Comment by ctoth

Comment by ctoth 6 hours ago

33 replies

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I was all set to be pissed off, "you can't tell me what I can make with your product once you've sold it to me!" but no... This outrage bait hinges on the definition of "use"

You can use Claude Code to write code to make a competitor for Claude Code. What you cannot do is reverse engineer the way the Claude Code harness uses the API to build your own version that taps into stuff like the max plan. Which? makes sense?

From the thread:

> A good rule of thumb is, are you launching a Claude code oauth screen and capturing the token. That is against terms of service.

whimsicalism 6 hours ago

under the ToS, no - you cannot use claude code to make a competitor to claude code. but you’re right that that appears to mostly be unenforced.

that said, it is absolutely being enforced against other big model labs who are mostly banned from using claude.

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behnamoh 5 hours ago

> You can use Claude Code to write code to make a competitor for Claude Code.

No, the ToS literally says you cannot.

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huevosabio 5 hours ago

Yes, I think this makes sense. I think if you are paying by token w/ an API key, then you're good to go, but if you're hijacking their login system then that's a different story.

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airstrike 5 hours ago

The trick is to use Codex to write a Claude Code clone, Claude Code to write an Antigravity clone, and Antigravity to write a Codex clone.

Good luck catching me, I'm behind 7 proxies.

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  • dathinab 4 hours ago

    or you just do it and be in the EU

    it's a clear anti-competive clause by a dominant market leader, such clauses tend to be void AFIK

    Reply View 5 replies
    • hinkley 4 hours ago

      It might suffice to just make it look like you’re European to keep their goons from harassing you, which hasn’t happened yet but will, because that’s how these stories always end. Get a PO Box for a credit card and VPN in through Europe.

      Reply View 1 reply
      • Imustaskforhelp 3 hours ago

        I think one might argue even a VPN might be enough. Theoretically someone might be European and can have American card or any other countries cards and it would generally be okay.

        So the only thing you kind of need to figure out is VPN and ProtonVPN provides free vpn service which does include EU servers access as well

        I wonder if Claude Code or these AI services block VPN access though.

        If they do, ehh, just buy a EU cheap vps (hetzner my beloved) and call it a day plus you also get a free dev box which can also run your code 24x7 and other factors too.

        Reply View 0 replies
    • atonse 4 hours ago

      Who is the dominant market leader? OpenAI dwarfs Anthropic.

      Most people still haven’t heard of Anthropic/Claude.

      (For the record, I use Claude code all day long. But it’s still pretty niche outside of programming.)

      Reply View 1 reply
      • andyferris 2 hours ago

        We are discussing Claude Code clones - the market _is_ programming

        Reply View 0 replies
    • YetAnotherNick 3 hours ago

      What do you mean by void? Sure you cannot be sued for writing clone, in any country. All they can do is ban account and I think they can ban any account in EU.

      Reply View 0 replies
tcdent 6 hours ago

This whole thing got blown out of proportion because the devs of third party harnesses that use the oauth API never disclosed that they were already actively sidestepping what is a very obvious message that the oauth API is for Claude Code only. What changed recently is that they added more restrictions for the shape of the payloads it accepts, not that they just started adding restrictions for the first time.

TLDR You cannot reverse engineer the oauth API without encountering this message:

https://tcdent-pub.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/cc_oauth_api_e...

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  • BoorishBears 2 hours ago

    There's also a meta aspect here, where the leading third party harness in this discussion is run someone who's chronically steeped in Twitter drama and is definitely not rushing to put this to bed.

    Add in various 2nd/3rd place players (Codex and Copilot) with employees openly using their personal accounts to cash in on the situation and there's a lot of amplification going on here.

    Reply View 0 replies
zzzeek 6 hours ago

not really. Here's their own product clarifying:

Based on the terms, Section 3, subsection 2 prohibits using Claude/Anthropic's Services:

  "To develop any products or services that compete with our Services, including to develop or train any artificial intelligence or machine learning algorithms or models or resell the Services."

  Clarification:

  This restriction is specifically about competitive use - you cannot use Claude to build products that compete with Anthropic's offerings.

  What IS prohibited:
  - Using Claude to develop a competing AI assistant or chatbot service
  - Training models that would directly compete with Claude's capabilities
  - Building a product that would be a substitute for Anthropic's services

  What is NOT prohibited:
  - General ML/AI development for your own applications (computer vision, recommendation systems, fraud detection, etc.)
  - Using Claude as a coding assistant for ML projects
  - Training domain-specific models for your business needs
  - Research and educational ML work
  - Any ML development that doesn't create a competing AI service

  In short: I can absolutely help you develop and train ML models for legitimate use cases. The restriction only applies if you're trying to build something that would compete directly with Claude/Anthropic's core business.
So you can't use Claude to build your own chatbot that does anything remotely like Claude, which would be, basically any LLM chatbot.
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  • pdpi 5 hours ago

    This seems reasonable at first glance, but imagine applying it to other development tools — "You can't use Xcode/Visual Studio/IntelliJ to build a commercial IDE", "You can't use ICC/MSVC to build a commercial C/C++ compiler", etc.

    Reply View 3 replies
    • Spooky23 5 hours ago

      In this case it’s “You can’t use our technology to teach your thinking machine from our stealing of other people’s work, because our AI is just learning stuff, not stealing, and you are stealing from us, because we say so.”

      Reply View 2 replies
      • pixl97 5 hours ago

        When it comes to AI stealing all IP in the world, I really don't give a crap.

        What I do give a crap about is the AI companies being little bitches when you politely pilfer what they have already snatched. Their hypocrisy is unlimited.

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      • dathinab 4 hours ago

        yes

        but also the prohibition goes way further as it's not limited to training competing LLMs but also for programming any of the plumbing etc. around it ....

        Reply View 0 replies
  • davorak 6 hours ago

    > This restriction is specifically about competitive use - you cannot use Claude to build products that compete with Anthropic's offerings.

    I am not a lawyer, regardless of the list of examples below(I have been told examples in contracts and TOS are a mixed bag for enforceability), this text says that if anthropic decides to make a product like yours you have to stop using Claude for that product.

    That is a pretty powerful argument against depending heavily on or solely on Claude.

    Reply View 1 reply
    • ffsm8 5 hours ago

      It may or may not be enforceable in the court of law, but they'll definitely ban you if they notice you...

      And I'm pretty sure ban evasion can become an issue in the court of law, even if the original TOS may not hold up

      Reply View 0 replies
  • oblio 5 hours ago

    LOL, that's so much worse than I imagined.

    I know we want to turn everything into a rental economy aka the financialization of everything, but this is just super silly.

    I hope we're 2-3 years away, at most, from fully open source and open weights models that can run on hardware you can buy with $2000 and that can complete most things Opus 4.5 can do today, even if slower or that needs a bit more handholding.

    Reply View 8 replies
    • pixl97 5 hours ago

      OpenAI, a while back said their was no moat. You'll see these AI companies panic more desperately as they all realize it's true.

      Reply View 2 replies
      • oblio 5 hours ago

        That's different, though. If 20 other companies can host these models, you still have to trust them. The end result should be cheap hardware that's good enough to large a solid, mature LLM that can code comparably to a fast junior dev.

        Reply View 1 reply
        • pixl97 4 hours ago

          A more interim way to put it is "The current moat is hardware".

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    • walterbell 5 hours ago

      > hardware you can buy with $2000

      Including how much RAM?

      Reply View 4 replies
      • lukan 4 hours ago

        I assume strongly, in 3 years the prices will have dropped a lot again.

        Reply View 3 replies