Comment by cedws 10 hours ago
I kind of lost interest in local models. Then Anthropic started saying I’m not allowed to use my Claude Code subscription with my preferred tools and it reminded me why we need to support open tools and models. I’ve cancelled my CC subscription, I’m not paying to support anticompetitive behaviour.
> Anthropic will let you use their API with any coding tools you want
No, in 2026, even with their API plan the create key is disabled for most orgs, you basically have to ask your admin to give you a key to use something other than Claude Code. You can imagine how that would be a problem.
That’s not an Anthropic problem, that’s a problem with whomever you work for.
The anticompetitive move would be not running their software if ‘which codex’ evaluated to showing a binary and then not allow you to use it due to its presence. Companies are allowed to set pricing and not let you borrow the jet to fly to a not approved destination. This distortion is just wrong as a premise. They are being competitive by making a superior tool and their business model is “no one else sells Claude” and they are pretty right to do this IMO.
Anticompetitive behavior has been normalized in our industry, doesn't make it not anticompetitive. It's a restriction that's meant to make it harder to compete with other parts of their offering. The non-anticompetitive approach would be to offer their subscription plans with a certain number of tokens every month, and then make Claude Code the most efficient with the tokens, to let it compete on its own merits.
Yes, exactly. The discourse has been so far off the rails now.
from what i remember, i couldnt actually use claude code with the subscription when i subscribed. i could only use it with third party tools.
eventually they added subscription support and that worked better than cline or kilo, but im still not clear what anthropic tools the subscription was actually useful for
The question I pose is this: if they're willing to start building walls this early in the game while they've still got plenty of viable competitors, and are at most 6 months ahead, how will they treat us if they achieve market dominance?
Some people think LLMs are the final frontier. If we just give in and let Anthropic dictate the terms to us we're going to experience unprecedented enshittification. The software freedom fight is more important than ever. My machine is sovereign; Anthropic provides the API, everything I do on my machine is my concern.
I don't get why so much mental gymnastics is done to avoid the fact that locking their lower prices to effectively subsidize their shitty product is the anti competitive behavior.
They simply don't want to compete, they want to force the majority of people that can't spend a lot on tokens to use their inferior product.
Why build a better product if you control the cost?
You gave up some convenience to avoid voting for a bad practice with your wallet. I admire this, try to consistently do this when reasonably feasible.
Problem is, most people don't do this, choosing convenience at any given moment without thinking about longer-term impact. This hurts us collectively by letting governments/companies, etc tighten their grip over time. This comes from my lived experience.
As I get older I more and more view convenience as the enemy of good. Luckily (or unluckily for some) a lot of the tradeoffs we are asked to make in the name of convenience are increasingly absurd. I have an easier and easier time going without these Faustian bargains.
IMHO The question is: who is in control? The user, or the profit-seeking company/control-seeking government? There is nothing we can do to prevent companies from seeking profit. What we can do is to prefer tools that we control, if that choice is not available, then tools that we can abandon when we want, over tools that remove our control AND abandoning them would be prohibitively difficult.
Claude Opus 4.5 by far is the most capable development model. I've been using it mainly via Claude Code, and with Cursor.
I agree anticompetitive behavior is bad, but the productivity gains to be had by using Anthropic models and tools are undeniable.
Eventually the open tools and models will catch up, so I'm all for using them locally as well, especially if sensitive data or IP is involved.
I'd encourage you to try the -codex family with the highest reasoning.
I can't comment on Opus in CC because I've never bit the bullet and paid the subscription, but I have worked my way up to the $200/month Cursor subscription and the 5.2 codex models blow Opus out of the water in my experience (obviously very subjective).
I arrived at making plans with Opus and then implementing with the OpenAI model. The speed of Opus is much better for planning.
I'm willing to believe that CC/Opus is truly the overall best; I'm only commenting because you mentioned Cursor, where I'm fairly confident it's not. I'm basing my judgement on "how frequently does it do what I want the first time".
Thanks, I'll try those out. I've used Codex CLI itself on a few small projects as well, and fired it up on a feature branch where I had it implement the same feature that Claude Code did (they didn't see each other's implementations). For that specific case, the implementation Codex produced was simpler, and better for the immediate requirements. However, Claude's more abstracted solution may have held up better to changing requirements. Codex feels more reserved than Claude Code, which can be good or bad depending on the task.
I've tried nearly all the models, they all work best if and only if you will never handle the code ever again. They suck if you have a solution and want them to implement that solution.
I've tried explaining the implementation word and word and it still prefers to create a whole new implementation reimplementing some parts instead of just doing what I tell it to. The only time it works is if I actually give it the code but at that point there's no reason to use it.
There's nothing wrong with this approach if it actually had guarantees, but current models are an extremely bad fit for it.
Yes, I only plan/implement on fully AI projects where it's easy for me to tell whether or not they're doing the thing I want regardless of whether or not they've rewritten the codebase.
For actual work that I bill for, I go in with intructions to do minimal changes, and then I carefully review/edit everything.
That being said, the "toy" fully-AI projects I work with have evolved to the point where I regularly accomplish things I never (never ever) would have without the models.
There are domains of programming (web front end) where lots of requests can be done pretty well even when you want them done a certain way. Not all, but enough to make it a great tool.
> Claude Opus 4.5 by far is the most capable development model.
At the moment I have a personal Claude Max subscription and ChatGPT Enterprise for Codex at work. Using both, I feel pretty definitively that gpt-5.2-codex is strictly superior to Opus 4.5. When I use Opus 4.5 I’m still constantly dealing with it cutting corners, misinterpreting my intentions and stopping when it isn’t actually done. When I switched to Codex for work a few months ago all of those problems went away.
I got the personal subscription this month to try out Gas Town and see how Opus 4.5 does on various tasks, and there are definitely features of CC that I miss with Codex CLI (I can’t believe they still don’t have hooks), but I’ve cancelled the subscription and won’t renew it at the end of this month unless they drop a model that really brings them up to where gpt-5.2-codex is at.
I have literally the opposite experience and so does most of AI pilled twitter and the AI research community of top conferences (NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, AAAI) Why does this FUD keep appearing on this site?
Edit: It's very true that the big 4 labs silently mess with their models and any action of that nature is extremely user hostile.
Probably because all of the major providers are constantly screwing around with their models, regardless of what they say.
It feels very close to a trade-off point.
I agree with all posts in the chain: Opus is good, Anthropic have burned good will, I would like to use other models...but Opus is too good.
What I find most frustrating is that I am not sure if it is even actual model quality that is the blocker with other models. Gemini just goes off the rails sometimes with strange bugs like writing random text continuously and burning output tokens, Grok seems to have system prompts that result in odd behaviour...no bugs just doing weird things, Gemini Flash models seem to output massive quantities of text for no reason...it is often feels like very stupid things.
Also, there are huge issues with adopting some of these open models in terms of IP. Third parties are running these models and you are just sending them all your code...with a code of conduct promise from OpenRouter?
I also don't think there needs to be a huge improvement in models. Opus feels somewhat close to the reasonable limit: useful, still outputs nonsense, misses things sometimes...there are open models that can reach the same 95th percentile but the median is just the model outputting complete nonsense and trying to wipe your file system.
The day for open models will come but it still feels so close and so far.
I do wonder if they locked things down due to people abusing their CC token.
I buy the theory that Claude Code is engineered to use things like token caching efficiently, and their Claude Max plans were designed with those optimizations in mind.
If people start using the Claude Max plans with other agent harnesses that don't use the same kinds of optimizations the economics may no longer have worked out.
(But I also buy that they're going for horizontal control of the stack here and banning other agent harnesses was a competitive move to support that.)
It should just burn quota faster then. Instead of blocking they should just mention that if you use other tools then your quota may reduce at 3x speed compared to cc. People would switch.
When I last checked a few months ago, Anthropic was the only provider that didn't have automatic prompt caching. You had to do it manually (and you could only set checkpoints a few times per context?), and most 3rd party stuff does not.
They seem to have started rejecting 3rd party usage of the sub a few weeks ago, before Claw blew up.
By the way, does anyone know about the Agents SDK? Apparently you can use it with an auth token, is anyone doing that? Or is it likely to get your account in trouble as well?
Absolutely. I installed clawdbot for just long enough to send a single message, and it burned through almost a quarter of my session allowance. That was enough for me. Meanwhile I can use CC comfortably for a few hours and I've only hit my token limit a few times.
I've had a similar experience with opencode, but I find that works better with my local models anyway.
I have a feeling the different harnesses create new context windows instead of using one. The more context windows you open up with Claude the quicker your usage goes poof.
Wow, that is very surprising and alarming. I wish Anthropic would have made a more public statement as to why they blocked other harnesses.
I would be surprised if the primary reason for banning third party clients isn't because they are collecting training data via telemetry and analytics in CC. I know CC needlessly connects to google infrastructure, I assume for analytics.
If that was the real reason, why wouldn't they just make it so that if you don't correctly use caching you use up more of your limit?
In what way would it be abused? The usage limits apply all the same, they aren't client side, and hitting that limit is within the terms of the agreement with Anthropic.
The subscription services have assumptions baked in about the usage patterns; they're oversubscribed and subsidized. If 100% of subscriber customers use 100% of their tokens 100% of the time, their business model breaks. That's what wholesale / API tokens are for.
> hitting that limit is within the terms of the agreement with Anthropic
It's not, because the agreement says you can only use CC.
> It's not, because the agreement says you can only use CC.
it's like Apple: you can use macOS only on our Macs, iOS only on iPhones, etc. but at least in the case of Apple, you pay (mostly) for the hardware while the software it comes with is "free" (as in free beer).
Taking umbrage as if it matters how I use the compute I'm paying for via the harness they want me to use it within as long as I'm just doing personal tasks I want to do for myself, not trying to power an apps API with it seems such a waste of their time to be focusing on and only causes brand perception damage with their customers.
Could have just turned a blind eye.
The loss of access shows the kind of power they'll have in the future. It's just a taste of what's to come.
If a company is going to automate our jobs, we shouldn't be giving them money and data to do so. They're using us to put ourselves out of work, and they're not giving us the keys.
I'm fine with non-local, open weights models. Not everything has to run on a local GPU, but it has to be something we can own.
I'd like a large, non-local Qwen3-Coder that I can launch in a RunPod or similar instance. I think on-demand non-local cloud compute can serve as a middle ground.
How do I "abuse" a token? I pass it to their API, the request executes, a response is returned, I get billed for it. That should be the end of the conversation.
(Edit due to rate-limiting: I see, thanks -- I wasn't aware there was more than one token type.)
You can buy this product, right here: https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/about-claude/pricing
That's not the product you buy when you a Claude Code token, though.
Claude Code supports using API credits, and you can turn on Extra Usage and use API credits automatically once your session limit is reached.
This confused me for a while, having two separate "products" which are sold differently, but can be used by the same tool.
Access is one of my concerns with coding agents - on the one hand I think they make coding much more accessible to people who aren't developers - on the other hand this access is managed by commercial entities and can be suspended for any reason.
I can also imagine a dysfunctional future where a developers spend half their time convincing their AI agents that the software they're writing is actually aligned with the model's set of values
Anthropic banned my account when I whipped up a solution to control Claude Code running on my Mac from my phone when I'm out and about. No commercial angle, just a tool I made for myself since they wouldn't ship this feature (and still haven't). I wasn't their biggest fanboy to begin with, but it gave me the kick in the butt needed to go and explore alternatives until local models get good enough that I don't need to use hosted models altogether.
I didn't like the existing SSH applications for iOS and I already have a local app that I made that I have open 24/7, so I added a screen that used xterm.js and Bun.spawn with Bun.Terminal to mirror the process running on my Mac to my phone. This let me add a few bells and whistles that a generic SSH client wouldn't have, like notifications when Claude Code was done working etc.
How did they even know you did this? I cannot imagine what cause they could have for the ban. They actively want folks building tooling around and integrating with Claude Code.
I have no idea. The alternative is that my account just happened to be on the wrong side of their probably slop-coded abuse detection algorithm. Not really any better.
How did this work? The ban, I mean. Did you just wake up to find out an email and that your creds no longer worked? Were you doing things to sub-process out to the Claude Code CLI or something else?
I left a sibling comment detailing the technical side of things. I used the `Bun.spawn` API with the `terminal` key to give CC a PTY and mirrored it to my phone with xterm.js. I used SSE to stream CC data to xterm.js and a regular request to send commands out from my phone. In my mind, this is no different than using CC via SSH from my phone - I was still bound by the same limits and wasn't trying to bypass them, Anthropic is entitled to their different opinion of course.
And yeah, I got three (for some reason) emails titled "Your account has been suspended" whose content said "An internal investigation of suspicious signals associated with your account indicates a violation of our Usage Policy. As a result, we have revoked your access to Claude.". There is a link to a Google Form which I filled out, but I don't expect to hear back.
I did nothing even remotely suspicious with my Anthropic subscription so I am reasonably sure this mirroring is what got me banned.
Edit: BTW I have since iterated on doing the same mirroring using OpenCode with Codex, then Codex with Codex and now Pi with GPT-5.2 (non-Codex) and OpenAI hasn't banned me yet and I don't think they will as they decided to explicitly support using your subscription with third party coding agents following Anthropic's crackdown on OpenCode.
> Anthropic is entitled to their different opinion of course.
I'm not so sure. It doesn't sound like you were circumventing any technical measures meant to enforce the ToS which I think places them in the wrong.
Unless I'm missing some obvious context (I don't use Mac and am unfamiliar with the Bun.spawn API) I don't understand how hooking a TUI up to a PTY and piping text around is remotely suspicious or even unusual. Would they ban you for using a custom terminal emulator? What about a custom fork of tmux? The entire thing sounds absurd to me. (I mean the entire OpenCode thing also seems absurd and wrong to me but at least that one is unambiguously against the ToS.)
> Anthropic is entitled to their different opinion of course.
It’d be cool if Anthropic were bound by their terms of use that you had to sign. Of course, they may well be broad enough to fire customers at will. Not that I suggest you expend any more time fighting this behemoth of a company though. Just sad that this is the state of the art.
It sucks and I wish it were different, but it is not so different from trying to get support at Meta or Google. If I was an AI grifter I could probably just DM a person on Twitter and get this sorted, but as a paying customer, it's wisest to go where they actually want my money.
There is weaponized malaise employed by these frontier model providers and I feel like that dark-pattern, what you pointed out, and others are employed to rate-limit certain subscriptions.
They have two products:
* Subscription plans, which are (probably) subsidized and definitely oversubscribed (ie, 100% of subscribers could not use 100% of their tokens 100% of the time).
* Wholesale tokens, which are (probably) profitable.
If you try to use one product as the other product, it breaks their assumptions and business model.
I don't really see how this is weaponized malaise; capacity planning and some form of over-subscription is a widely accepted thing in every industry and product in the universe?
I am curious to see how this will pan out long-term. Is the quality gap of Opus-4.5 over GPT-5.2 large enough to overcome the fact that OpenAI has merged these two bullet points into one? I think Anthropic might have bet on no other frontier lab daring to disconnect their subscription from their in-house coding agent and OpenAI called their bluff to get some free marketing following Anthropic's crackdown on OpenCode.
It will also be interesting to see which model is more sustainable once the money fire subsidy musical chairs start to shake out; it all depends on how many whales there are in both directions I think (subscription customers using more than expected vs large buys of profitable API tokens).
So, if I rent out my bike to you for an hour a day for really cheap money and I do so a 50 more times to 50 others, so that my bike is oversubscribed and you and others don't get your hours, that's OK because it is just capacity planning on my side and widely accepted? Good to know.
That's non-local. I am not interested in coding assistants that work on cloud based work-spaces. That's what motivated me to developed this feature for myself.
But... Claude Code is already cloud-based. It relies on the Anthropic API. Your data is all already being ingested by them. Seems like a weird boundary to draw, trusting the company's model with your data but not their convenience web ui. Being local-only (ie OpenCode & open weights model running on your own hw) is consistent, at least.
Yes, although OpenCode works great with official Claude API keys that are on normal API pricing.
What Anthropic blocked is using OpenCode with the Claude "individual plans" (like the $20/month Pro or $100/month Max plan), which Anthropic intends to be used only with the Claude Code client.
OpenCode had implemented some basic client spoofing so that this was working, but Anthropic updated to a more sophisticated client fingerprinting scheme which blocked OpenCode from using this individual plans.
Thank you for this comment! I knew it was something like this. I've been using it in the VSCode terminal, but you're right, the ANSI terminal just doesn't work. I wasn't quite sure why!
Did they actually say that? I thought they rolled it back.
OpenCode et al continue to work with my Max subscription.
OpenAI committed to allowing it btw. I don't know why Anthropic gets so much love here
Cause they make the best coding model.
It's that simple. Everyone else is trying to compete in other ways and Anthropic are pushing for dominate the market.
They'll eventually lose their performance edge and suddenly they will back to being cute and fluffy
I've cancelled a clause sub, but still have one.
Agreed.
I've tried all of the models available right now, and Claude Opus is by far the most capable.
I had an assertion failure triggered in a fairly complex open-source C library I was using, and Claude Opus not only found the cause, but wrote a self-contained reproduction code I could add to a GitHub issue. And it also added tests for that issue, and fixed the underlying issue.
I am sincerely impressed by the capabilities of Claude Opus. Too bad its usage is so expensive.
Because OpenAI is on the back foot at the moment, they need the retention
What do you require local models to do? The State of Utopia[1] is currently busy porting a small model to run in a zero-trust environment - your web browser. It's finished the port in javascript and is going to wasm now for the CPU path. you can see it being livecoded by Claude right now[2] (this is day 2, day 1 it ported the C++ code to javascript successfully). We are curious to know what permissions you would like to grant such a model and how you would like it served to you. (For example, we consider that you wouldn't trust a Go build - especially if it's built by a nation state, regardless of our branding, practices, members or contributors.)
Please list what capabilities you would like our local model to have and how you would like to have it served to you.
[1] a sovereign digital nation built on a national framework rather than a for-profit or even non-profit framework, will be available at https://stateofutopia.com (you can see some of my recent posts or comments here on HN.)
[2] https://www.youtube.com/live/0psQ2l4-USo?si=RVt2PhGy_A4nYFPi
> I’m not paying to support anticompetitive behaviour
You are doing that all the time. You just draw the line, arbitrarily.
What is the point of any of this? To exchange how we think about things. I think virtue signaling is boring and uncandid.
But you are virtue-signalling, too, based on your own definition of virtuous behavior. In fact, you're doing nothing else. You're not contributing anything of value to the discussion.
That's great, yes. We all draw the line somewhere, subjectively. We all pretend we follow logic and reason and lets all be more honest and truthfully share how we as humans are emotionally driven not logically driven.
It's like this old adage "Our brains are poor masters and great slaves". We are basically just wanting to survive and we've trained ourselves to follow the orders of our old corporate slave masters who are now failing us, and we are unfortunately out of fear paying and supporting anticompetitive behavior and our internal dissonance is stopping us from changing it (along with fear of survival and missing out and so forth).
The global marketing by the slave master class isn't helping. We can draw a line however arbitrary we'd like though and its still better and more helpful than complaining "you drew a line arbitrarily" and not actually doing any of the hard courageous work of drawing lines of any kind in the first place.
> Then Anthropic started saying I’m not allowed to use my Claude Code subscription with my preferred tools
To be clear, since this confuses a lot of people in every thread: Anthropic will let you use their API with any coding tools you want. You just have to go through the public API and pay the same rate as everyone else. They have not "blocked" or "banned" any coding tools from using their API, even though a lot of the clickbait headlines have tried to insinuate as much.
Anthropic never sold subscription plans as being usable with anything other than their own tools. They were specifically offered as a way to use their own apps for a flat monthly fee.
They obviously set the limits and pricing according to typical use patterns of these tools, because the typical users aren't maxing out their credits in every usage window.
Some of the open source tools reverse engineered the protocol (which wasn't hard) and people started using the plans with other tools. This situation went on for a while without enforcement until it got too big to ignore, and they began protecting the private endpoints explicitly.
The subscription plans were never sold as a way to use the API with other programs, but I think they let it slide for a while because it was only a small number of people doing it. Once the tools started getting more popular they started closing loopholes to use the private API with other tools, which shouldn't really come as a surprise.