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Comments (286)

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  malisper
  Since there's a lot of questions about what this means, let me explain.Anthropic has two different products that are relevant here: the Claude API and Claude Code. The Claude API has usage based pricing. The more you use, the more you pay. With Claude Code, you can get a monthly subscription which gives you a fixed amount of usage. Comparing equivalent token generation between the Claude API and Claude Code, Claude Code with a subscription is much cheaper.When it comes to third party products such as OpenClaw and OpenCode, Anthropic has made it clear those products should be using the Claude API and not the internal Claude Code APIs. OpenClaw and OpenCode have both been using the internal Claude Code APIs as when a user has a Claude Code subscription, the internal Claude Code API gives you tokens at a much cheaper rate than the Claude API. Presumably Anthropic makes Claude Code cheaper than the Claude API because they are willing to give users a discount for them to use Claude Code vs a competing product such as OpenCode.It looks like until recently OpenCode tried to get around Anthropic's requirements by offering "plugins" in OpenCode that would allow users to use their Claude Code subscription in OpenCode. This PR mentions as much at[0][1]:> There are plugins that allow you to use your Claude Pro/Max models with OpenCode. Anthropic explicitly prohibits this.> Previous versions of OpenCode came bundled with these plugins but that is no longer the case as of 1.3.0This PR seems to be in response to Anthropic threatening OpenCode with legal action if they keep using the internal Claude Code APIs. [0] https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/pull/18186/changes#diff-b5d5affc6941bf7bb19805cc8f556cd1b9ae73ffd99e520120700536b166f8c0L310 [1] https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/pull/18186/changes#diff-b5d5affc6941bf7bb19805cc8f556cd1b9ae73ffd99e520120700536b166f8c0R321
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  827a
  I'm really struggling to understand how Anthropic is benefited by not allowing this. Its bad PR for no good reason. The only thing I can figure is that Claude Code is hemorrhaging money, they're too afraid to actually enforce reasonable token limits, and the only thing that's keeping it from totally bankrupting the company tomorrow is: controlling the harness and having the harness dynamically route toward Haiku or Sonnet over Opus when Opus is overloaded, without telling the user. Or maybe, they're extremely interested in observability of the exact prompts users are typing, and third party harnesses muck that data in with the rest of the context that gets sent, so its harder to detangle the prompt from the noise?Like, in any event, I seriously get the feeling that Anthropic doesn't just not care about their users, but actively dislikes them. Like, they must be losing so much money on each Claude Code subscriber that if a million people all said "we're switching" they just wouldn't care. I get this vibe even from watching videos of people working on the Antrhopic team; like they all think they're Gods above mere mortals, serving some higher purpose, and nothing matters to them except Building the Machine God.OpenCode is awesome. Claude Code is nothing special at all. Last month I switched to just using OpenCode with a Codex $200/mo subscription, and that's been great. Let the weirdos at Anthropic do what weirdos do, and hopefully one day their name is never mentioned again in polite society.
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  mellosouls
  This and threatening OpenClaw (now at OpenAI), Anthropic really on a roll making friends in Open Source.Previously discussed I think:Anthropic Explicitly Blocking OpenCode (173 points, 157 comments)https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46625918
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  extr
  The OpenCode guys have really surprised me in the way they've reacted to Anthropic shutting down the side-loaded auth scheme. Very petty and bitter. It's clearly just a business decision from Anthropic and a rational one at that, usage subsidization to keep people on the first party product surface is practically the oldest business move in the book and is completely valid.
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  gwd
  "Legal action" means you filed a lawsuit. This looks more like someone sent a list of requested changes, backed up by an implicit or explicit threat of legal action.
• jryio
  Businesses exercise power and control in the market. The purpose of this is to set a precedent (perceived or actual) — the auth system was a product, not an API. Anthropic is drawing the line between 'built on us' and 'built around us.'I don't necessarily see this as an evil action. It doesn't inhibit open source, it sets terms of service and practice boundaries.Granted this is a wildly unpopular approach, worse has happened in the OSS world...
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  unshavedyak
  Anyone know why OpenCode is integrating to ClaudeCode in the manner they were? Ie CC gives you an SDK, and i get the impression that Anthropic is fine with you using whatever external tools you want with the SDK .. otherwise why'd they publish an SDK?So if CC has an SDK, why doesn't OC just use the SDK? I assume there's some functional reason why it doesn't perform to their needs? Maybe it's not low level enough? I'm unfamiliar with what sort of functionality a harness needs.It makes me nervous as i'm using the CC SDK for my own wrapper though. Hypothetically what i'm doing is no different than embedding CC into an IDE.. though. Fingers crossed.
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  valunord
  This wouldn't be so bad if they didn't have such a sucky tui or ecosystem. AI is chef's kiss, tooling is bottom barrel.
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  _ache_
  AI company crying over IP violation. Incredible.
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  droidjj
  It's not clear what exactly the "legal action" is based on this github link. My pure speculation is Anthropic's lawyers have come up with a liability story boiling down to OpenCode helping end users violate the Anthropic ToS (i.e. tortious interference with contract).
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  MyHonestOpinon
  Can anyone ELI5 what is open code and why Anthropic is asking them to delete something ?
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  hokkos
  It's ok when Anthropic do it, like when they make deal with the army.
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  rcr-anti
  Something that usually gets missed in these discussions is that the subscription quotas seem to rely heavily on prompt caching to be economically viable, or at least less unviable. They can and do have permutations of the system prompt, tools, skills, etc. that makes the first 20k or so tokens hit the cache and not use inference resources for that portion. In addition, from my monitoring, Claude Code with Max has about an 80% cost reduction via caching (equivalent if you had done the same work with API billing), and has been improving over time. If cache use passes on a discount of 90% I think it's fair to assume the actual cost to them is close to negligible.So they're being obtuse about it for some reason, but if you want an economically sustainable model for AI companies they have to have some kind of optimization for the otherwise ridiculously discounted subscriptions. They sell subscriptions at the same rate and quotas to enterprise now, minus the $200 tier, so this isn't just consumer marketing being subsidized by b2b revenue.Whether they're making money or just losing less, you can only get those kind of cache optimizations when you have a fixed client.
• jitl
  Same thing happened with Google, but Google started actually banning user's accounts. Hopefully it doesn't come to that with Anthropic.
• 0xbadc0de5
  A few months ago, I had my Anthropic Claude Max account nuked for using OpenCode. That sucked, but I just opened a new Claude Max account under a different email. Which, yes, after re-reading their terms is also forbidden. But I had been playing by their rules ever since. Only using Claude Code and their official apps. So they got what they wanted - compliance.Today they nuked my account again. I can only assume it was because I had the gall to find so much value in their product that even after they banned me once, I still wanted to give them money!I've been around this planet a long time and I have never encountered a tech company as hostile to their users as Anthropic. And that includes Microsoft back in the 90's & 00's.I really hope they change their ways. But for now, I'm done with them. I'll take my business elsewhere.
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  carlos-menezes
  I'm sure absolutely nothing will come of Anthropic's open-source acquisitions. Totally harmless, I'm sure.
• akmarinov
  It’s like they want people to not like them …
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  DanielHall
  Anthropic is set to become the second-strongest legal department in North America
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  zajio1am
  Is this relevant for people that use regular (per-token credit-based) API key?
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  karmasimida
  Just use GPT5.4, avoid the drama and it is a better model anyway
• FloatArtifact
  Maybe go third party for plugins?
• ftchd
  sorry guys, I started OpenCode after 2 weeks, my bad
• exabrial
  Remember Anthropic is supposed to be the "good guys"
• I_am_tiberius
  Driving your business on content you don't own and then this. Disgusting.
• anon
  undefined
• rvz
  Once again, Anthropic are not your friends and are the bad guys.
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  anonym29
  I've said it before and I'll say it again.The people mad about this feel they are entitled to the heavily subsidized usage in any context they want, not in the context explicitly allowed by the subsidizer.It's kind of like a new restaurant started handing out coupons for "90% off", wanting to attract diners to the restaurant, customers started coming in and ordering bulk meals then immediately packaging them in tupperware containers and taking it home (violating the spirit of the arrangement, even if not the letter of the arrangement), so the restaurant changed the terms on the discount to say "limited to in-store consumption only, not eligible for take-home meals", and instead of still being grateful that they're getting food for 90% off, the cheapskate customers are getting angry that they're no longer allowed to exploit the massive subsidy however they want.Anthropic has every right to place rules around their generous subsidization of the Claude subscription plans, which give limits of ~8-12x as many tokens as you'd get for the same expenditure in the PAYG API.That said, demanding an open source repo remove information that Anthropic openly publishes and distributes for free (the prompt) is a bit odd...
• ihsw
  [dead]
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  adampunk
  [flagged]
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  Handy-Man
  Seems fine to me. Why do people think they are entitled to use heavily subsidized services outside of the tools it's intended to work with per terms.
• segmondy
  Anthropic is a shit company. I cancelled my subscription 2 years ago once they started calling for regulation. They might have gotten folks to side with them in the OpenAI debate, but they are just another shit company like OpenAI.
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  taf2
  avoid bun is my take away... if anthropic decides you're a competitor and with the way AI is evolving you will be a competitor soon - don't rely on any anthropic tools or models.
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  p5v
  What’s next - coming after all the projects that have been coded using Claude Code, claiming they are their property?
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  strideashort
  Can anyone explain what’s going on here? Using API is illegal? that can’t possibly be since we now know API is not even copyrighted (which personally I disagree with bit whatever)… so what is going on here?
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  cedws
  Under what law can Anthropic force OpenCode to do this? Surely it's not illegal to publish code that interacts with an API that's open for everyone to see?
• adangert
  And the downfall of anthropic starts, OpenAI has had this all in the bag the whole time. Anthropic is a poor imitation of Sam's Master plan, it was over before it even started. Money grubbers, the lot of em!
• matltc
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