Comment by tomashubelbauer

Comment by tomashubelbauer 10 hours ago

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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.

darkwater 10 hours ago

I control it with ssh and sometimes tmux (but termux+wireguard lead to a surprisingly generally stable connection). Why did you need more than that?

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  • tomashubelbauer 10 hours ago

    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.

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    • pluralmonad 8 hours ago

      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.

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      • tomashubelbauer 7 hours ago

        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.

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redblacktree 9 hours ago

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?

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  • tomashubelbauer 9 hours ago

    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.

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    • fc417fc802 8 hours ago

      > 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.)

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    • eptcyka 7 hours ago

      > 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.

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      • tomashubelbauer 7 hours ago

        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.

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RationPhantoms 10 hours ago

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.

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  • bri3d 10 hours ago

    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?

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    • tomashubelbauer 9 hours ago

      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.

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      • bri3d 9 hours ago

        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).

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    • Propelloni 9 hours ago

      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.

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      • bri3d 8 hours ago

        Let me introduce you to Citibike?

        Also, this is more like "I sell a service called take a bike to the grocery store" with a clause in the contract saying "only ride the bike to the grocery store." I do this because I am assuming that most users will ride the bike to the grocery store 1 mile away a few times a week, so they will remain available, even though there is an off chance that some customers will ride laps to the store 24/7. However, I also sell a separate, more expensive service called Bikes By the Hour.

        My customers suddenly start using the grocery store plan to ride to a pub 15 miles away, so I kick them off of the grocery store plan and make them buy Bikes By the Hour.

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      • elzbardico 8 hours ago

        As others pointed out, every business that sells capacity does this, including your ISP provider.

        They could, of course, price your 10GB plan under the assumption that you would max out your connection 24 hours a day.

        I fail to see how this would be advantageous to the vast majority of the customers.

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        • pluralmonad 7 hours ago

          Well, if the service price were in any way tied to the cost of transmitting bytes, then even the 24hr scenarios would likely see a reduction in cost to customers. Instead we have overage fees and data caps to help with "network congestion", which tells us all how little they think of their customers.

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      • dehugger 8 hours ago

        Yes, correct. Essentially every single industry and tool which rents out capacity of any system or service does this. Your ISP does this. The airline does this. Cruise lines. Cloud computing environments. Restaurants. Rental cars. The list is endless.

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      • pyvpx 9 hours ago

        I have some bad news for you about your home internet connection.

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Tossrock 9 hours ago

They did ship that feature, it's called "&" / teleport from web. They also have an iOS app.

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  • tomashubelbauer 9 hours ago

    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.

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    • Tossrock 8 hours ago

      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.

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      • tomashubelbauer 8 hours ago

        It is not a moral stance. I just prefer to have my files of my personal projects in one place. Sure I sync them to GitHub for backup, but I don't use GitHub for anything else in my personal projects. I am not going to use a workflow which relies on checking out my code to some VM where I have to set everything up in a way where it has access to all the tools and dependencies that are already there on my machine. It's slower, clunkier. IMO you can't beat the convenience of working on your local files. When I used my CC mirror for the brief period where it worked, when I came back to my laptop, all my changes were just already there, no commits, no pulls, no sync, nothing.

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        • Tossrock 8 hours ago

          Ah okay, that makes sense. Sorry they pulled the plug on you!

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