Anthropic made a mistake in cutting off third-party clients
(archaeologist.dev)327 points by codesparkle a day ago
327 points by codesparkle a day ago
> Also Opencode makes it all easily swappable
It's all easily swappable without OpenCode. Just symlink CLAUDE.md -> AGENTS.md and run `codex` instead of `claude`.
> they are working hard on making it impossible for other models to support their every increasing agent feature set (skills, teleport and remote sessions, LSP, Chrome integration, etc).
Every feature you listed has an open-source MCP server implementation, which means every agent that supports MCP already has all those features. MCP is so epic because it has already nailed the commodification coffin firmly shut. Besides, Anthropic has way less funding than OAI or Google. They wouldn't win the moat-building race even if there were one.
That said, the conventional wisdom is that lowering switching costs benefits the underdogs, because the incumbents have more market share to lose.
> ie. Anthropic did not invest in image generation, Google did and Gemini has a shot at the market now.
They're after the enterprise market - where office / workspace + app + directory integration, security, safety, compliance etc. are more important. 80% of their revenue is from enterprise - less churn, much higher revenue per W/token, better margins, better $/user.
Microsoft adopting the Anthropic models into copilot and Azure - despite being a large and early OpenAI investor - is a much bigger win than yet another image model used to make memes for users who balk at spending $20 per month.
Same with the office connector - which is only available to enterprises[0] (further speaking to where their focus is). There hasn't yet been a "claude code" moment for office productivity, but Anthropic are the closest to it.
[0] This may be a mistake as Claude Code has been adopted from the ground up
> They're after the enterprise market
I am curious how big of a chance they have. I could imagine many enterprises that are already (almost by default) Microsoft customers (Windows, Office, Entra etc.) will just default to Copilot (and maybe Azure) to keep everything neatly integrated.
So an enterprise would need to be very dedicated to use everything Microsoft, but then go through the trouble use Claude as their AI just because it is slightly better for coding.
I have a feeling I am missing something here though, I would be happy for anyone to educate me!
I think at the current price point the capability of office copilot (which I don't use, only read reviews) is that it's basically email writer/summarizer/meeting notes.
Can't light a candle to Opus 4.5 who can now create and modify financial models from PDFs and augmented with websearch and the Excel skill (gpt-5.2 can do this too). That said the market IS smaller
When I was a software developer, I mostly griped about this when I wanted to experiment to see if I would even ask my larger enterprise if they would be interested in looking into it. I always felt like companies were killing a useful marketing stream from the enterprise's own employees. I think Tailscale has really nailed it, though. They give away the store to casual users, but make it so that a business will want to talk to sales to get all the features they need with better pricing per user. Small businesses can survive quite well on the free plan.
I'm sure everyone "wants to" land a many million dollar deal with a big company that has mild demands, but that doesn't mean those naggers are bad customers. Bad customers have much more annoying and unreasonable demands than a pricing sheet.
I don’t think anyone lands contracts with “mild demands”.
Most of the time you want to cut off ‘non customers’ as soon as possible and don’t leave ‘big fish’ without having direct contact person who can explain stuff. People just clicking around on their own will make assumptions that need to be addressed in a way no one wastes time.
This is really not the point. Anthropic isn’t cutting off third-party. You can use their models via API all you want. Why are people conflating this issue? Anthropic doesn’t owe anyone anything to offer their “unlimited” pro tiers outside of Claude Code. It’s not hard to build your own Opencode and use API keys. CLI interface by itself is not a moat.
People should take this as a lesson on how much we are being subsidized right now.
Claude code runs into use limitations for everyone at every tier. The API is too expensive to use and it's _still_ subsidized.
I keep repeating myself but no one seems to listen: quadratic attention means LLMs will always cost astronomically more than you expect after running the pilot project.
Going from 10k loc to 100k loc isn't a 10x increase, it's a 99x increase. Going from 10k loc to 1m loc isn't a 100x increase, it's a 9999x increase. This is fundamental to how transformers work and is the _best case scenario_. In practice things are worse.
Good architecture (eg separation of concerns) means you won’t need to expose 1M loc to the llm all at once.
>Claude code runs into use limitations for everyone at every tier
What do you mean by this? I know plenty of people who never hit the upgraded Opus 4.5 limits anymore even on the $100 plan, even those who used to hit the limits on the $200 plan w/ Opus 4 and Opus 4.1.
>The API is too expensive to use and it's _still_ subsidized.
What do you mean by saying the API is subsidized? Anthropic is a private company that isn't required to (and doesn't) report detailed public financial statements. The company operating at a loss doesn't mean all inference is operating at a loss, it means that the company is spending an enormous amount of money on R&D. The fact that the net loss is shrinking over time tells us that the inference is producing net profit over time. In this business, there is enormous up front cost to train a model. That model then goes on to generate initially large, but subsequently gradually diminishing revenue until the model is deprecated. That said, at any given snapshot-in-time, while there is likely large ongoing R&D expenditure on the next model causing the overall net profit for the entire company to still be negative, it's entirely possible that several, if not many or even most of the previously trained models have fully recouped their training costs in inference revenue.
It's fairly obvious that the monthly subscriptions are subsidized to gain market share the same way Uber rides were on early on, but what indication do you have that the PAYG API is being subsidized? How would total losses have shrunk from $5.6B in 2024 to just $3B in 2025 while ARR grew from ~$1B to ~$7B over the same time period (one where usage of the platform dramatically expanded) if PAYG API inference wasn't running at a net profit for the company?
>quadratic attention means LLMs will always cost astronomically more than you expect after running the pilot project
This is only true as long as O(n²) quadratic attention remains the prevailing paradigm. As Qwen3-Next and Nemotron 3 Nano have shown with hybrid linear attention + sparse quadratic layers and a hybrid Mamba SSM, not all modern, performant LLMs necessarily need to run strictly O(n²) quadratic attention models. Sure, these aren't frontier models competitive with Opus 4.5 or Gemini 3 Pro or GPT 5.2 xhigh, but these aren't experimental tiny toy models like RWKV or Falcon Mamba that serve as little more than PoCs for alternative architectures, either. Qwen3-Next and Nemotron 3 Nano are solid players in their respective local weight classes.
Nemotron 3 is amazing. 60 tokens/s on my 128GB Nvidia GB10, and actually emits some pretty reasonable "smart" content" for its size.
It might make sense from Anthropics perspective but as a user of these tools I think it would be a huge mistake to build your workflow around Claude Code when they are pushing vendor lock in this aggressively.
Making this mistake could end up being the AI equivalent of choosing Oracle over Postgres
As a user of Claude Code via API (the expensive way), Anthrophic's "huge mistake" is capping monthly spend (billed in advance and pay as you go some $500 - $1500 at a time, by credit card) at just $5,000 a month.
It's a supposedly professional tool with a value proposition that requires being in your work flow. Are you going to keep using a power drill on your construction site that bricks itself the last week or two of every month?
An error message says contact support. They then point you to an enterprise plan for 150 seats when you have only a couple dozen devs. Note that 5000 / 25 = 200 ... coincidence? Yeah, you are forbidden to give them more than Max-like $200/dev/month for the usage-based API that's "so expensive".
They are literally "please don't give us money any more this month, thanks".
This sounds like a stop loss? Are they losing money per token even through the api?
Their target is the Enterprise anyway. So they are apparently willing to enrage their non-CC user base over vendor-locking.
But this is not the equivalent of Oracle over Postgres, as these are different technology stacks that implement an independent relational database. Here were talking about Opencode which depends on Claude models to work "as a better Claude" (according to the enraged users in the webs). Of course, one can still use OC with a bazillion other models, but Anthropic is saying that if you want the Claude Code experience, you gotta use the CC agent period.
Now put yourself in the Anthropic support person shoes, and suppose you have to answer an issue of a Claude Max user who is mad that OC is throwing errors when calling a tool during a vibe session, probably because the multi-million dollar Sonnet model is telling OC to do something it can't because its not the claude agent. Claude models are fine-tuned for their agent! If the support person replies "OC is an unsupported agent for Claude Code Max" you get an enraged customer anyway, so you might as well cut the crap all together by the root.
If you’ve only got a CLAUDE.md and sub agent definitions in markdown it is pretty easy to do at the moment, although more of their feature set is moving in a direction that doesn’t have 1:1 equivalents in other tools.
The client is closed source for a reason and they issued DMCA takedowns against people who published sourcemaps for a reason.
I rather have a product that is only good at one single thing than mid for everything else especially when the developer experience for me is much more consistent than using gemini and chatgpt to the point that I only have chatgpt for productivity reasons and also sometimes making better prompts to claude (when I don't use claude to make a better prompt). After realizing that Anthropic is discounting token usages for claude code they should have made that more explicit and also the API key (but hindsight is 20/20) they should already have been blocking third party apps or just have you make another API key that has no discount but even then this could have pissed off developers.
> Anthropic is protecting its huge asset: the Claude Code value chain
Why is that their “huge asset?” The genus of this complaint is that Opencode et al replace everything but the LLM, so it seems like the latter is the true “huge asset.”
If Clause Code is being offered at or near operational breakeven, I don’t see the advantage of lock-in. If it’s being offered at a subsidy, then it’s a hint that Claude Code itself is medium-term unsustainable.
“Training data” is a partial but not full explanation of the gap, since it’s not obviously clear to me how Anthropic can learn from Claude Code sessions but not OpenCode sessions.
If developers are using Claude code with it's quirks, Anthropic controls the backend LLM. If developers are using OpenCode, it's easy for developers to try different LLMs and maybe substitute it (temporarily or permanently). In an enterprise market, once they choose a tool they tend to stay with that even if it is not the best, the cost and timeframe of changing is too high. if developers could swap LLMs freely on their own tool that is big missed opportunity for Anthropic. Not a User friendly move, but the norm in Enterprise.
Right now, most enterprises are experimenting with different LLMs and once they chose they will be locked for a long time. If they cant can't chose because their coding agent doesn't let them they be locked to that.
Anthropic and OpenAI are essentially betting that a somewhat small difference in accuracy translates to a huge advantage, and continuing to be the one that's slightly but consistently better than others is the only way they can justify investments in them at all. It's natural to then consider that an agent trained to use a specific tool will be better at using that tool. If Claude continues to be slightly better than other models at coding, and Claude Code continues to be slightly better than OpenCode, combined it can be difficult to beat them even at a cheaper price. Right now, even though Kimi K2 and the likes are cheaper with OpenCode and perform decently, I spend more than 10x the amount on Claude Code.
Agreed. The system is ALL about who controls the customer relationship.
If Anthropic ended up in a position that they had to beg various Client providers to be integrated (properly) and had to compete with other LLMs on the same clients and could be swapped out at a moment's notice, they would just become a commodity and lose all leverage. They don't want to end up in such situation. They do need to control the delivery of the product end-to-end to ensure that they control the customer relationship and the quality.
This is also going to be KEY in terms of democratizing the AI industry for small startups because this model of ai-outside-tools-inside provides an alternative to tools-outside-ai-inside platforms like Lovable, Base44 and Replit which don't leave as much flexibility in terms of swapping out tooling.
The problem the second you stop subsidizing Claude Code and start making money on it the incentive to use it over opencode disappears. If opencode is the better tool than claude code - and that's the reason people are using their claude subscription with it instead of claude code - people will end up switching to it.
Maybe they can hope to murder opencode in the meantime with predatory pricing and build an advantage that they don't currently have. It seems unlikely though - the fact that they're currently behind proves the barrier to building this sort of tool isn't that high, and there's lots of developers who build their own tooling for fun that you can't really starve out of doing that.
I'm not convinced that attempting to murder opencode is a mistake - if you're losing you might as well try desperate tactics. I think the attempt is a pretty clear signal that Antrhopic is losing though.
It’s possible that tokens become cheap enough that they don’t need to raise prices to make a profit. The latest opus is 3x less expensive than the previous.
> Anthropic's mistake is that they are incapable of monetizing their great models in the chat market
The types of people who would use this tool are precisely the types of people who don't pay for licenses or tools. They're in a race to the bottom and they don't even know it.
> and that's a very thin layer
I don't think Anthropic understands the market they just made massive investments in.
>They did not. Anthropic is protecting its huge asset: the Claude Code value chain
that's just it, it has been proven over and over again with alternatives that CC isn't the moat that Anthropic seems to think it is. This is made evident with the fact that they're pouring R&D into DE/WM automation meanwhile CC has all the same issues it has had for months/years -- it's as if they think CC is complete.
if anything MCP was a bigger moat than CC.
also : I don't get the opencode reference. Yes, it's nice -- but codex and gemini-cli are largely compatible with cc generated codebases.
There will be some initial bumpiness as you tell the agent to append the claude.md file to all agent reads -- or better yet just merge it into agent file.) -- but that's about as rough as it'll get.
They’re betting that the stickiness of today’s regular users is more valuable than the market research and training data they were receiving from those nerdy, rule-breaking users.
> they are working hard on making it impossible for other models to support their every increasing agent feature set (skills, teleport and remote sessions, LSP, Chrome integration, etc). The move totally makes sense, like it or not.
I don't understand, why would other models not be able to support any, or some, or even a particular single one of these? I don't even see most of these as relevant to the model itself, but rather the harness/agentic framework around it. You could argue these require a base degree of model competence for following instructions, tool calling, etc, but these things are assumed for any SOTA model today, we are well past this. Almost all of these things, if not all, are already available in other CLI + IDE-based agentic coding tools.
i think they're trading future customer acquisition and model quality for the current claude code userbase which they might also lose from this choice.
the reason i got the subscription wasnt to use claude code. when i subscribed you couldnt even use it for claude code. i got it because i figured i could use those tokens for anything, and as i figured out useful stuff, i could split it off onto api calls.
now that exploration of "what can i do with claude" will need to be elsewhere, and the results of a working thing will want to stay with the model that its working on.
The model is the best.
The CLI tool is terrible compared to opencode.
That is the unfortunate reality, we are now being foisted claude code. :( I wish they just fork opencode.
It's crazy how bad the interface it is. I'm generally a fan of the model performance but there is not a day where their CLI will not flash random parts of scrollback or have a second of input lag just typing in the initial prompt (how is that even possible? you are not doing anything?). If this is their "premier tool" no vending machine business can save them.
> making it impossible for other models to support their every increasing agent feature set (skills, teleport and remote sessions, LSP, Chrome integration, etc)
I use CC as my harness but switch between third party models thanks to ccs. If Anthropic decided to stop me from using third party models in CC, I wouldn't just go "oh well, let's buy another $200/mo Claude subscription now". No. I'd be like: "Ok, I invested in CC—hooks/skills/whatever—but now let's ask CC to port them all to OpenCode and continue my work there".
I mean... I don't like it either but this is pretty standard stuff and it's obvious why they're doing it.
Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok are all more or less on par with each other, or a couple months behind at most. Chinese open models are also not far behind.
There's nothing inherent to these products to make them "sticky". If your tooling is designed for it, you can trivially switch models at any time. Mid-conversation, even. And it just works.
When you have basically equivalent products with no switching cost, you have perfect competition. They are all commodities. And that means: none of them can make a profit. It's a basic law of economics.
If they can't make a profit, no matter how revolutionary the tech is, their valuation is not justified, and they will be in big trouble when people figure this out.
So they need to make the product sticky somehow. So they:
1. Add a subscription payment model. Once you are paying a subscription fee, then the calculus on switching changes: if you only maintain one subscription, you have a strong reason to stick with it for everything.
2. Force you to use their client app, which only talks to their model, so you can't even try other models without changing your whole workflow, which most people won't bother to do.
These are bog standard tactics across the tech industry and beyond for limiting competitive pressure.
Everyone is mad about #2 but honestly I'm more mad about #1. The best thing for consumers would be if all these model providers strictly provided usage-based API pricing, which makes switching easy. But right now the subscription prices offer an enormous discount over API pricing, which just shows how much they are really desperate to create some sort of stickiness. The subscriptions don't even provide the "peace of mind" benefit that Spotify-like subscription models provide, where you don't have to worry about usage, because they still have enforced usage limits that people regularly hit. It's just purely a discount offered for locking yourself in.
But again I can't really be that mad because of course they are doing this, not doing it would be terrible business strategy.
> And that means: none of them can make a profit
Well, no. It just means no single player can dominate the field in terms of profits. Anthropic is probably still losing money on subscribers, so other companies "reselling" their offering does them no good. Forcing you to use their TUI at least gives them control of how you interact with the models back. I'm guessing but since they've gone full send into the developer tooling space, their pitch to investors likely highlights the # of users on CC, not their subscriber numbers (which again, lose money). The move makes since in that respect.
> The best thing for consumers would be if all these model providers strictly provided usage-based API pricing
Using openrouter myself I find the costs of APIs to be extremely low and affordable? I don't send the whole codebase to every question, I just ask about what I need, and everything is actually ridiculously cheap? $20 lasts about 3 months.
I tried to plug CC on my OpenRouter account, and just asking it what my project was doing (a directory containing three .sh of around 100 LOC each), I saw like 20 API requests to OpenRouter accounting for almost $1 in total.
Meanwhile copy/pasting those shells in OpenRouter's Chat and asking the same question resulted in a single API request costing a tenth of a cent.
I could probably try tuning everything to keep costs down, but idk if it's worth the efforts.
I don't actually think Claude Code is very good and this is exactly why. It's not really optimized to use its tools efficiently. I think Cursor probably does a better job of that but I imagine all of these coding assistants will come with some form of local tooling support in the way of vector DBs etc one day.
I have not had the same experience. I pay 10 dollars a month for GitHub Copilot, where I get to use Claude Sonnet 4.5.
I tried the same with OpenRouter and I used up 2.5 dollars in a day using Sonnet 4.5. Similar use on copilot has could maybe make me use 10% of my quota (and that's being generous for OpenRouter).
I think GitHub Copilot is way more affordable than OpenRouter.
I'm not "mad", I'm "sad" -- because I was very much on "Team Anthropic" a few months ago ... but the tool has failed to keep up in terms of quality.
If they're going to close the sub off to other tools, they need to make very strong improvements to the tool. And I don't really see that. It's "fine" but I actually think these tools are letting developers down.
They take over too much. They fail to give good insights into what's happening. They have poor stop/interrupt/correct dynamics. They don't properly incorporate a basic review cycle which is something we demand of junior developers and interns on our teams, but somehow not our AIs?
They're producing mountains of sometimes-good but often unreviewable code and it isn't the "AI"'s fault, it's the heuristics in the tools.
So I want to see innovation here. And I was hoping to see it from Anthropic. But I just saw the opposite.
There is so much low-hanging fruit in the tooling side right now. There's no way Anthropic alone can stay ahead of it all -- we need lots of different teams trying different things.
I myself have been building a special-purpose vibe-coding environment and it's just astounding how easy it is to get great results by trying totally random ideas that are just trivial to implement.
Lots of companies are hoping to win here by creating the tool that everyone uses, but I think that's folly. The more likely outcome is that there are a million niche tools and everyone is using something different. That means nobody ends up with a giant valuation, and open source tools can compete easily. Bad for business, great for users.
Yep. And in a way this has always been the story. It's why there's just so few companies making $$ in the pure devtooling space.
I have no idea what JetBrain's financials are like, but I doubt they're raking in huge $$ despite having very good tools & unfortunately their attempts to keep abreast of the AI wave have been middling.
Basically, I need Claude Code with a proper review phase built in. I need it to slow-the-fuck-down and work with me more closely instead of shooting mountains of text at me and making me jam on the escape key over and over (and shout WTF I didn't ask for that!) at least twice a day.
IHMO these are not professional SWE tools right now. I use them on hobby projects but struggle to integrate them into professional day jobs where I have to be responsible in a code review for the output they produced.
And, again, it's not the LLM that's at fault. It's the steering wheel driving it missing a basic non-yeet process flow.
(Also, Kenton, I'd add that I'm an admirer more broadly of your work, and so if by chance you end up creating some public project commercial or open source in the general vein we're talking about here, I'd love to contribute)
I'll be honest; I'm pretty sure this "mistake" will be completely forgotten by the next month. Their enforcing that their subscription only works with their product should not really come as a surprise to anyone, and the alt-agent users are a small enough minority that they'll get over it.
I’m starting to think you’re right but only because software engineers don’t seem to actually value or care about open source anymore. Apparently we have collectively forgotten how bad it can be to let your tools own you instead of the other way around.
Maybe another symptom of Silicon Valley hustle culture — nobody cares about the long term consequences if you can make a quick buck.
There's nothing stopping you from using OpenCode with any other provider, including Anthropic: you just can't get the subsidised pricing while doing so. This is irritating, yes - it certainly disincentivises me from trying out OpenCode - but it's also, like, not unexpected?
In any case, the long-term solution for true openness is to be able to run open-weight models locally or through third-party inference providers.
Quality, UX, DX first, second openness.
If all is equal, I pick the open option. In this case it's not equal, Claude Code + Opus 4.5 is better than Opencode + Opus 4.5.
> software engineers don’t seem to actually value or care about open source anymore.
Hate to break it to you, but the vast majority never did. See any thread about Linux on HN. Maybe the Open Source wave was before my time, but ever since I came into the industry around 2015 "caring about open source" has been the minority view. It's Windows/Mac/Photo Shop/etc all the way up and down.
We're going to learn that lesson again in a big hurry at this point.
> Apparently we have collectively forgotten how bad it can be to let your tools own you instead of the other way around.
We've collectively forgotten because a large enough number of professional developers have never experienced anything other than a thriving open source ecosystem.
As with everything else (finance and politics come to mind in particular), humans will have to learn the same lessons the hard way over and over. Unfortunately, I think we're at the beginning of that lesson and hope the experience doesn't negatively impact me too much.
I forgot what Malcolm Gladwell called them but I imagine the small minority of users affected here have disproportionate influence over their peers.
Power users?
Any such users in the thread? I used third-party clients for a little while but I did not see the benefit.
(I was more likely to do the opposite, and run Claude Code with a proxy which allows me to use it with other models. Though after much experimentation I ended up back on Claude.)
I am sure the company is going to get very upset at people no longer paying who were using their product in a way that they did not intend. Just going to be heartbroken. I will never understand the people that make a big deal about "I will never support this business again because of x" when X not something the company ever officially said they cared about.
In all seriousness, I really don't think it should be a controversial opinion that if you are using a companies servers for something that they have a right to dictate how and the terms. It is up to the user to determine if that is acceptable or not.
Particularly when there is a subscription involved. You are very clearly paying for "Claude Code" which is very clearly a piece of software connected to an online component. You are not paying for API access or anything along those lines.
Especially when they are not blocking the ability to use the normal API with these tools.
I really don't want to defend any of these AI companies but if I remove the AI part of this and just focus on it being a tool, this seems perfectly fine what they are doing.
To me it's very easy to understand why people would be upset and post about it online.
1. The company did something the customers did not like.
2. The company's reputation has value.
3. Therefore highlighting the unpopular move online, and throwing shade at the company so to speak, is (alongside with "speaking with your wallet") one of the few levers customers have to push companies to do what they want them to do.
Sure, it is perfectly valid to complain all you want. But it is also important to remember the context here.
I could write an article and complain about Taco Bell not selling burgers and that is perfectly within my right but that is something they are clearly not interested in doing. So me saying I am not going to give them money until they start selling burgers is a meaningless too them.
Everything I have seen about how they have marketed Claude Code makes it clear that what you are paying for is a tool that is a combination of a client-side app made by them and the server component.
Considering the need to tell the agent that the tool you are using is something it isn't, it is clear that this ever working was not the intention.
> So me saying I am not going to give them money until they start selling burgers is a meaningless too them.
Sure, but that's because you're you. No offense, but you don't have a following that people use to decide what fast food to eat. You don't have posts about how Taco Bell should serve burgers, frequently topping one of the main internet forums for people interested in fast food.
HN front page articles do matter. They get huge numbers of eyeballs. They help shape the opinions of developers. If lots of people write articles like this one, and it front pages again and again, Anthropic will be at serious risk of losing their mindshare advantage.
Of course, that may not happen. But people are aware it could.
Before this drama started, OpenCode was just another item on a long list of tools I've been meaning to test. I was 100% content with CC (still am, mostly). But it was nice to know that there were alternatives, and that I could try them, maybe even switch to them, without having to base my decision on token pricing. The idea of there being escape hatch made me less concerned about vendor lock-in and encouraged me to a) get my entire team onto CC and b) invest time into building CC's flavor of agents, skills, commands, hooks, etc., as well as setting up a marketplace to distribute them internally.
While Anthropic was within their right to enforce their ToS, the move has changed my perspective. In the language of moats and lock-ins, it all makes sense, sure, but as a potential sign of the shape of things to come, it has hurt my trust in CC as something I want to build on top of.
Yesterday, I finally installed OpenCode and tried it. It feels genuinely more polished, and the results were satisfactory.
So while this is all very anecdotal, here's what Anthropic accomplished:
1) I no longer feel like evangelizing for their tool 2) I installed a competitor and validated it's as good as others are claiming.
Perhaps I'm overly dramatic, but I can't imagine I'm the only one who has responded this way.
I responded in a similar way. More than that I preemptively canceled my claude subscription (which just cancels auto-renewal) to make sure it was an affirmative choice to continue with it next month, after I have some time to try out the alternative they are so worried about and see if I should switch to it instead.
Claude already played their card, from threatening that 90% of the code will be written by Ai then cutting off their most enthusiastic followers. Opencode and others haven't threatened the industry and generally have better standing with most devs. I do not see how Claude can ever be profitable at this point, they don't have any stickyness and they actively propose cutting their own market.
Have any of these sorts of proclamations ever actually come true? I recall when Reddit effectively cut off all the clients from their API, there were similar loud proclamations that they had ruined their business and everyone would defect. I remember something similar with Twitter. These businesses both have their problems, but blocking third-party apps doesn’t seem to be one of them.
I think Anthropic took a look at the market, realized they had a strong position with Claude Code, and decided to capitalize on that rather than joining the race to the bottom and becoming just another option for OpenCode. OpenAI looked at the market and decided the opposite, because they don’t have strong market share with Codex and they would rather undercut Claude, which is a legitimate strategy. Don’t know who wins.
I feel like Anthropic is probably making the right choice here. What do they have to gain by helping competitors undercut them? I don’t think Anthropic wants to be just another model that you could use. They want to be the ecosystem you use to code. Probably better to try to win a profitable market than to try to compete to be the cheapest commodity model.
The Hoi polloi were never going to leave Reddit.
But there are specific subreddits and communities who did, /r/linux and related being the biggest ones, who moved to Lemmy.
As for Twitter blocking the API, they just killed all of the fun bots people made (two of mine) - the actual goverment propaganda troll-bots never went away, they just paid the $10 for the checkmark to get top of everyone's replies and kept running as-is.
It seems that Anthropic's thesis is that vertical integration wins.
It's too soon to tell if that's true or not.
One of the features of vertical integration is that there will be folks complaining about it. Like the way folks would complain that it's impossible or hard to install macOS on anything other than a Mac, and impossible or hard to install anything other than macOS on a Mac. Yet, despite those complains, the Mac and macOS are successful. So: the fact that folks are complaining about Anthropic's vertical integration play does not mean that it won't be successful for them. It also doesn't mean that they are clueless
The models are pretty much the same, the differentiation for the last few months have purely been in the tooling and harness around the models.
As it will continue to be. Unless we get a Opus-5 or GPT-6 that blows everything out of the water, all major progress will be in the UX/DX of the tools and what tools each harness will let the agent use and how.
For now Claude is the best at this, MS is trying to keep up with Copilot in VSCode and Codex ... exists.
Interestingly, another front page article today is about Apple choosing to use Gemini for Siri.
A lot of the comments revolve around how much they will be locked in and how much the base models are commoditized.
Google is pretty clearly ok with being an infrastructure/service provider for all comers. Same is true for Open AI (especially via Azure?) I guess Anthropic does not want to compete like that.
Anthropic offer their API, including for tools like Opencode. It’s more expensive than Claude Code, but I don’t think it’s priced significantly differently to competitors. Obviously Apple aren’t paying API prices, and Google have a lot more to offer them, but I don’t think Anthropic would turn down that deal if they could have it. They have their models in AWS Bedrock too, and that is an option to auth with Claude Code.
I think they do see vertical integration opportunities on product, but they definitely want to compete to power everything else too.
> They're probably losing money on each pro subscription so they probably won't miss me!
looool
Maybe the LLM thing will be profitable some day?
Anthropic is not cutting off third-party clients.
It is blocking the usage of subsidized subscriptions that are intended to be used with Claude Code, with third party tools. Those thirdy party tools can still use claude's api, but paying API rates, which are not subsidized or at least are a lot less subsidized.
Anthropic doesn’t want you to use a tool that makes it easy to switch to a competitor’s model when you reach a cap. They want to nudge you toward upgrading - Pro -> Max -> Max 20× -> extra usage - rather than switching to Codex. They can afford to make moves like this as long as they stay on top. OpenAI isn’t the good guy here - it’s just an opportunity for them to bite off a bit more of the cake.
Why would I "switch" when I can pay the $20 for both? More than enough for any personal projects I have time for.
And if I was making any money, the Max tiers would be pennies in the bucket.
As a Claude Code user (on the Max $200 plan), I think this is fine. Already I frequently receive:
API Error: 529 {"type":"error","error":{"type":"overloaded_error","message":"Overloade d"},"request_id":"req_011CX42ZX2u
I use Claude Code quite a bit and have never seen this
While I respect the author's opinion (and it's interesting that Vibe Coding, the term is less than a year old), I am more than happy to be an Anthropic customer, and actually happy that they've opened more capacity for their paying customers. What I'm achieving with Claude is spectacular and for now, it's the best system I've found to meet my goals.
Can't Opencode just modify their implementation to use the anthropic claude code SDK directly? The issue is they were spoofing oauth. I tried OpenCode before this whole drama and immediately noticed the oauth spoofing and never authorized it. Doesn't opencode speak ACP? https://agentclientprotocol.com/overview/agents
no, they banned use of the model without the CLI harness/SDK when using the subscription plans. Opencode was spoofing requests as if they were coming from claude code CLI, and controlling the agent loop / tool call totally internally. Anthropic wants subscription plans to use the CLI/SDK.
I don’t get the outrage, this is same as when Twitter and Reddit cut off 3rd party clients to push people to use their official client. The lesson is that don’t build a product that depends on unofficial APIs. Opencode got huge adoption because they baked in being able to use Claude’s max plan so people could switch with no switching costs. Why would you think Anthropic would be ok with this? On top of that, I read Anthropic cache’s the system prompt for Claude code for every user and this helps their costs.
The truth is Opencode didn’t have to bake this in. People who can will proxy Claude’s API anyways through other means.
3rd party reddit clients used the official api. They changed it from free to paid.
This is true, Twitter and Reddit clients were using official APIs that got their price increased. The point still stands though, don't build a service dependent on another service and especially if you're using an unofficial API. It works if you're under the radar but Opencode is not anymore.
Honestly, it seems like this played out in Opencode's favor. They are getting press for this and people who are used to Opencode now and can't use their Claude plan might use GLM 4.7 or Minimax M2, models they offer for free.
The Reddit API price was completely bonkers, a power-user would have had to pay tens of dollars a month for it.
Honestly very confused by the people happy or agreeing with Anthropic here. You can use their API on a pay-per-use basis, or (as I interpreted the agreement) you can prepay as a subscription and use their service with hourly & weekly session limits.
What's changed is that I thought I was subscribing to use their API services, claude code as a service. They are now pushing it more as using only their specific CLI tool.
As a user, I am surprised, because why should it matter to them whether I open my terminal and start up using `claude code`, `opencode`, `pi`, or any other local client I want to send bits to their server.
Now, having done some work with other clients, I can kind of see the point of this change (to play devils' advocate): their subscription limits likely assume aggregate usage among all users doing X amount of coding, which when used with their own cli tool for coding works especially well with client side and service caching and tool-calls log filtering— something 3rd party clients also do to varying effectivness.
So I can imagine a reason why they might make this change, but again, I thought I was subscribing to a prepaid account where I can use their service within certain session limits, and I see no reason why the cli tool on my laptop would matter then.
Dec 7, 2025 (A day that will live in infamy?) Linked from TFA:
> > > one word: repositories view
> > what do you mean?
> It's possible, and the solution is so silly that I laughed when I finally figured it out. I'm not sure if I should just post it plainly here since Anthropic might block it which would affect opencode as well, but here's a hint. After you exhaust every option and you're sure the requests you're sending are identical to CC's, check the one thing that probably still isn't identical yet (hint: it comes AFTER the headers).
I guess Anthropic noticed.
Note - we primarily make use of Gemini CLI, which is very promising, but have made pretty extensive trials as Claude Code.
Anthropic hasn't changed their licensing, just enforcing what the licensing always required by closing a loophole.
Business models aside - what is interesting is whether the agent :: model relationship requires a proprietary context and language such that without that mutual interaction, will the coding accuracy and safety be somehow degraded? Or, will it be possible for agentic frameworks to plug and play with models that will generate similar outcomes.
So far, we tend to see the former is needed --- that there are improvements that can be had when the agentic framework and model language understanding are optimized to their unique properties. Not sure how long this distinction will matter, though.
I would disagree on the knowledge sharing. They're the only major AI company that's released zero open weight models. Nor do they share any research regarding safety training, even though that's supposedly the whole reason for their existence.
I agree with you on your examples, but would point out there are some places they have contributed excellent content.
In building my custom replacement for Copilot in VS Code, Anthropic's knowledge sharing on what they are doing to make Claude Code better has been invaluable
You are just taking advantage of their CC subscription business model, which they are subsidizing because you are using CC. Why should they do this when you don't use their product?
Also You can still use OpenCode with API access...so no they didn't lock anything down. Basically the people just don't want to pay what is fair and is whining about it.
Not unexpected.
- Google cutting off using search from other than their home page code. (At one time there was an official SOAP API for Google Search.)
- Apple cutting off non-Apple hardware in the Power PC era. ("We lost our license for speeding", from a third party seller of faster hardware.)
- Twitter cutting off external clients. (The end of TweetDeck.)
I agree that this probably isn't in their own interests but "because I refuse to do business with a company that takes its customers for granted" should be heavily qualified. My power company is taking advantage of me but so far I haven't had the nerve to fire them.
I want them to cut off these electron wrappers. If there's no tokens going to these third parties, the more they can keep subsidizing my claude code usage.
Credit to the early AI coding startups. They masterfully forked Microsoft VS Code and integrated frontier LLMs into a familiar IDE. Instant audience.
But it was only a matter of time before: a) Microsoft reclaimed its IDE b) Frontier model providers reclaimed their models
Sage advice: don’t fill potholes in another company’s roadmap.
Just checked https://opencode.ai/.
It looks like they need to update their FAQ:
Q: Do I need extra AI subscriptions to use OpenCode? A: Not necessarily, OpenCode comes with a set of free models that you can use without creating an account. Aside from these, you can use any of the popular coding models by creating a Zen account. While we encourage users to use Zen, OpenCode also works with all popular providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI etc. You can even connect your local models.
After reading this opinion ten times today. Can someone explain to me why OpenCode is a “better harness”? Or is it just because it’s open source that people support it?
No matter what the answer to the question is.. IMO "just" is out of place here. Being free/open source software is a big deal, particularly for a developer tool.
All these harnesses are free and grateful for any use they get. It might be worthwhile to try it and see.
It's mostly based on feelings/"vibes", and hugely dependent on the workflow you use. I'm so happy with Claude Code, Opus and plan mode that I don't feel any need to check the others.
Anthropic has been doing this from the start and they are justified in it (the plan has different pricing rates than API). People have been making workarounds and they are justified in that as well - those people understand their workarounds are fragile when they made them.
I don't think I agree with this claim. Also, they didn't cut-off anyone. You can still use their API as you wish. It's out there for anyone who wants it.
They simply stopped people from abusing a accessibility feature that they created for their own product.
>go to war with their paying customers over a trivial ToS violation
It's a trivial violation until it isn't. Competitors need to be fought off early else they become much harder to fight in the future.
> they really, really want to own the entire value chain rather than being relegated to becoming just another "model provider"
I remember the story used to be the other way around - "just a wrapper", "wrapper AI startups" were everywhere, nobody trusted they can make it.
Maybe being "just a model provider" or "just a LLM wrapper" matter less than the context of work. What I mean is that benefits collect not at the model provider, nor at the wrapper provider, but where the usage takes place, who sets the prompts and uses the code gets the lion share of benefits from AI.
this feels anti-trust-y to me.
when i signed up for a subscription it was with the understanding that id be able to use those tokens on which ever agent i wanted to play with, and that as i got to something i want to have persistently running, id switch that to be an api client. i quickly figured out that claude code was the current best coding agent for the model, but seeing other folks calling opus now im not actually sure thats true, in which case that subsidized token might be more expensive to both me and anthropic, because its not the most token efficient route over their model.
i dislike that now i wont be able to feed them training data using many different starting points and paths, which i think over time will have a bad impact on their models making them worse over time
They use the API directly.
Opencode was spoofing itself as the official Claude Code CLI to get access to the subscription tier.
Anyone that sees the value in Claude Code will never leave.
This will be completely forgotten in like a week.
And if you leave because of this, more support for those that abide by the TOS and stay.
This is akin to someone selling/operating a cloud platform named Blazure and it’s just a front for Azure.
My view to everyone is to stop trying to control the ecosystem and just build shit. Fast.
> they really, really want to own the entire value chain rather than being relegated to becoming just another "model provider"
This is really the salient point for everything. The models are expensive to train but ultimately worthless if paying customers aren't captive and can switch at will. The issue it that a lot of the recent gains are in the prefill inference, and in the model's RAG, which aren't truly a most (except maybe for Google, if their RAG include Google scholar). That's where the bubble will pop.
That seems a bit dramatic.
What I learned from all this is that OpenAI is willing to offer a service compatible with my preferred workflow/method of billing and Anthropic clearly is not. That's fine but disappointing, I'm keeping my Codex subscription and letting my Claude subscription lapse but sure, it would be nice if Anthropic changed their mind to keep that option available because yes, I do want it.
I'm a bit perplexed by some comments describing the situation like OpenCode users were getting something for free and stealing from CC users when the plan quota was enforced either way and were paying the same amount for it. Or why you seem to think this post pointing out that Anthropic's direct competitor endorses that method of subscription usage is somehow malicious or manipulative behavior.
Commerce is a two-way street and customers giving feedback/complaining/cancelling when something changes is normal and healthy for competition. As evidenced by OpenAI immediately jumping in to support OpenCode users on Codex without needing to break their TOS.
Idk if I disagree with anything you're saying, I'm just saying it's a very small minority that and are upset enough to both cancel and announce they are cancelling their subscription is all.
I think I just understand that companies only offer heavily subsidized services in return for something - in this case Anthropic gets a few things - to tell investors how many daily actives are on CC, and a % of CC users opting into data sharing. Plus control of their UX, more feedback on their product, future opportunities to show messages, etc. It's really just obvious and normal and I don't get why anyone would be upset that they removed OC access.
650,000 monthly active users is not "extremely small". I wonder how many total users Claude Code has?
> "For me personally, I have decided I will never be an Anthropic customer, because I refuse to do business with a company that takes its customers for granted."
The best pressure on companies comes from viable alternatives, not from boycotts that leave you without tools altogether.
This reads like an overreaction. I think both OpenAI and Anthropic are soon to settle upon their target markets; that each of them are attracting separate crowds/types of coders and that the people already sold on Claude Code don’t care about this decision.
When the only winning move is corner-the-market, the only way for the customer to win is not to play the game. I'll take my token-money elsewhere.
That said, the author is deluding themselves if they think OpenAI is supporting OpenCode in earnest. Unlike Anthropic, they don't have explicit usage limits. It's a 'we'll let you use our service as long as we want' kind of subscription.
I got a paid plan with GPT 5.2 and after a day of usage was just told 'try again in a week'. Then in a week I hit it again and didn't even get a time estimate. I wasn't even doing anything heavy or high reasoning. It's not a dependable service.
I just cancelled, citing this as the reason. I’m actually not all that torn up about it. I mostly want to see how Anthropic responds to the community about this issue.
"they utterly failed to consider the second-order effects of this business decision"
Or maybe they did consider but were capital/ inference capacity constrained to keep serving at this pricepoint. Pretty sure without any constraints they would eagerly go for 100% market share.
CC users give them the reigns to the agentic process. Non CC users take (mostly indirect) control themselves. So if you are forced to slow growth, where do you push the break (by charging defacto more per (api) token)?
Discussion:
Anthropic blocks third-party use of Claude Code subscriptions
Both Claude Code and OpenCode users are too loud. It makes sense for them to fight. These are boutique tools, and there can be only one boutique tool.
I have a gut feeling that the real top dog harness (profitability, sticky users, growth) is VSCode + Copilot.
I think they’re smart enough to know that they’re not making a mistake here. I’m fine with it. The API costs are not outrageous. I don’t mind paying per token prices and I don’t mind getting a discounted all-inclusive plan.
Yeah I think Anthropic has the "right" to do this. That's fine.
But they also have shown a weakness by failing to understand why people might want to do this (use their Max membership with OpenCode etc instead).
People aren't using opencode or crush with their Claude Code memberships because they're trying to exploit or overuse tokens or something. That isn't possible.
They do it because Claude Code the tool itself is full of bugs and has performance issues, and OpenCode is of higher quality, has more open (surprise) development, is more responsive to bug fixes, and gives them far more knobs and dials to control how it works.
I use Claude Code quite a bit and there isn't a session that goes by where I don't bump into a sharp edge of some kind. Notorious terminal rendering issues, slow memory leaks, or compaction related bugs that took them 3 months to fix...
Failure to deal with quality issues and listen to customers is hardly a good sign of company culture, leading up to IPO... If they're trying to build a moat... this isn't a strong way to do it.
If you want to own the market and have complete control at the tooling level, you're simply going to have to make a better product. With their mountain of cash and army of engineers at their disposal ... they absolutely could. But they're not.
Meh. I’ve never used my x20 Max account in OpenCode because the Oauth solution was clearly “hacky”.
But to me the appeal of OpenCode is that I can mix and match APIs and local models. I have DeepSeek R1 doing research while KLM is planning and doing code reviews and o4 mini breaking down screenshots into specs while local QWEN is doing the work.
My experience with bugs has also been the exact opposite of what you described.
could it also be a short term thing to lessen the server load since now we see they just released a new set of tools for non-code work?
He is pretty popular in the AI/vibe coding niche on X and amassed a good following with his posts. Clearly the user is in the same bubble as him.
He vibe-coded Clawdbot and lots of people are spinning up their own.
https://clawd.bot/ https://github.com/clawdbot/clawdbot
He's also the guy behind https://github.com/steipete/oracle/
> For me personally, I have decided I will never be an Anthropic customer, because I refuse to do business with a company that takes its customers for granted.
Archaeologist.dev Made a Big Mistake
If guided by this morality column, Archaeologist should immediately stop using pretty-much anything they are using in their life. There's no company today that doesn't have their hands dirty. The life is a dance between choosing the least bad option, not radically cutting off any sight of "bad".
The people defending Anthropic because “muh terms of service” are completely missing the point. These are bad terms. You should not accept these terms and bet the future of your business on proprietary tooling like this. It might be a good deal right now, but they only want to lock you in so that they can screw you later.
But switching cost to a different CLI coding tool is close to zero… I truly don’t understand the argument that using Claude Code means betting your business on that particular tool. I use Claude Code daily, but if tomorrow they massively raised prices, made the tool worse, or whatever I’d just switch to a competitor and keep working like nothing happened.
To be clear, I’ve seen this sentiment across various comments not just yours, but I just don’t agree with it.
They did not. Anthropic is protecting its huge asset: the Claude Code value chain, which has proven itself to be a winner among devs (me included, after trying everything under the sun in 2025). If anything, Anthropic's mistake is that they are incapable of monetizing their great models in the chat market, where ChatGPT reigns: ie. Anthropic did not invest in image generation, Google did and Gemini has a shot at the market now.
Apparently nobody gets the Anthropic move: they are only good at coding and that's a very thin layer. Opencode and other tools are game for collecting inputs and outputs that can later be used to train their own models - not necessarily being done now, but they could - Cursor did it. Also Opencode makes it all easily swappable, just eval something by popping another API key and let's see if Codex or GLM can replicate the CC solution. Oh, it does! So let's cancel Claude and save big bucks!
Even though CC the agent supports external providers (via the ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL env var), they are working hard on making it impossible for other models to support their every increasing agent feature set (skills, teleport and remote sessions, LSP, Chrome integration, etc). The move totally makes sense, like it or not.