Anthropic takes legal action against OpenCode

https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/pull/18186

by _squared_ • 4 months ago

483 389 4 months ago

github.com

mellosouls2• 4 months ago

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

noemit4• 4 months ago

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.

shimman• 4 months ago

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.

danny_codes• 4 months ago

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

brookst3• 4 months ago

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?

pixl97• 4 months ago

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.

LZ_Khan• 4 months ago

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.

doc_ick2• 4 months ago

*What makes you think it hasn’t already been pulled/used in training from GitHub?

runako4• 4 months ago

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.

linux2647• 4 months ago

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.

segmondy4• 4 months ago

so they own the trademark to Clawd? Or is it suppose to be Claude?

TiredOfLife2• 4 months ago

And what relation does Anthropic or Claude have woth the name Clawdbot

paxys4• 4 months ago

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.

ViewTrick1002• 4 months ago

Which means the plans are subsidized, and you pay with your data.

ffsm83• 4 months ago

You're literally spreading misinformation.

Anthropic stance has not been consistent. There are even now still articles by them telling users about unattended use like in CI which would now be considered TOS

Their stance has just been clear for a year now, even if they've changed their mind in comparison to the introduction of the sub, which significantly predates Claude code

gck13• 4 months ago

There's nothing consistent with Anthropic on this matter.

Their documentation, cli, SDKs, TOS, their public stance - have major contradictions and are subject to so much interpretation that you can't really figure out what's allowed and what's not.

Opencode allowed? No

Custom agentic harnesses allowed? Yes

Opencode is a custom agentic harness? Yes, but not allowed

Which agentic harness is allowed? Can I use a custom agentic harness I develop - say, tmux that runs claude code? We don't know, but you'll know if we ban you

rvz3• 4 months ago

I guarantee you that Cursor will be next to be targeted by Anthropic.

"Safety" is just complete control for them.

hirako20009• 4 months ago

The irony given they hoped to get acquired.

hokkos• 4 months ago

It's ok when Anthropic do it, like when they make deal with the army.

hirako20009• 4 months ago

Worse, they deserve virtue signaling rewards when they don't make the deal.

adampunk4• 4 months ago

Anthropic has determined that they do not want to be a provider. This has clearly paid off for them, given that owning the harness allows them to do things like sign commits, which is an extraordinarily well placed advertising scheme.

Whether Claude Code can keep pace with the variety of demand remains to be seen. My guess is no and that unlike OpenAI, they are interested in suing and not buying competing harnesses.

Good luck!

gwd4• 4 months ago

They're perfectly happy being an API provider, where they're not selling their tokens at a loss. My guess is that they're counting the losses for Claude Code Max plans as R&D: what does usage look like if people don't have to worry about the cost of tokens? Because someday they won't, and Anthropic want to skate to where the puck will be, not where it is.

adampunk4• 4 months ago

You don't go after OpenCode because they allow for arbitrage. You go after them because they can decouple your model from your brand.

akmarinov• 4 months ago

It’s like they want people to not like them …

solenoid093711• 4 months ago

Yeah, they're so mean for not letting you abuse their loss leading product under the terms you accepted!

jitl• 4 months ago

Same thing happened with Google, but Google started actually banning user's accounts. Hopefully it doesn't come to that with Anthropic.

cedws5• 4 months ago

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?

bdangubic2• 4 months ago

Terms or Service

Ekaros• 4 months ago

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.

strideashort5• 4 months ago

Do you need to accept ToS to vibe code anthropic plugin?

Code is one thing. Using API key is entirely different thing.

anonym294• 4 months ago

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.

cedws5• 4 months ago

I thought TOS grants Anthropic the right to stop providing the service to a user, not go after them legally.

strideashort5• 4 months ago

but plan is linked to api key which the user provides…

pbasista• 4 months ago

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.

bakugo2• 4 months ago

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.

strideashort5• 4 months ago

well i guess the next github will be based out of China on Alibaba cloud

nijave2• 4 months ago

Presumably there's binding legal terms in the license agreement that users agree to in order to access the API.

Daviey6• 4 months ago

And what makes Opencode beholden to that, and not the actual customer (you and I)?

anonym294• 4 months ago

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...

cedws5• 4 months ago

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.

jakelazaroff• 4 months ago

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.

siva76• 4 months ago

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).

raw_anon_11113• 4 months ago

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”.

Analemma_2• 4 months ago

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.

noemit4• 4 months ago

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?

brookst3• 4 months ago

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.

anonym294• 4 months ago

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...

bena• 4 months ago

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.

sifex• 4 months ago

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.

Robdel12• 4 months ago

I love this argument because people grab Anthropic’s API pricing, stop there, and present it at face value.

Only Anthropic knows their inference costs. And do we _really_ think they’re losing money? Hahaha

carlos-menezes• 4 months ago

I'm sure absolutely nothing will come of Anthropic's open-source acquisitions. Totally harmless, I'm sure.

tommica• 4 months ago

Yeah, I've been looking at bun a bit, but now I am skeptical about it.

cyanydeez• 4 months ago

The "good" news is LLMs make them 100% easier to fork.

p5v• 4 months ago

What’s next - coming after all the projects that have been coded using Claude Code, claiming they are their property?

bilekas2• 4 months ago

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.

rspeele• 4 months ago

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.

Handy-Man• 4 months ago

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.

zadikian2• 4 months ago

Was it always clear that you're not supposed to use the Claude API this way?

snoman2• 4 months ago

Yes.

maccam912• 4 months ago

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.

FloatArtifact• 4 months ago

Maybe go third party for plugins?

extr7• 4 months ago

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.

tietjens3• 4 months ago

This is not my impression, could you explain what you're talking about?

extr7• 4 months ago

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).

bitpush4• 4 months ago

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.

ayhanfuat• 4 months ago

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).

Aerroon• 4 months ago

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.

ipsum2• 4 months ago

This seems like pure misinformation. The code lines that are actually changed:

              hint: {
                opencode: "recommended",
                -anthropic: "API key",
                openai: "ChatGPT Plus/Pro or API key",
              }[x.id],

They're removing the ability to use OpenCode via Anthropic API key

extr7• 4 months ago

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.

aeriose2• 4 months ago

This is what most people in the comments are missing. They are removing the ability to even use Anthropic APIs not just your Max subscription.

g947o• 4 months ago

I believe parent is talking about a separate topic, not about this change.

raincole5• 4 months ago

What exactly are you referring to?

valunord• 4 months ago

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.

zozbot2342• 4 months ago

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.

brookst3• 4 months ago

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?

girvo4• 4 months ago

GPT 5.4 keeps erroring out when I’ve tried it on long complex tasks. Might be works harness I guess.

ljm• 4 months ago

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.

strideashort5• 4 months ago

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?

2muchtime• 4 months ago

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.

Analemma_2• 4 months ago

No, you’re completely right, you can use Claude API pricing with anything you want, including OpenCode and OpenClaw.

jryio• 4 months ago

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...

MyHonestOpinon• 4 months ago

Can anyone ELI5 what is open code and why Anthropic is asking them to delete something ?

raincole5• 4 months ago

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.

paxys4• 4 months ago

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.

Mashimo• 4 months ago

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.

aeriose2• 4 months ago

But the PR is also removing the ability to use Anthropic API key as well not just Claude Code subscription

girvo4• 4 months ago

Harness :)

droidjj• 4 months ago

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).

paxys4• 4 months ago

A vaguely threatening letter is usually all it takes

Cthulhu_2• 4 months ago

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.

0x3f3• 4 months ago

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.

gwd4• 4 months ago

"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.

Cthulhu_2• 4 months ago

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.

lima• 4 months ago

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.

karmasimida3• 4 months ago

Just use GPT5.4, avoid the drama and it is a better model anyway

girvo4• 4 months ago

Except for, yknow, the DoD and killer robots and mass surveillance drama.

awestroke3• 4 months ago

Not all of us enjoy being glazed mercilessly while getting subpar output

karmasimida3• 4 months ago

I have burnt billion of tokens in gpt 5.4 and I didn’t know what you are talking about

taf2• 4 months ago

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.

awestroke3• 4 months ago

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

zajio1am• 4 months ago

Is this relevant for people that use regular (per-token credit-based) API key?

vova_hn25• 4 months ago

No, this is perfectly OK with the ToS.

I_am_tiberius• 4 months ago

Driving your business on content you don't own and then this. Disgusting.

827a5• 4 months ago

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.

0x3f3• 4 months ago

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.

simple10• 4 months ago

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.

stanac• 4 months ago

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).

theshrike798• 4 months ago

Also lock-in to their harness so they can control caching on both ends and make things more profitable.

szmarczak• 4 months ago

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.

strictnein2• 4 months ago

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.

terhechte• 4 months ago

you can also use Claude Code programmatically with the `prompt` parameter in the cli.

SeanAnderson• 4 months ago

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?

segmondy4• 4 months ago

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.

harikb2• 4 months ago

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.

827a5• 4 months ago

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.

hirako20009• 4 months ago

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.

raincole5• 4 months ago

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.

827a5• 4 months ago

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).

celestialcheese• 4 months ago

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.

samcollins2• 4 months ago

Yep, I suspect this is the rationale/driver too.

827a5• 4 months ago

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.

andreagrandi• 4 months ago

You mean their tool (I use it daily) is so bad despite all the data they collect?

pmarreck• 4 months ago

Yeah but they're not owed the telemetry. It's a privilege (if you convince your users to interface with your service via their client), not a right.

rvz3• 4 months ago

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.

achompas6• 4 months ago

Yes, it is true that companies often litigate against customers who violate their Terms of Service. The TOS is put into place to protect the company’s interests from user abuse.

Paying customers of Claude Code don’t receive a free-use license for any desired application. They’re paying to use Claude Code. Anthropic can take steps to litigate usage outside of those terms, even if customers find that fact really annoying.

impulser_2• 4 months ago

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.

aray07• 4 months ago

you can choose your own model in claude code and it generally defaults to Opus

samcollins2• 4 months ago

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.

browningstreet3• 4 months ago

I use both.. Claude Code memory smokes OpenCode's lack of it when memory is important.

raincole5• 4 months ago

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.

dvfjsdhgfv2• 4 months ago

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?

throwaway13337• 4 months ago

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.

kristo• 4 months ago

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.

bakugo2• 4 months ago

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.

nikcub• 4 months ago

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

georgemcbay• 4 months ago

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

rudedogg3• 4 months ago

This is more like if Google took action against Thunderbird and open-source email clients

stefan_• 4 months ago

Ok, bear with me here.

Theory 1: the internet has been fully strip mined for all content and is now dead. See that graph of StackOverflow questions dropping off a cliff to zero. Nothing much worthwhile is being added.

Theory 2: they are all unethical as fuck and definitely learning off your data. You would be insane not to - theory 1 means all your free training data is gone, but all that corporate data is fresh, ripe and covers many domains that the amateurs on the internet never filled. You have to launder it some way of course, but it's definitely happening.

Theory 3: winner takes all. I don't care for "Claude" and your wishy-washy ethics performance. ChudAI has a better model and harness? I'm gone this evening.

Having all the users, even if they are exploiting you for cheap compute with their own harness, is essential.

piskov• 4 months ago

So what openai does differently than anthropic to allow usage everywhere via chatgpt subscription?

Hemorrhaging money more than Anthropic?

lemming• 4 months ago

This argument is predicated on Anthropic losing money on the subs, but I'm not sure that's a cut and dried argument. OpenAI have said publicly that they're (very) profitable on inference, and they're much cheaper than Anthropic. I suspect this is just artificially trying to create a moat. The problem is their moat is not as sticky as they think it is - I completely ditched Claude for Codex a while ago, my money now goes to OpenAI, and I'm very happy with it. For a while Claude was noticeably better, but that's not the case any more - in my case I prefer Codex.

WhyNotHugo• 4 months ago

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.

otabdeveloper45• 4 months ago

Eventually (several years max) there will self-hosted Chinese LLM devices with the quality of cloud models for the price of a smartphone.

The only sticky part that will remain will be the UX of particular harness and post-training flavors.

phist_mcgee• 4 months ago

I seriously get the feeling that Anthropic doesn't just not care about their users

AI companies would have to be one of the worst for actually caring about their user's health and wellbeing.

paxys4• 4 months ago

You are wayy overestimating the negative press. HN commenters are a negligible fraction of Anthropic's user base, and I can guarantee that even people here will forget about this and go right back to using Claude Code in a couple days when there is something else to be outraged about. The company needs to do what is best for its business.

Esophagus4• 4 months ago

Pretty much this. When Anthropic broke the OAuth flow from OpenCode, I switched back to Claude Code.

I like Anthropic’s models better than OpenCode + GPT/Gemini.

websap• 4 months ago

There are a plethora of models that you can use with open code. Anthropic is well within its rights to limit third-party usage of services that violate the TOS. As a Claude code user I’d much rather have the very best experience on Claude code than the largest supportability matrix for Anthropic models.

serf2• 4 months ago

as someone who has used codex/claude-code/opencode I can confidently say that "the very best experience on Claude" is not the one that Anthropic provides software for.

827a5• 4 months ago

Well, the challenge for Anthropic's users is: While Anthropic has fantastic coding models right now, they have a bad harness in claude code and the claude desktop app. The best experience using Anthropic's models is OpenCode and Cursor. This wasn't true ~3 months ago, and may return to being untrue in ~3 months, that's how fast these things change, but right now this is the case. Unfortunately, Anthropic models in OpenCode/Cursor are tremendously expensive; and that gets at some of the leading theories on why CC has degraded recently; that Anthropic has been forced to dynamically route more of the agentic process onto Sonnet/Haiku, or reduce the Opus thinking budget.

For all of these reasons, currently, the meta is ChatGPT subscription on Codex or OpenCode. But, again, these things change every few weeks.

I don't think this is as clean-cut as just saying "Anthropic is in their rights" etc. Of course, they are, to whatever degree they are; the bigger problem is that you've got $100/mo and $200/mo Claude subscriptions who are actively saying "the $20/mo Codex subscription is better in every way", possibly because of these thinking budget/routing changes people suspect have happened this month. In other words: Anthropic is at-capacity after the DoW incident, they need to load shed, and they've chosen to harm their high-paying power users and Enterprise over just temporarily slowing growth a bit by hurting the $20/mo plan. And, frankly, they might be right: because for every $200/mo user that jumps over to ChatGPT, half of them will be back once Anthropic can scale capacity, and if they can gain 20x $20/mo users who only use half their sub, that's a win.

KronisLV• 4 months ago

OpenCode is awesome. Claude Code is nothing special at all.

It's weird, my experience is the exact opposite: OpenCode had the weirdest issue of interpreting C:\Users\some-user\Documents\Projects\... as a bunch of escaped characters without \ and created some trash files even with Anthropic models. Before then, OpenCode had the issue of me copying multiple lines of text into it from clipboard somehow quitting the program (crashing?) and then making every following line (of text, notes etc.) be passed to the shell directly. Happened in both Terminal app and also Git Bash on Windows. It might just be that Windows is a shit OS, but Claude Code doesn't really seem to exhibit those problems (and neither does Codex, in their defense). I hope OpenCode has fixed at least some of those since.

Let the weirdos at Anthropic do what weirdos do, and hopefully one day their name is never mentioned again in polite society.

What an odd thing to say. Maybe I'm out of the loop about some drama (aside from Anthropic having a bit of a spine in regards to govt. while being otherwise flawed still), but pretty happy with my Max subscription, they even fixed the Code GUI mode in their Electron app recently, it finally feels usable and I don't just need to juggle 4 terminal sessions.

3abiton• 4 months ago

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.

I have noticed odd behavior when choosing a model, it automatically switches after sometime. Some tasks do not require lots of power, so when I select Haiku, few prompts later, I see Sonnet popping up in the cost/spending. Happened few times.

kaycey20223• 4 months ago

I don't think it's any of that. It's plain as day to see that as the owners of the API they can see every request, collect every metric they need. The routing can easily be done in the API gateway layer and doesn't depend on the harness at all. Good harnesses are not performing acrobatics around user behaviour to improve anything. They just understand the provider API very well and translate tool calls really well. Then they get out of the way to let the magic happen.

This is about controlling user behaviour, resisting standardisation efforts, to keep subscribers hooked to their models. If they keep their users on claude code, they don't have to adapt to evolving harness standards when shown increased usage across different harnesses. They will try to keep everything on their terms, on their poor quality of engineering, and the users accustomed to claude behaviour will be left with no quick way to switch to other models.

This strategy will keep working as long as they own a top tier frontier model with enough marketing hype behind it to blind unsophisticated users.

solenoid093711• 4 months ago

This is such an incredibly entitled take

You are given a loss leader product under certain terms for a very cheap price. The ONLY condition is that you respect the terms.

Instead of doing that you go off on this rant about how you shouldn't have to respect the terms and the company is evil for imposing terms at all!

The Claude API is RIGHT THERE if you don't want to use the loss leader. Where is this entitlement coming from!?

Sure Codex lets you do this for now, but VC money is finite and people won't let you abuse their free loss leaders forever.

rvz3• 4 months ago

Once again, Anthropic are not your friends and are the bad guys.

DanielHall2• 4 months ago

Anthropic is set to become the second-strongest legal department in North America

shifto• 4 months ago

Maybe Oracle should just buy Anthropic.

fy20• 4 months ago

Maybe their next product will be Claude Lawyer.

shrx• 4 months ago

After OpenAI?

NekkoDroid• 4 months ago

I assumed Nintendo of America was top.

_ache_• 4 months ago

AI company crying over IP violation. Incredible.

pmdr• 4 months ago

Well, stealing and training on the world's IP obviously wasn't free. /s

exabrial• 4 months ago

Remember Anthropic is supposed to be the "good guys"

ftchd• 4 months ago

sorry guys, I started OpenCode after 2 weeks, my bad

malisper• 4 months ago

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.

  [0] https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/pull/18186/changes#diff-b5d5affc6941bf7bb19805cc8f556cd1b9ae73ffd99e520120700536b166f8c0L310
  [1] https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/pull/18186/changes#diff-b5d5affc6941bf7bb19805cc8f556cd1b9ae73ffd99e520120700536b166f8c0R321

sufehmi• 4 months ago

this is actually the best explanation of this situation, why is it downvoted?

guelo• 4 months ago

people like directing anger at a "bad guy"

achompas6• 4 months ago

Yep, well said and great, sharp explanation.

I think we can attribute a bunch of consternation here to drift between assumed and actual licensing terms.

The actual licensing terms for Claude Code expressly prohibit use of the product outside of the Claude Code harness. If you want Opus outside of CC, the API is available for your use anytime.

Some percentage of the community seems to assume their Claude Code subscription licenses allow free usage of CC across any product surface - including competing products like OpenCode. While this is a great way to save on API costs, the assumption is incorrect. In fact, it is *so* incorrect that Anthropic has encoded their licensing terms into their Terms of Service, and a result can take legal action against any violating parties.

We can have separate discussions about Anthropic’s use of the Common Crawl in pre-training, or whether foundation labs adhere to robots.txt conventions. But those don’t directly impact Anthropic’s right to bring litigation.

——

Outside of that I think angry users have their own stated preferences v revealed preferences here. They claim they want Opus on their terms, and Anthropic’s actions infringe on their user rights.

Angry folks: Opus is right there! You just need an API key! The reality is you want Opus in your devtools of choice at discounted rates. You could at least be honest about your consternation

exitb2• 4 months ago

including competing products like OpenCode

I think that’s a bit more nuanced. The actual „product” is not the harness, which is free anyway, but the Claude subscription. In any scenario, that’s what the customer continues to pay for. I understand why Anthropic is doing that, but I feel no need to defend it. Just like I understand why Apple limits your app choices to AppStore, but I’m not going to go out of my way to defend their decision.

FuckButtons• 4 months ago

I think this is disingenuous, people want to be able to use a tool that they pay for to do useful work on their own terms because they payed for it and don’t see the differential pricing model offered by Anthropic as legitimate.

coldtea5• 4 months ago

We can have separate discussions about Anthropic’s use of the Common Crawl in pre-training, or whether foundation labs adhere to robots.txt conventions. But those don’t directly impact Anthropic’s right to bring litigation.

Some of us don't care for Anthropic's "right to bring litigation" anymore than we care about some scumbag patent troll company doing things "within their legal rights".

We care for the morality of its conduct, the openess of its products, and the environment it creates.

hermanzegerman• 4 months ago

They can't take any legal action outside of the US. In most other jurisdiction such Bullshit in the ToS would be void anyway

esperent4• 4 months ago

Anthropic has two different products that are relevant here: the Claude API and Claude Code.

No, the two relevant products are Claude API vs Claude subscription. There's no "Claude Code subscription". There's just a subscription for all Claude services at once.

bloody-crow• 4 months ago

The $20/mo Pro subscription only allows regular chat and Claude Code and does not allow you to export your API key without reverse engineering CC. The higher tiers allows console and direct API usage.

Basically, the concept of Claude-Code having its own API tier holds.

skeledrew6• 4 months ago

Their ToS says differently. You can't argue with what's explicitly in their legal agreement.

faangguyindia• 4 months ago

Claude code might be subsidized but there are other risks

Like if any agent can use claude models then it exposes them to distillation risk. Where data gathered from millions of such agent usage can easily be used to train a model, making their model superiority subpar

Second thing is, to improve their own coding model, you need predictable input.

If input to their model is all over the place (using different harnesses adds additional entropy to data) then it's hard to improve the model along 1 axis.

Cache is money saver in computing. Their own client might be lot better at caches than any other agent so they do not want to lose money yet end up with disgrunted customer that claude isn't working as good

And also, if a user can simply switch model in an agent. Then what moat does anthropic have? Claude code will not include other companys models and thus will allow them to make their claude code more "complex" with time so the workflows are ingrained in users psyche to the point using anything else becomes very difficult and user quickly returns to claude code

cruffle_duffle• 4 months ago

Cache is money saver in computing. Their own client might be lot better at caches than any other agent so they do not want to lose money yet end up with disgrunted customer that claude isn't working as good

I’d bet a reasonable amount that this could be the case. They are very well incentivized to maximize cache use when it’s basically not pay per token.

Covenant0028• 4 months ago

They are not entitled to a moat, and their customers do not owe them one. Several companies have narrow or no moats. Dell and HP are two examples when it comes to their PC business.

This idea that companies should be allowed to lock down their products just so they can have moats, is how we ended up with printer ink being more expensive than crude oil or champagne.

mech4222• 4 months ago

The part I never really understood, was I thought the subscriptions were to try and boost Opus usage, not claude code usage ? I'm not sure why they care whether you use API or claude, as they limit the number of tokens you can use anyway - and once the request hits the model, I would have thought it takes the same amount of effort to process it regardless of where it comes from ?

maxaw2• 4 months ago

It’s definitely to encourage Claude code usage. Owning the interface through which your core product is delivered is a hedge against the commoditisation that everyone talks about. Eg, it’s much harder to switch from Claude code to cursor or vice versa than it is to switch between models in cursor (I sometimes don’t even notice model defaulting to composer inside cursor)

threecheese• 4 months ago

Good recent video on this specific subject, it was enlightening to me: https://youtu.be/3FbqaD1MCUA

coldtea5• 4 months ago

> There are plugins that allow you to use your Claude Pro/Max models with OpenCode. Anthropic explicitly prohibits this.

In other words, you pay $$ for a subscription, but Anthropic has the gal to tell you what client to use with it.

ouraf• 4 months ago

So they've been advancing in making the AI use the computer through the same API as a person (screen/cursor/keystrokes), and the dream is a Future where AI can use a PC and handle tasks and tools like a human user.

But to use their product,you have to go through the non-human-friendly API route, or else it's against the rules and Anthropic will sic their legal team onto you...

Something about this reasoning seems brittle. Specially in a world of Agentic tools

segmondy4• 4 months ago

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.

rcr-anti• 4 months ago

Something that usually gets missed in these discussions is that the subscription quotas seem to rely heavily on prompt caching to be economically viable, or at least less unviable. They can and do have permutations of the system prompt, tools, skills, etc. that makes the first 20k or so tokens hit the cache and not use inference resources for that portion. In addition, from my monitoring, Claude Code with Max has about an 80% cost reduction via caching (equivalent if you had done the same work with API billing), and has been improving over time. If cache use passes on a discount of 90% I think it's fair to assume the actual cost to them is close to negligible.

So they're being obtuse about it for some reason, but if you want an economically sustainable model for AI companies they have to have some kind of optimization for the otherwise ridiculously discounted subscriptions. They sell subscriptions at the same rate and quotas to enterprise now, minus the $200 tier, so this isn't just consumer marketing being subsidized by b2b revenue.

Whether they're making money or just losing less, you can only get those kind of cache optimizations when you have a fixed client.

skybrian• 4 months ago

Maybe they could charge API users less if they use the same prefix that Claude Code uses? More coding agents using the same prefix results in better caching, reducing costs.

solenoid093711• 4 months ago

They do charge API users less, I pay 50-90% less when structuring my prompts for caching.

unshavedyak2• 4 months ago

Anyone know why OpenCode is integrating to ClaudeCode in the manner they were? Ie CC gives you an SDK, and i get the impression that Anthropic is fine with you using whatever external tools you want with the SDK .. otherwise why'd they publish an SDK?

So if CC has an SDK, why doesn't OC just use the SDK? I assume there's some functional reason why it doesn't perform to their needs? Maybe it's not low level enough? I'm unfamiliar with what sort of functionality a harness needs.

It makes me nervous as i'm using the CC SDK for my own wrapper though. Hypothetically what i'm doing is no different than embedding CC into an IDE.. though. Fingers crossed.

achompas6• 4 months ago

The problem isn’t the SDK but the API usage.

Users will say this-or-that about choice etc etc. It’s about subsidized tokens. Otherwise th users (and OpenCode) would have stopped pushing the workarounds months ago.

unshavedyak2• 4 months ago

The problem isn’t the SDK but the API usage.

Yes, i completely agree - which was my question. To my understanding OC was using CC API directly instead of using the SDK. My question is, why? Does the SDK prevent some functionality they needed?

adangert• 4 months ago

And the downfall of anthropic starts, OpenAI has had this all in the bag the whole time. Anthropic is a poor imitation of Sam's Master plan, it was over before it even started. Money grubbers, the lot of em!

0xbadc0de5• 4 months ago

A few months ago, I had my Anthropic Claude Max account nuked for using OpenCode. That sucked, but I just opened a new Claude Max account under a different email. Which, yes, after re-reading their terms is also forbidden. But I had been playing by their rules ever since. Only using Claude Code and their official apps. So they got what they wanted - compliance.

Today they nuked my account again. I can only assume it was because I had the gall to find so much value in their product that even after they banned me once, I still wanted to give them money!

I've been around this planet a long time and I have never encountered a tech company as hostile to their users as Anthropic. And that includes Microsoft back in the 90's & 00's.

I really hope they change their ways. But for now, I'm done with them. I'll take my business elsewhere.

tallesborges92• 4 months ago

This is really sucks, it’s a bad move for Anthropic, OpenAI is allowing using their models in third parties apps and the china models as well …

I don’t believe Anthropic will win this battle.

I just want to use the tools in a way and customized way that I want, Anthropic not allowing me to me to do that forced me to use the codex models, thanks for that I’m very happy with the results. I’m cheering for OpenAI

627467• 4 months ago

Hey its not suing me so i guess i shouldnt care?

But what is the argument here? "OpenCode facilitates the users of their opensource tool to misuse another app they have installed"?

I guess anything goes with ip law really. Its all about flexing lawyer power and willingness to drown opponents in legal costs.

Maybe if you dont want people to misuse your sub dont ship the ability to do so in the app that users actually installed on their machines?

This is the same as all the alternative youtube clients. Just play the cat and mouse game Anthropic

vova_hn25• 4 months ago

I can understand how and why they are able to go after users, who violate ToS, but I do not understand how are why they can go after open source developers, who just publish some source code that seems to be protected speech under the First Amendment [0] in the US jurisdiction.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_as_speech

Daviey6• 4 months ago

I know this is a low value comment, but Anthropic always felt like the good guys in this space. Now.. Fuck you Anthropic.

solenoid093711• 4 months ago

Amazing how fickle people are. Yes, Anthropic are the baddies for not letting you abuse their loss leading product.

Daviey6• 4 months ago

Can you help me understand how using Claude Code isn't abusive, but Opencode is?

('because they said so, isn't a good answer)

karljtaylor• 4 months ago

teams enterprise customer here, we got knocked out too. the most irritating thing here? OpenCode is necessary given how incredibly buggy Claude Code is. I know Boris is a "hot shot" but the whole individual contributor developers running rough shot on that codebase + they still haven't really fixed the cache bug makes this a really poorly timed move on their part. I can't prove this, but I would bet management doesn't actually use Claude outside of the Desktop surface. They'd have known how much this would break if they were really using it at scale.

cferry• 4 months ago

I believe the solution to this kind of problems is that enough legislators (thinking of USA, EU) make it illegal to require a certain implementation of a software client to use an online service, whether this restriction is built into the communications protocol or checked through a side channel. Then the owner of the client device decides which implementation they'd like to use - so corporations can keep requiring the proprietary "official" one on their own corporate devices, but customers / end users who own their devices get to choose. Like, basic rights that come with ownership.

This would essentially take us back to what online services were 20 years ago, by outlawing a business model that relies on providers controlling stuff on users' devices. What's on the server is the company's business, what's on the client is the user's, and the boundary is clear. On the one hand, services that would persist would likely no longer have free tiers (which would essentially mean free lunch for customers); since it's a commercial service run by a company that has costs, it's just normal to pay for it as a user, there's no free beer anywhere. On the other hand, by paying for something, you'd get that thing and nothing else, as there's always going to be a client that doesn't leak data not necessary for the service to perform whatever you paid for, or impose arbitrary restrictions on its use. If any, these need to be server-side.

solenoid093711• 4 months ago

This just increases the price for everyone. The API is always there if you don't want to use the loss leader. The entitlement in this thread is insane.

wklm• 4 months ago

Could someone please explain in simple terms what is the legal basis for these “legal requests”?

coldtea5• 4 months ago

Just fucking buy them already -- they have a better product than yours

guru4consulting• 4 months ago

Anthropic subsidizes the fees when devs use their API within their own Claude code product. They do not give any such discount when the devs use their API outside their product. Seems fair enough. But looks like lots of developers expect the subsidy even when used outside their core product. Not fair, I guess.

In the end, a business gets to decide how and when to strategically subsidize their users.

scuderiaseb• 4 months ago

Worth noting something the PR comments are glossing over is that the auth plugin wasn’t actually deleted in this PR, just removed from the default bundle. A third-party plugin doing the same thing is still technically on the table. OpenCode just can’t be the one shipping it anymore. Whether that holds up legally is anyone’s guess, but it’s not a hard wall.

NamlchakKhandro• 4 months ago

Local models are coming boys.

As much as it kills the living shit out of me to say this... Apple M5 Ultra will probably mean for a lot of us that we wont need openai or anthropic for coding llms anymore

alifeinbinary• 4 months ago

While the M5 is impressive, its capacity to compete against enterprise models like Opus, Sonnet etc is off by a couple orders of magnitude. Even the most sophisticated open source models top out at 100-200 billion parameters whereas Claude, OpenAI are north of a trillion parameters.

While SOC is definitely the future or local AI, even if you get an M5 that's jacked to the tits, you still won't be able to store the entire model in unified memory on top of the OS and whatever other applications you have running. 128GB is the upper limit for unified memory on the M5, which on paper could support a model like gpt-oss:120b but still with a nerfed context size and quantised at that. Furthermore, the cost of a maxed out Macbook Pro M5 Max is between $8-10k depending on your storage option, screen size etc., so we can safely assume that the M5 Ultra will be even more. There's also no guarantee that the Ultra will offer double the amount of unified memory, it may only offer more cores but cores aren't the current bottleneck for local AI, memory is.

If you consider what you'd be paying above and beyond your requirements barring local AI, it would be adding $5-6k to the price tag at a minimum. That equates to 5 years worth of a Claude Code subscription! Even if you shouldered that cost with your NFT fortunes you likely wouldn't achieve performance parity with CC.

I'm equally as excited as you are about the future for local AI and I am actively working in this space everyday to improve it but we're still a long way off from being able to match model size, context size, token/sec, TTFB etc. A single H100 is so OP, so hosting thousands in a data centre it's expected that it should remain unrivalled.

The area where I'm having success with local AI is by pairing local models with other supportive technologies like databases and the like to compensate for smaller context size. There are still many in roads to be made in this area and that bodes well for the future of local AI as models become more efficient and sophisticated.

maxwellsdeamons• 4 months ago

This might be a very dumb question. But does this restriction also include the usage of claude code print mode with the -p flag and —continue or —resume? This way I can use CC inside any application? Or what exactly was OpenCode using?

rurban• 4 months ago

But you still can use the superior experience of opencode, the best agent, and Opus, the best model, via the standard opencode github model selection.

But right now I'm not so sure anymore, if gpt-5.4 got actually better than opus-4.6 recently.

Anthropic takes legal action against OpenCode

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