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.
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.
I wonder what they are up to.
Could have just turned a blind eye.
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.
* 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?
(Edit due to rate-limiting: I see, thanks -- I wasn't aware there was more than one token type.)
> hitting that limit is within the terms of the agreement with Anthropic
It's not, because the agreement says you can only use CC.
That's not the product you buy when you a Claude Code token, though.
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.
Selling dollars for $.50 does that. It sounds like they have a business model issue to me.
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).
It's within their capability to provision for higher usage by alternative clients. They just don't want to.
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.)
Without knowing the numbers it's hard to tell if the business model for these AI providers actually works, and I suspect it probably doesn't at the moment, but selling an oversubscribed product with baked in usage assumptions is a functional business model in a lot of spaces (for varying definitions of functional, I suppose). I'm surprised this is so surprising to people.
You are doing that all the time. You just draw the line, arbitrarily.
I've had a similar experience with opencode, but I find that works better with my local models anyway.
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.
I recommend Ghostty for Mac users. Alacritty probably works too.
{
"plugin": [
"opencode-anthropic-auth@latest"
]
}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.
There are already many serious concerns about sharing code and information with 3rd parties, and those Chinese open models are dangerously close to destroying their entire value proposition.
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.
This confused me for a while, having two separate "products" which are sold differently, but can be used by the same tool.
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.)
OpenCode et al continue to work with my Max subscription.
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.
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 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
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".
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 probably is, but I found it very hard to make sense of the UI and how everything works. Hard to change models, no chat history etc.?)
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.
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
Being a common business model and it being functional are two different things. I agree they are prevalent, but they are actively user hostile in nature. You are essentially saying that if people use your product at the advertised limit, then you will punish them. I get why the business does it, but it is an adversarial business model.
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.
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?
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 problem is, there's not a clear every-man value like Uber has. The stories I see of people finding value are sparse and seem from the POV of either technosexuals or already strong developer whales leveraging the bootstrapy power .
If AI was seriously providing value, orgs like Microsoft wouldn't be pushing out versions of windows that can't restart.
It clearly is a niche product unlike Uber, but it's definitely being invested in like it is universal product.
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.
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.
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.
It'll be interesting to see what OpenAI and Anthropic will tell us about this when they go public (seems likely late this year--along with SpaceX, possibly)
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.
I've heard Codex CLI called a scalpel, and this resonates. You wouldn't use a scalpel for a major carving project.
To come back to my earlier comment, though, my main approach makes sense in this context. I let Opus do the abstract thinking, and then OpenAI's models handle the fine details.
On a side note, I've also spent a fair amount of time messing around around in Codex CLI as I have a Pro subscription. It rapidly becomes apparent that it does exactly what you tell it even if an obvious improvement is trivial. Opus is on the other end of the spectrum here. you have to be fairly explicit with Opus intructing it to not add spurious improvements.
its not. The idea is that majority subscribers don't hit limit, so they sell them dollar for 2. But there is minority which hit limit, and they effectively selling them dollar for 50c, but aggregated numbers could be positive.
Very interesting. I'm going to try this out. Thanks!