that the plans were only meant for first-party clients, and everyone else should be using per-token billing.
Now OpenCode is removing this option from their product, it seems because of legal threats from Anthropic.
OpenCode is a agent .. harnest? The CLI or UI tool you use as an AI agent, similar to ClaudeCode.
You where not allowed to use your ClaudeCode subscription with other tool then ClaudeCode. I'm not sure if this is what got removed or if there is more too it.
Anthropic is a shit company. I cancelled my subscription 2 years ago once they started calling for regulation. They might have gotten folks to side with them in the OpenAI debate, but they are just another shit company like OpenAI.
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.
Anthropic has every right to place rules around their generous subsidization of the Claude subscription plans, which give limits of ~8-12x as many tokens as you'd get for the same expenditure in the PAYG API.
That said, demanding an open source repo remove information that Anthropic openly publishes and distributes for free (the prompt) is a bit odd...
This argument has been decapitated countless times already on HN. Anthropic already enforce usage limits for everyone. If those limits are higher than what they want users to actually consume, that's Anthropic's problem.
This move is anti-competitive and Anthropic knows it. They're hurriedly trying to lock the gates and lay landmines behind everyone after a massive surge of new subscribers so that they're stuck using Claude Code. They see it as vital to their survival to not just to be the gas pump for tokens, they need to control the platform.
I'm baffled how people don't seem intellectually able to grasp what you described here. Claude Code users on Anthropic subscriptions aren't subsidizing those using other harnesses because usage limits aren't counted on the harness layer. It's an anti-competitive move against vc-backed commercial harnesses like Opencode (vc-backed) or Openclaw (openai-affiliated).
> Anthropic already enforce usage limits for everyone. If those limits are higher than what they want users to actually consume, that's Anthropic's problem.
I mean, OpenCode is the one changing their app here. So it kinda seems like it's actually everyone else's problem.
> This argument has been decapitated countless times already on HN.
No it hasn't, because the argument is completely correct, and the people mad about it are mad they can't have unlimited usage instead of paying the token API prices.
> This move is anti-competitive and Anthropic knows it.
No it isn't, that's not what "anti-competitive" means, and no court in the world would label it as such. You can't go flailing around looking for legal jargon to attach to behavior just because you don't like it.
API is intended for massive scaled operations (companies) and has no hard usage limits, a subscription is intended only for individual usage (solo dev) and has therefore hard usage limits. Is it that difficult to grasp the difference between API and subscription models?
I must be alone in this but I don't think its heavily subsidized. I see their models as really overpriced. No way they cost that much. Could they really?
Cost to the business and price to customers are not the same thing. Even if it cost Anthropic nothing to run any of these (it actually costs quite a bit in electricity, infrastructure, ops teams to keep everything running smoothly, and above all else, extraordinary R&D expenses to develop the models), they could set the price at a million dollars per token if they wanted to.
That clarified: yes, every major lab is losing money on full utilization of their inference subscription plans. The API prices are what the business has determined they need to achieve profitability, and are not reflective of actual costs as you point out, but the discounts vs API pricing can get pretty extreme. Some users report 50x+ (98%+) discounts on the $100/mo Max subscription plans vs PAYG API pricing¹. Even the skeptical, contrarian takes that focus on cost to the business will tell you that, yes, Anthropic is losing money on those subscriptions, even using generously low estimates on costs².
Except to me, the argument is like a customer bringing their own plate to eat off of, and the restaurant then sues the customer and demands that no restaurant can ever be allowed to use that customers plate.
Opencode to a lot of people is a nicer and more feature rich harness than CC, it doesn’t consume any more tokens than CC, and if it did, the bounds of how many tokens each account is allowed to use is tied to the users payment and rate limits.
I don't think Anthropic has a problem with you using a regular pay-per-token API key with opencode. The issue is letting someone use their "Log in with Claude" as if it were a regular API key.
avoid bun is my take away... if anthropic decides you're a competitor and with the way AI is evolving you will be a competitor soon - don't rely on any anthropic tools or models.
Don't give them ideas please. They'll ask for more investment to do exactly this.
I miss the days when open source was a way to get your product in the developers hands and build trust. Stuff like this shows that the tide has shifted to primary focus on shareholders and potential hold on patents and trademarks.
Me too. I also miss the days when I was proud of my little open source projects. Now I just regret donating fuel, even a miniscule amount in the grand scheme of things, to the soulless lawnmower that has already chopped down so much of my joy in work and promises to eventually shred the paycheck, too.
I hear yah, especially knowing that AI crawlers just don't respect ROBOTS.txt or anything similar, but there's still nothing wrong with writing code for fun.. No need to lose that!
Can anyone explain what’s going on here? Using API is illegal? that can’t possibly be since we now know API is not even copyrighted (which personally I disagree with bit whatever)… so what is going on here?
Under what law can Anthropic force OpenCode to do this? Surely it's not illegal to publish code that interacts with an API that's open for everyone to see?
The API has a very clear ToS prohibiting third-party client usage with the heavily subsidized Claude.ai subscription plans. Anthropic's right to reject or block that traffic, as well as to ban users who attempt this, is well-protected by the ToS those users neglected to read.
Regarding the legal demands here, anyone can issue anyone else a cease and desist order at any time, for anything, in the USA. The demands do not need to have merit.
"Illegal" generally refers to criminal law, not civil suits, this was essentially Anthropic threatening to file a lawsuit. Opencode was under no legal obligation to comply and was not breaking any laws, they simply decided it was easier and cheaper to comply than to fight.
Surely there's no way that's true. The logical conclusion of that would be that every random ToS is a law that everyone must abide by, regardless of whether or not they've agreed to it.
By definition, it is exactly a law. It's known as business law. The ToS is a business contract which you must agree to if you wish to use the service. Violating terms of service is literally a breach of contract.
I think you may be confused here. Anthropic isn't going after users here at all, they essentially told another company that is interfacing with Anthropic's service in a way that violates Anthropic's TOS to "please stop or else we might have to take legal action in the future".
More broadly, you do not need to establish any kind of contractual right to "go after" anyone legally, that's not how civil law works. A cease and desist letter isn't even really legal action, it's a threat of legal action, but even then, Anthropic doesn't need your permission to sue you, just like you don't need Anthropic's permission to sue them.
If you think that inside the U.S., you have some kind of legal immunity to or protection from cease and desist letters or lawsuits from any company, for any reason¹, you would largely be mistaken. If this is important to you, you might want to talk to a lawyer.
¹ Some states have anti-SLAPP statutes that offer limited protections in certain context, but this isn't applicable in the context of this example between Anthropic and AnomalyCo.
That being said it's maybe a valid claim under "tortuous interference" theory, i.e. OpenCode damaged Anthropic by interfering with the contractual ToS agreement between Anthropic and its users
Cleary they need to get AI which has not accepted those to rewrite it. That is the easy and fast solution these days. Or at most find a person who has not accepted tos do that.
They don't need any actual written law behind their actions, all they need is money. What are you gonna do, fight them in court? Good luck with that, especially against a company directly associated with the US government and Palantir.
I'm really struggling to understand how Anthropic is benefited by not allowing this. Its bad PR for no good reason. The only thing I can figure is that Claude Code is hemorrhaging money, they're too afraid to actually enforce reasonable token limits, and the only thing that's keeping it from totally bankrupting the company tomorrow is: controlling the harness and having the harness dynamically route toward Haiku or Sonnet over Opus when Opus is overloaded, without telling the user. Or maybe, they're extremely interested in observability of the exact prompts users are typing, and third party harnesses muck that data in with the rest of the context that gets sent, so its harder to detangle the prompt from the noise?
Like, in any event, I seriously get the feeling that Anthropic doesn't just not care about their users, but actively dislikes them. Like, they must be losing so much money on each Claude Code subscriber that if a million people all said "we're switching" they just wouldn't care. I get this vibe even from watching videos of people working on the Antrhopic team; like they all think they're Gods above mere mortals, serving some higher purpose, and nothing matters to them except Building the Machine God.
OpenCode is awesome. Claude Code is nothing special at all. Last month I switched to just using OpenCode with a Codex $200/mo subscription, and that's been great. Let the weirdos at Anthropic do what weirdos do, and hopefully one day their name is never mentioned again in polite society.
This is analogous to when Google launched Gmail with 1GB of storage and then a bunch of third-party apps cropped up that took advantage of it to use it as a generic online file storage drive.
There was GMailFS[0] and Gmail Drive[1] - this is before S3, dropbox, and a time where web hosting would give you ~10MB or so of space.
Google updated their ToS and shut down accounts using their service in ways they weren't intended via these apps - because obviously the 1GB of storage was a loss-leader into Google's ecosystem (and it worked)
Same thing today - "unauthorized" third parties taking advantage of a loss-leading[2] deal - complete with similar trademark violations to boot[3].
Google have more cash to burn in the AI race so can be more forgiving today in how their codex plans are used. Anthropic are still a private company and can't.
[0] https://handwiki.org/wiki/GmailFS
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2005/07/31/profile-gmail-drive/
[2] it's a big q just how large a loss leader the max plans are considering a fixed harness, prompt caching etc. but point still stands. you're getting up to $5k of RRP tokens for $200
[3] Clawd Bot -> OpenClaw
This is more like if Google took action against Thunderbird and open-source email clients
> Google have more cash to burn in the AI race so can be more forgiving today in how their codex plans are used.
Even despite the larger cash pile to burn, Google is in the middle of their own controversy around what many feel is a rug-pull around how Gemini "AI credits" work and are priced.
See:
https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/12/users_protest_as_goog...
https://old.reddit.com/r/google_antigravity/comments/1rv4cec...
etc
You can use OpenCode programmatically, thus turning that $200/mo Claude Code account into a very cheap Opus 4.6 API service.
I don't think there's anything really to it past that.
you can also use Claude Code programmatically with the `prompt` parameter in the cli.
Or the Python or Typescript Agent SDK libraries: https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/agent-sdk/overview
Or can you? It's my understanding that you cannot use your subscription with the Agent SDK, that's what the docs say:
> Unless previously approved, Anthropic does not allow third party developers to offer claude.ai login or rate limits for their products, including agents built on the Claude Agent SDK. Please use the API key authentication methods described in this document instead.
Though there was that tweet [0] a while back by someone from Anthropic that just muddied the water. It's frustrating because I feel like the line between the Agent SDK and `claude -p` is not that large but one can use the subscription and one can't... or we don't know, the docs seem unambiguous but the tweet confuses things and you can find many people online saying you can, or you can't.
I'd love to play around with the Agent SDK and try out some automations but it seems I can only do that if I'm willing to pay for tokens, even though I could use Claude Code to write the code "for" the Agent SDK, but not "run" the Agent SDK.
Where is the line? Agent SDK is not allowed with subscription, but if I write a harness around passing data to and parsing the JSON response from `claude -p '<Your Prompt>' --output-format json` would that be allowed? If I run it on a cron locally? I literally have no idea and, not wanting my account to be banned, I'm not interested in finding out. I wish they would clarify it.
[0]
Twitter: https://x.com/trq212/status/2024212378402095389 XCancel: https://xcancel.com/trq212/status/2024212378402095389 Text:
> Apologies, this was a docs clean up we rolled out that’s caused some confusion.
> Nothing is changing about how you can use the Agent SDK and MAX subscriptions!
> We want to encourage local development and experimentation with the Agent SDK and claude -p.
> If you’re building a business on top of the Agent SDK, you should use an API key instead. We’ll make sure that’s clearer in our docs.
And they can ban your account if they think you are doing that. I think someone even commented here on HN they were banned by Anthropic for this.
Why would they have that feature in claude code cli if it goes against the ToS? You can use Claude Code programatically. This is not the issue. The issue is that Anthropic wants to lock you in within their dev ecosystem (like Apple does). Simple as that.
I don't know why this is downvoted, see my nephew (?) comment [0] for a longer version, but this is not at all clear IMHO. I'm not sure if a "claude -p" on a cron is allowed or not with my subscription, if I run it on another server is it? Can I parse the output of claude (JSON) and have another "claude -p" instance work on the response? It's only a hop, skip, and a jump over to OpenClaw it seems, which is _not_ allowed. But at what point did we cross the line?
It feels like the only safe thing to do is use Claude Code, which, thankfully, I find tolerable, but unfortunate.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47446703
> You can use OpenCode programmatically, thus turning that $200/mo Claude Code account into a very cheap Opus 4.6 API service.
Can you explain what you mean by this?
Their SDK shows a really basic example that you could build out pretty easily, ironically about Anthropic:
https://opencode.ai/docs/sdk/#structured-output
You can stand up an OpenAI compatible API layer in front of it and just feed the requests back and forth. Adds a little delay, but not much.
You can easily automate OpenCode - more so than the basic Claude Code or Claude desktop app - in a way that automatically uses the maximum amount of subscription quota every cycle. And in an inefficient way that Anthropic can't cache on their end.
If you know anything about subscription models, you know that ALL of them are built on the fact that most of the users don't use the full capacity available all the time.
Can you show any service that is selling API because they have turned a $200/mo Claude code account into an API service? Give me a break.
1. If alternate UX exists, the user can easily replace them with another model as soon as it comes out.
2. All 'all-you-can-eat' plans everywhere comes with clause. Whether it is lunch at a restaurant or it is token-proxy-providers who might think of reselling Max plan to individuals at 20% markup.
> Let the weirdos at Anthropic do what weirdos do, and hopefully one day their name is never mentioned again in polite society.
Woof, that is a bit harsh... :) OpenAI will also face the same problem. They are doing it right now because they need to stand out in some way.
I disagree that this path is inevitable for any service provider. Case in point: Google Drive offers substantially better per-terabyte pricing for storage than Google Cloud Storage; like 100x+ cheaper. Yet, Google Drive has a beautiful API that is used by everything from the Google Drive desktop client to rclone. This is how most apps work, and this frame of thinking about the internet has worked for 40 years because of course 95% of users are going to use the frontend the company makes for their backend; but that 5% of users left on the fringe are oftentimes the most valuable, they're the ones that are going to pay Google an extra $1000/mo for 50TB of storage, and as long as the internal unit economics are good to go, Google should want that. Less edge-cases they have to deal with on drive.google.com, more revenue, all good things.
I do fully expect the limits on these subscriptions to be brought down. But that's not the problem people have with Anthropic today, nor the problem we'd have with OpenAI when they have to eventually do it. That's just the way of things.
The problem is: These actions by Anthropic scream: "Our internal unit economics are going nuclear and we need to do anything we can to regain control."
Low-key: I think the DoW situation was an inflection point for their usage internally. It spiked up hard after that. Dario spent all of 2025 being told "you're not investing enough into compute", but really didn't listen because he wanted to be "responsible" or whatever, and now they're shopping to every provider trying to find compute and are being told that there isn't any.
Anthropic is not stoping you from using API (pay per token). They are only saying Pro or Max 'all-you-can-eat' plans have to be used via their tools
My guess is that the telemetry data they can collect from interacting with claude code is the "secret sauce" behind a lot of the improvements we're seeing with coding models right now. Look at cursors Composer-2 release today. Clicking "accept" during plan mode, committing changes and pushing to a remote repo, etc. is a really strong reward signal.
Can't collect telemetry from applications you don't control.
Yup, agreed with this as well. Probably also why they've been investing so heavily in the desktop Claude Code experience; very hard to gather great telemetry from a terminal app.
You mean their tool (I use it daily) is so bad despite all the data they collect?
Literally everyone is desperately trying to figure out why it's so bad and how to make it work consistently using harness etc. But in spite of this massive effort things always go awry after a while. Maybe in a year or two someone figures it out.
Yep, I suspect this is the rationale/driver too.
This is my theory. They don't want other harnesses to use this because it costs them more. I don't know exactly how OpenCode works, but I'm assuming when people are using this plugin they are mostly using Opus for everything while Claude Code really only uses Opus for writing the actual code. It uses Haiku and Sonnet for almost all of the tasks outside of writing code.
So it hard for them to control and understand the costs of subscriptions if people are using them on different hardnesses that do things that they have no control over.
you can choose your own model in claude code and it generally defaults to Opus
Since I discovered pi I cancelled my Claude subscription and subscribed to ChatGPT. On one hand, the competition is making miracles. On the other hand, it's pretty dooming that there is only one (1) company that keeps my agent cost reasonable.
> Since I discovered pi I cancelled my Claude subscription and subscribed to ChatGPT.
Sorry, what is pi and how are you using it with ChatGPT for agentic coding?
> Sorry, what is pi
https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono/tree/main/packages/codin...
> how are you using it with ChatGPT for agentic coding?
OpenAI has publically blessed people using their subscriptions with different harnesses, like OpenCode and Pi.
They're trying for the vertical integration monopoly.
The times it works, it works well for the company at great cost to society.
Imagine the world we'd have if comcast got to control your web browsing experience.
If ISPs got started today, they'd sell the open web at API prices that no one can afford. Then sell the ISP's lock-in 'internet' for a low monthly fee.
My question is why people who don't want comcast's internet think other vertical integrated lock-in is fine.
Our markets game only works for the benefit of society if we have fair markets.
VC-backed loss-leader dumping to starve competition model breaks the game.
They want lock-in for their UI/X, presumably. If Photoshop ran in the cloud, I doubt Adobe would let you make an alternative front-end either. Not that I'm sympathetic to them.
Yes, this. They need as much lock-in as possible before IPO. Most likely less about cash flow and more about IPO story telling.
We'll know for sure when they add full OpenClaw-like features to Claude Code like remote channels & heartbeat support. Both are partially implemented already.
> If Photoshop ran in the cloud
Off topic, but there is something like that: photopea, it's free and it's good enough for my use cases (I need it once a year maybe).
Also lock-in to their harness so they can control caching on both ends and make things more profitable.
One possible factor is reinforcement training: by forcing users to use their own CLI, they gather usage and training data which serves as feedback training data for their own tools. Users operating with a different agent with different tool implementation and quirks might poison that data.
The sibling reply given by strictnein is very likely a factor.
The business driver I assume is not lock-in on UX (as some say here) but the additional signal Anthropic gets when using their harness vs a 3P one. It makes sense to discount the price if that signal helps you improve your models, but that discount makes no sense if the user is running your model in another harness and you just get regular API usage signal.
also for economic reason. Anthropic design Claude code so they are in control regarding how token get burned. To a degree.
With 3rd party, designers have not incentive to be token consumption conscious.
Gemini has a 1M token context, flash can be used for free via the web interface, can't paste more than handful thousands token.
Agreed. What I suspect is: the dynamic model routing on CC is way stronger than people realize, and that "Percent-based usage" is intentionally vague because while it is probably measuring "200M tokens per week" or something, they don't want you asking questions about whether you're getting 200M Haiku tokens or 200M Opus tokens. A token is a token to the usage limit, where it comes from doesn't matter to the usage limit. But, to OpenCode it might, because OpenCode can just fire-and-forget everything at Opus (and probably does).
> With 3rd party, designers have not incentive to be token consumption conscious.
How? If I used open code I'd hope it to not eat tokens unnecessarily so my subscription quota lasts longer.
I add 'only do this if...' to every single skill I write. It's a bit of voodoo-style wishful thinking, I admit.
I use both.. Claude Code memory smokes OpenCode's lack of it when memory is important.
> they must be losing so much money on each Claude Code subscriber that if a million people all said "we're switching" they just wouldn't care.
You're looking at it completely wrong. Claude Code is Anthropic's flagship product, not the API. They want to attract as many users as possible to Claude Code and lock them into their ecosystem, so they can squeeze them later. All of their questionable actions surrounding Claude Code and its subscription are ultimately in service of this goal.
The subscription isn't some kind of charity, it exists specifically because they know the average user isn't willing to pay the exorbitant API prices to vibe code their groundbreaking new B2B SaaS idea, but they want to capture that market share anyway, because it's the core of their long-term strategy. The subscription arose from that: it's a form of predatory pricing designed to attract as many users as possible while they still have VC money to burn.
Once that runs out and the time comes to IPO and start making real profits, they are going to increase the price drastically, and what's where the lock-in comes into play. If everyone is using some open-source alternative that natively supports every other provider on earth, they will be far less likely to continue paying for Claude specifically instead of just switching to a competitor. Not to mention, they'd also lose out on the free advertising from things like CLAUDE.md and the commit co-signing (because that's all those things are, the only reason Claude Code doesn't support AGENTS.md is because CLAUDE.md serves as an advertisement in public repositories).
> like they all think they're Gods above mere mortals, serving some higher purpose, and nothing matters to them except Building the Machine God.
This is all just part of their marketing strategy, and you shouldn't read too much into it.
This seems harsh and unfair. You aren’t allowed to stream Netflix through a third party streaming service because then the experience is controlled by the third party and there is no lock in to using Netflix and thus no benefit to the subsidy they give you in the plan.
OpenAI is allowing it as a PR stunt and because they have seemingly unlimited cash they can throw at user growth.
Anthropic doesn't care and it is all to look good for their IPO.
They are still losing billions of dollars and will do anything to keep people hooked onto the API and will litigate against their own customers.
They will even lobby against open-weight models which is their biggest threat and want to make them illegal to run in the US just for them to succeed.
Anthropic are not your friends and want you to become addicted / over-reliant on Claude Code (hence the free $20 spins at the roulette until March, 27 2026) and charging others on their overpriced API.
> I'm really struggling to understand how Anthropic is benefited by not allowing this.
Closed ecosystem like Apple. They want you to use their tools, not someone else's.
This and threatening OpenClaw (now at OpenAI), Anthropic really on a roll making friends in Open Source.
Previously discussed I think:
Anthropic Explicitly Blocking OpenCode (173 points, 157 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46625918
I’m not seeing the open source connection at all?
Anthropic sells a service that bundles server and client. They are not wild about people taking their server part and using their own clients because the business model relies on both client behaviors (Claude code does a lot of work to achieve > 95% cache hit rates; third party clients likely don’t) and flywheel of usage data.
If Microsoft went after third party clients that emulated M365 and used their backend, would that also “make friends” in open source somehow?
I mean, Microsoft started out by 'not making friends' in open source at the start. Then migrated to the embrace, extend, extinguish days. The current Microsoft is rather friendly towards open source compared to those days.
Typically services that try to gatekeep standard http don't get very far with the kind of people that like to modify their software.
Anthropic's position has been consistent from the start. Subscription plans are for first-party clients. Everyone else should be on per-token billing.
That's really all there is to it. It has nothing to do with open or closed source.
Which means the plans are subsidized, and you pay with your data.
Dario has stated multiple times he doesn't believe there is any value in open-weight models. Not surprised. This is not the behavior of an innovative company - it is fear-driven. They are seeing a rapidly shrinking moat.
This exactly. Kimi 2.5 has coding performance hardly discernible from Claude. The only way to maintain a business edge is to crush open source clients to force people into a closed ecosystem. Once there, create context moat where people are not in control of their own context data (cannot export it to open tooling). Maybe we can call it the Oracle play?
It’ll be interesting to see if companies get tricked. I think it’s inevitable that it goes like MySQL/Postgres, where the open tools gets way better
Which "Claude"? Sonnet, Opus? With which harness are you comparing the coding performance?
Nowadays the harness matters more than the model itself. For example pi.dev + GPT5-codex is a lot smarter than plain codex cli
K2.5 is dog shit compared to leading OAI/Ant models.
thats only because kimi 2.5 was trained using data stolen from claude. it wouldnt exist without riding claudes coat tails. none of the so called 'open source' models would
That's not true, some open weight models didn't distill Claude or other then frontier models. E.g Llama. Yet achieved comparable performance (back then in llama's case).
If distillation wasn't a thing, they would certainly exist, they would have trained them from scratch or via a decent base models to remain economically viable.
What's for sure is that Claude wouldn't exist if it wasn't for data stolen from millions of creators. As they found themselves admittedly guilty of.
Boo hoo. Claude was trained using data stolen from the collective works of all of humanity. If someone does it faster and cheaper by skimming the cream off the top of Claude then surely that’s just a market efficiency in the thieves business?
The dude built a mass plagiarism machine and wants to now profit off of his mass plagiarism machine, of course he's going to have antidemocratic ideas regarding people + technology.
His engineers told him "I don't write code anymore. Claude writes the code, I edit it, I code around it".
In 6 months, people won't work anymore. They will all use my products, outsource the thinking, why bother.
Oh and open weight models have no value...
There is a paper out there showing 30% of CEOs/C-suite have some psychopath tendencies. Not sure if they even used the term narcissistic , but I would add delusional.
> threatening OpenClaw
IIRC it was called Clawdbot when Anthropic complained. IANAL but I believe the holder of a trademark is obligated to defend it against infringement. Hard to say that Clawdbot was not potentially infringing, given its purpose. It's not clear how much leeway Anthropic had given his initial choice of name.
I still think Anthropic should've bought Clawdbot/OpenClaw. Feels like a missed business opportunity to expand your market share by capitalizing on the hype.
Why should they pay money for such crappy software?
This whole thread is people repeating wrong facts that have been clarified 100x in the previous threads on the same issue.
I wonder why conversation can never progress. When a stake goes in the ground, it never ever comes out.
FWIW OpenAI didn't buy OpenClaw.
And Nvidia didn't buy Groq.
When Peter gets tired of having a boss again, OpenAI will have zero OpenClaw.
Does your employer use Salesforce? Crappy software is practically the only software that anybody really pays for.
OpenClaw is underwhelming, and its founder is basically a hype machine.
so they own the trademark to Clawd? Or is it suppose to be Claude?
Is open source really open source if it can be bought by big companies and manipulated freely? Technically one day it can just be pulled off github.
*What makes you think it hasn’t already been pulled/used in training from GitHub?
I guarantee you that Cursor will be next to be targeted by Anthropic.
"Safety" is just complete control for them.
The irony given they hoped to get acquired.
The OpenCode guys have really surprised me in the way they've reacted to Anthropic shutting down the side-loaded auth scheme. Very petty and bitter. It's clearly just a business decision from Anthropic and a rational one at that, usage subsidization to keep people on the first party product surface is practically the oldest business move in the book and is completely valid.
This is not my impression, could you explain what you're talking about?
Ever since the shutdown of the side-load they've been pretty vocally anti-anthropic on twitter. Paranoid that anthropic is going to torpedo them via some backdoor now that they own bun, insinuating that anthropic shut down the auth from a position of weakness since OpenCode is a superior product, etc.
The thing is OpenCode IS a great product, I'm not sure it's "superior", but unfortunately the way things are evolving where the model + harness pairing is so important, it does seem like they are in a similar position to Cursor (and do not have the resources to try to pivot into developing their own foundational model).
I wouldn't call OpenCode a "great" product tbh. It's nice that it's FLOSS of course, but the overall quality is a bit underwhelming and it's clearly possible to build much better open agentic harnesses. It would be nice if more people tried to do this.
The OpenCode bun dependency is an unsettling issue I would imagine.
if you look at the last few weeks of commits, you can see they've been systematically ripping out everything bun-specific and moving to node
I think frankly OpenCode is delusional to think that Anthropic is actually "concerned" with them in any way. Anthropic's concerns at this point are on the geopolitical level. I doubt stamping out ToS-violating usage of their subscription services is even on executive radar. OpenAI only allows it because it's a cheap PR win and they take those where they can get them.
Opencode is not delusional, it would be delusional to think Anthropic won't after they have already threatened them.
Yeah, I recognized the PR author from Twitter (same avatar) and man he really does come across as incredibly juvenile. Shamelessly talking up OpenAI while shitting on Claude models and the motivation is just so transparent.
Why does Anthropic care how the tokens are consumed?
Same reason movie theaters care about you not bringing your own snacks
You pay for snacks in the cinema and they lose money if you buy elsewhere. Where does Anthropic lose money when I use OpenCode?
If you use Claude through an interface that’s not Claude Code, you’ll only stick with it for as long as it proves itself the best. With other interfaces, you can experiment with multiple models and switch from one to another for different tasks or different periods of time.
Those tokens going to other providers are tokens not going to Anthropic, so they want to lock you in with Claude Code. And it clearly works, since a lot of people swear by it.
Why does Netflix care how the movies they stream to you are consumed? Shouldn't your $8/mo allow you to stream any movie to OpenFlix and consume however you like?
You are also not allowed to show these Netflix movies on a big screen in front of your house and charge people. The 8 dollar are for a specific use case, just like the tokens in the subscription.
Unironically, you should. In a more just world, laws would mandate service providers not obstruct third party clients.
The pricing would also be different.
Yes, content providers would have to compete with each other on price and library, and client providers could compete on UX and privacy.
Because models are quickly moving toward commoditization, whether the big three like it or not. The differentiator now is tooling around those models. By eliminating OpenCode's auth stuff, they prevent leaking customers onto another platform that allows model choice (they will likely lose paying customers to one of the major inference catalogs like OpenRouter once they move from Claude Code to OpenCode).
because he is giving them at 90% discount in their subscription. they are more than happy if you use the tokens at api pricing, but when subsidized they want you to use their claude code surface.
Because they're selling discounted tokens to use with their tooling.
opencode is a very meh agent.
Source: i run pretty much all of these agents (codex, cc, droid, opencode, amp, etc) side-by-side in agentastic.dev and opencode had basically 0 win-rate over other agents.
I've been using opencode and would be curious to try something else. What would recommend for self hosted llms?
Very new to self-hosted LLM, but I was able to run Codex with my local ollama server. (codex --oss)
I have a huge issue 10416 on OpenCode
https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/issues/10416
- their stance on privacy
not sure i follow - do they leak my information to their own servers by default?
> Paranoid that anthropic is going to torpedo them via some backdoor
Like with lawyers or something?
Rather the hypothetical situation where anthropic makes a code change to bun to have a backdoor.
Anthropic leadership is delusional, not suicidal, so they would rather use their lawyers.
Anthropic provides subsidized access to Claude models through Claude Code. It is well understood to be 'a loss leader' so that they can incentivize people to use Claude Code.
OpenCode lets people take the Claude-Code-only-API-Key, and lets them use it in a different harness. Anthropic's preferred way for such interaction is getting a different, Claude API key (and not Claude Code SDK API key).
---
A rough analogy might be something like getting subsidized drinks from a cafe, provided you sit there a eat food. What if someone says, go to the cafe and get free drink and come sit over at our cafe and order food. It is a loose analogy, but you get the idea.
> It is well understood to be 'a loss leader'
You have zero proof for this claim. It's like people read somewhere that stuff and keep spitting it out again and again without understanding..
If it wasn't the case, the Claude API pricing would be the same, $200 for unlimited use. But it's metered.
We don't know if Claude Code bleeds money for every user that touches it. Probably not. But the different pricing is a strong enough clue that it's an appeal product with subsidized tokens consumption.
API is intended for a different audience - companies with a big pocket who aren't as price sensitive as private users. So the pricing will be different than for a private subscription.
> If it wasn't the case, the Claude API pricing would be the same, $200 for unlimited use.
How do you figure? That doesn't make any sense to me.
There is huge value in getting people to subscribe to recurring payments. Giving people a discount to do so makes sense and does not mean that the subscription service loses money.
It's not a loss leader - as in they're not making a loss on the subscription.
Because they control the harness(es) and the backend, they can optimise caching and thus the costs to them.
I'm giving up. Caching is optimized server-side on a product for which they can't control the client.
Thank you, I understand all of this. My question was about the reference to "petty and bitter."
It revolves around how Open AI has much better models and how Claude Code engineers are a bunch of kids (which is kind of ironic).
What exactly are you referring to?
>usage subsidization
Is this actually the case though? Because I can't imagine what kind of hardware they're running to have costs per 1M tokens be above like $3.
This seems like pure misinformation. The code lines that are actually changed:
They're removing the ability to use OpenCode via Anthropic API keyThis is what most people in the comments are missing. They are removing the ability to even use Anthropic APIs not just your Max subscription.
this not true. api keys are supported. only "claude code" is being dropped.
that code is just a cli hint to which LLM they recommend using. so they stop recommending anthropic. rightfully so.
I believe parent is talking about a separate topic, not about this change.
Is this what the legal request demanded or is this just something that OpenCode is doing out of spite? Seems unclear. To me the meat of this change is that they're removing support for `opencode-anthropic-auth` and the prompt text that allows OpenCode to mimic Claude Code behavior. They have been skirting the intent of the original C&D for awhile now with these auth plugins and prompt text.
Using your API key in third-party harnesses has always been allowed. They just don't like using the subsidized subscription plan outside of first-party harnesses. So this seems to be out of spite
Anthropic's issue was always them spoofing OpenCode as Claude Code, piggybacking on the subscription plan.
Banning them from using the pay-per-token API key would be bad business.
It is what the legal demands are. They requested removal of all Anthropic (trademark?) mentions.
"Legal action" means you filed a lawsuit. This looks more like someone sent a list of requested changes, backed up by an implicit or explicit threat of legal action.
That's how these things usually (should) go; a good legal system (be it civil suits, insurance claims, mediation, etc) will only actually take on cases if you've tried a reasonable approach first, e.g. asking nicely.
Fun fact: In Germany, the civil courts will usually take the case anyways if it has merit, but the winner ends up paying for the whole lawsuit if they failed to make an effort to resolve the case before suing.
Since there's a lot of questions about what this means, let me explain.
Anthropic has two different products that are relevant here: the Claude API and Claude Code. The Claude API has usage based pricing. The more you use, the more you pay. With Claude Code, you can get a monthly subscription which gives you a fixed amount of usage. Comparing equivalent token generation between the Claude API and Claude Code, Claude Code with a subscription is much cheaper.
When it comes to third party products such as OpenClaw and OpenCode, Anthropic has made it clear those products should be using the Claude API and not the internal Claude Code APIs. OpenClaw and OpenCode have both been using the internal Claude Code APIs as when a user has a Claude Code subscription, the internal Claude Code API gives you tokens at a much cheaper rate than the Claude API. Presumably Anthropic makes Claude Code cheaper than the Claude API because they are willing to give users a discount for them to use Claude Code vs a competing product such as OpenCode.
It looks like until recently OpenCode tried to get around Anthropic's requirements by offering "plugins" in OpenCode that would allow users to use their Claude Code subscription in OpenCode. This PR mentions as much at[0][1]:
> There are plugins that allow you to use your Claude Pro/Max models with OpenCode. Anthropic explicitly prohibits this.
> Previous versions of OpenCode came bundled with these plugins but that is no longer the case as of 1.3.0
This PR seems to be in response to Anthropic threatening OpenCode with legal action if they keep using the internal Claude Code APIs.
this is actually the best explanation of this situation, why is it downvoted?
Opened this in Feeder's native reader and got this:
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Businesses exercise power and control in the market. The purpose of this is to set a precedent (perceived or actual) — the auth system was a product, not an API. Anthropic is drawing the line between 'built on us' and 'built around us.'
I don't necessarily see this as an evil action. It doesn't inhibit open source, it sets terms of service and practice boundaries.
Granted this is a wildly unpopular approach, worse has happened in the OSS world...
It's not clear what exactly the "legal action" is based on this github link. My pure speculation is Anthropic's lawyers have come up with a liability story boiling down to OpenCode helping end users violate the Anthropic ToS (i.e. tortious interference with contract).
A vaguely threatening letter is usually all it takes
Doesn't even need to be threatening, a notice of "this thing you're doing is in violation of our terms of service" should be enough... although I suppose that can be construed as threatening already.
I haven't used OpenCode but if not using Claude is existential then why back down? Set up limited liability somehow and just let it play out.
Sometimes, it's just not worth the effort. Seriously would you rather:
A) Get invovled in a lengthy back and forth, potential legal proceedings with a billion dollar company.
or
B) Listen to the message being sent, be pragmatic, and then get on with building things.
AI company crying over IP violation. Incredible.
Well, stealing and training on the world's IP obviously wasn't free. /s
Can anyone ELI5 what is open code and why Anthropic is asking them to delete something ?
OpenCode is an agentic coding CLI, similar to Claude Code, Codex etc. It supports different LLM providers, including Claude.
It originally had support for copying over your Claude subscription token and calling the same backend APIs as Claude Code, which meant you could use OpenCode with your Claude Pro/Max plans, but Anthropic came out and said that the plans were only meant for first-party clients, and everyone else should be using per-token billing.
Now OpenCode is removing this option from their product, it seems because of legal threats from Anthropic.
OpenCode is a agent .. harnest? The CLI or UI tool you use as an AI agent, similar to ClaudeCode.
You where not allowed to use your ClaudeCode subscription with other tool then ClaudeCode. I'm not sure if this is what got removed or if there is more too it.
But the PR is also removing the ability to use Anthropic API key as well not just Claude Code subscription
That's just them being vindictive. Anthropic doesn't care about API use, it's paid per token anyway and they set the prices for that.
Harness :)
Harnest.
Anthropic's ToS doesn't allow the subscribers to use third party tools that utilizes the APIs Claude Code uses. Open Code is one of those tools.
It's ok when Anthropic do it, like when they make deal with the army.
Worse, they deserve virtue signaling rewards when they don't make the deal.
This wouldn't be so bad if they didn't have such a sucky tui or ecosystem. AI is chef's kiss, tooling is bottom barrel.
Not really, GPT 5.4 is a great alternative. There's no real loss from using that over Claude Opus. And open models are quite close behind.
I'll do most of my work in opencode with GPT 5.3/5.4 and just spin up Claude Code for a review/cleanup pass.
Opencode just works faster and I prefer the UX.
I’ll try 5.4 again but when I spent a couple of hours with it, I found it much weaker than Claude code + opus 4.6 for working on large projects.
Are you delegating substantial work like planning and executing refactors, or more at single-line and function-level work?
I think the gap is smaller than it has been in the past but I largely agree with you, generally larger work is done much better with Claude Code.
GPT 5.4 keeps erroring out when I’ve tried it on long complex tasks. Might be works harness I guess.
Same thing happened with Google, but Google started actually banning user's accounts. Hopefully it doesn't come to that with Anthropic.
I'm sure absolutely nothing will come of Anthropic's open-source acquisitions. Totally harmless, I'm sure.
Yeah, I've been looking at bun a bit, but now I am skeptical about it.
The "good" news is LLMs make them 100% easier to fork.
It’s like they want people to not like them …
Is this relevant for people that use regular (per-token credit-based) API key?
No
Anthropic is a shit company. I cancelled my subscription 2 years ago once they started calling for regulation. They might have gotten folks to side with them in the OpenAI debate, but they are just another shit company like OpenAI.
sorry guys, I started OpenCode after 2 weeks, my bad
Anthropic is set to become the second-strongest legal department in North America
After OpenAI?
Maybe their next product will be Claude Lawyer.
Maybe Oracle should just buy Anthropic.
Remember Anthropic is supposed to be the "good guys"
Maybe go third party for plugins?
Just use GPT5.4, avoid the drama and it is a better model anyway
Not all of us enjoy being glazed mercilessly while getting subpar output
I have burnt billion of tokens in gpt 5.4 and I didn’t know what you are talking about
Except for, yknow, the DoD and killer robots and mass surveillance drama.
Driving your business on content you don't own and then this. Disgusting.
I've said it before and I'll say it again.
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.
Anthropic has every right to place rules around their generous subsidization of the Claude subscription plans, which give limits of ~8-12x as many tokens as you'd get for the same expenditure in the PAYG API.
That said, demanding an open source repo remove information that Anthropic openly publishes and distributes for free (the prompt) is a bit odd...
This argument has been decapitated countless times already on HN. Anthropic already enforce usage limits for everyone. If those limits are higher than what they want users to actually consume, that's Anthropic's problem.
This move is anti-competitive and Anthropic knows it. They're hurriedly trying to lock the gates and lay landmines behind everyone after a massive surge of new subscribers so that they're stuck using Claude Code. They see it as vital to their survival to not just to be the gas pump for tokens, they need to control the platform.
I'm baffled how people don't seem intellectually able to grasp what you described here. Claude Code users on Anthropic subscriptions aren't subsidizing those using other harnesses because usage limits aren't counted on the harness layer. It's an anti-competitive move against vc-backed commercial harnesses like Opencode (vc-backed) or Openclaw (openai-affiliated).
> Anthropic already enforce usage limits for everyone. If those limits are higher than what they want users to actually consume, that's Anthropic's problem.
I mean, OpenCode is the one changing their app here. So it kinda seems like it's actually everyone else's problem.
> This argument has been decapitated countless times already on HN.
No it hasn't, because the argument is completely correct, and the people mad about it are mad they can't have unlimited usage instead of paying the token API prices.
> This move is anti-competitive and Anthropic knows it.
No it isn't, that's not what "anti-competitive" means, and no court in the world would label it as such. You can't go flailing around looking for legal jargon to attach to behavior just because you don't like it.
API is intended for massive scaled operations (companies) and has no hard usage limits, a subscription is intended only for individual usage (solo dev) and has therefore hard usage limits. Is it that difficult to grasp the difference between API and subscription models?
The subscription is intended only for individual use specifically with Anthropic's first-party clients.
I hate these non lawyer HN takes that call anything they don’t like “anti competitive”. Let’s just start with looking up “no duty to deal”.
I don't mean anti-competitive in the legal sense of the word, I mean that it literally is hostile to competition.
It’s a company’s job to be hostile to competition
That’s a very ruthless American capitalist view. I would say a company’s job is to make the best product without resorting to cheap tricks.
Right because other capitalist countries have companies that make it easy for competition
I must be alone in this but I don't think its heavily subsidized. I see their models as really overpriced. No way they cost that much. Could they really?
Yes. Their API rates are breakeven to profitable, the subscription that people are arbitraging is a 90% discount or so from API rates.
There’s a reason 5% of GitHub commits are from Claude code and no other provider is above 0.1%… it’s quality, but it’s also subsidy.
Cost to the business and price to customers are not the same thing. Even if it cost Anthropic nothing to run any of these (it actually costs quite a bit in electricity, infrastructure, ops teams to keep everything running smoothly, and above all else, extraordinary R&D expenses to develop the models), they could set the price at a million dollars per token if they wanted to.
That clarified: yes, every major lab is losing money on full utilization of their inference subscription plans. The API prices are what the business has determined they need to achieve profitability, and are not reflective of actual costs as you point out, but the discounts vs API pricing can get pretty extreme. Some users report 50x+ (98%+) discounts on the $100/mo Max subscription plans vs PAYG API pricing¹. Even the skeptical, contrarian takes that focus on cost to the business will tell you that, yes, Anthropic is losing money on those subscriptions, even using generously low estimates on costs².
¹ https://www.ksred.com/claude-code-pricing-guide-which-plan-a...
² https://martinalderson.com/posts/no-it-doesnt-cost-anthropic...
Which I'm sure people would have more sympathy for if the restaurant wasn't robbing Sysco to make their food in the first place.
Except to me, the argument is like a customer bringing their own plate to eat off of, and the restaurant then sues the customer and demands that no restaurant can ever be allowed to use that customers plate.
Opencode to a lot of people is a nicer and more feature rich harness than CC, it doesn’t consume any more tokens than CC, and if it did, the bounds of how many tokens each account is allowed to use is tied to the users payment and rate limits.
Once again, Anthropic are not your friends and are the bad guys.
Seems fine to me. Why do people think they are entitled to use heavily subsidized services outside of the tools it's intended to work with per terms.
Was it always clear that you're not supposed to use the Claude API this way?
I don't think Anthropic has a problem with you using a regular pay-per-token API key with opencode. The issue is letting someone use their "Log in with Claude" as if it were a regular API key.
Yes.
Ok then it's fine
avoid bun is my take away... if anthropic decides you're a competitor and with the way AI is evolving you will be a competitor soon - don't rely on any anthropic tools or models.
Why should anybody avoid bun? Just fork it if it ever changes license. In fact, I'm 100% sure it would be instaforked if Anthropic ever tried anything
What’s next - coming after all the projects that have been coded using Claude Code, claiming they are their property?
Don't give them ideas please. They'll ask for more investment to do exactly this.
I miss the days when open source was a way to get your product in the developers hands and build trust. Stuff like this shows that the tide has shifted to primary focus on shareholders and potential hold on patents and trademarks.
> I miss the days when open source was...
Me too. I also miss the days when I was proud of my little open source projects. Now I just regret donating fuel, even a miniscule amount in the grand scheme of things, to the soulless lawnmower that has already chopped down so much of my joy in work and promises to eventually shred the paycheck, too.
> Now I just regret donating fuel
I hear yah, especially knowing that AI crawlers just don't respect ROBOTS.txt or anything similar, but there's still nothing wrong with writing code for fun.. No need to lose that!
Can anyone explain what’s going on here? Using API is illegal? that can’t possibly be since we now know API is not even copyrighted (which personally I disagree with bit whatever)… so what is going on here?
I believe Anthropic is trying to block the use of their Claude code subscription by third party applications like OpenCode.
I think they’re okay with someone using their API with anything, including OpenCode.
Please someone correct me if I’m wrong.
No, you’re completely right, you can use Claude API pricing with anything you want, including OpenCode and OpenClaw.
Under what law can Anthropic force OpenCode to do this? Surely it's not illegal to publish code that interacts with an API that's open for everyone to see?
Presumably there's binding legal terms in the license agreement that users agree to in order to access the API.
The API has a very clear ToS prohibiting third-party client usage with the heavily subsidized Claude.ai subscription plans. Anthropic's right to reject or block that traffic, as well as to ban users who attempt this, is well-protected by the ToS those users neglected to read.
Regarding the legal demands here, anyone can issue anyone else a cease and desist order at any time, for anything, in the USA. The demands do not need to have merit.
"Illegal" generally refers to criminal law, not civil suits, this was essentially Anthropic threatening to file a lawsuit. Opencode was under no legal obligation to comply and was not breaking any laws, they simply decided it was easier and cheaper to comply than to fight.
> The API has a very clear ToS prohibiting ...
What is the relevance?
If I understand correctly, OpenCode, i.e. the creator of the tool, does not use Anthropic's API. Their users do.
I am unsure where the connection can be made between the users violating some terms of service and a maker of a tool.
They specifically built the tools to do it easily.
... A tool that had code which explicitly enables and advertises the ability to violate those terms of service.
I thought TOS grants Anthropic the right to stop providing the service to a user, not go after them legally.
My understanding is that, if you directly assist someone violate a ToS, you can be held liable.
Bad analogy but the getaway driver doesn’t need to enter the bank to be guilty in the robbery.
Surely there's no way that's true. The logical conclusion of that would be that every random ToS is a law that everyone must abide by, regardless of whether or not they've agreed to it.
By definition, it is exactly a law. It's known as business law. The ToS is a business contract which you must agree to if you wish to use the service. Violating terms of service is literally a breach of contract.
I think you may be confused here. Anthropic isn't going after users here at all, they essentially told another company that is interfacing with Anthropic's service in a way that violates Anthropic's TOS to "please stop or else we might have to take legal action in the future".
More broadly, you do not need to establish any kind of contractual right to "go after" anyone legally, that's not how civil law works. A cease and desist letter isn't even really legal action, it's a threat of legal action, but even then, Anthropic doesn't need your permission to sue you, just like you don't need Anthropic's permission to sue them.
If you think that inside the U.S., you have some kind of legal immunity to or protection from cease and desist letters or lawsuits from any company, for any reason¹, you would largely be mistaken. If this is important to you, you might want to talk to a lawyer.
¹ Some states have anti-SLAPP statutes that offer limited protections in certain context, but this isn't applicable in the context of this example between Anthropic and AnomalyCo.
That being said it's maybe a valid claim under "tortuous interference" theory, i.e. OpenCode damaged Anthropic by interfering with the contractual ToS agreement between Anthropic and its users
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortious_interference
but plan is linked to api key which the user provides…
Terms or Service
Do you need to accept ToS to vibe code anthropic plugin?
Code is one thing. Using API key is entirely different thing.
Cleary they need to get AI which has not accepted those to rewrite it. That is the easy and fast solution these days. Or at most find a person who has not accepted tos do that.
Just re-train your own model on your own collected data. No problem there.
They don't need any actual written law behind their actions, all they need is money. What are you gonna do, fight them in court? Good luck with that, especially against a company directly associated with the US government and Palantir.
well i guess the next github will be based out of China on Alibaba cloud