> protect their investment

Viewed another way, the preferential pricing they're giving to Claude Code (and only Claude Code) is anticompetitive behavior that may be illegal.

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Aurornis 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This is a misunderstanding of the regulations.

They’re not obligated to give other companies access to their services at a discounted rate.

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gpm 3 hours ago | parent [-]

They may however be obligated to not give customers access to their services at a discounted rate either - predatory pricing is at least some of the time and in some jurisdictions illegal.

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dwaltrip 2 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

What makes it predatory?

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Aurornis 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Predatory pricing? They have a public API that anyone can use for a public rate. There is no predatory pricing here.

The Claude Code endpoint is a private API. They’re free to control usage of their private API.

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gpm 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Predatory pricing is selling something below cost to acquire/maintain market dominance.

The Claude subscription used for Claude Code is to all appearances being sold substantially below the cost to run it, and it certainly seems that this is being done to maintain Claude Code's market dominance and force out competitors who cannot afford to subsidize LLM inference in the same way such as OpenCode.

It's not a matter of there being a public API, I don't believe they are obligated to offer one at all, it's a matter of the Claude Subscription being priced fairly so that OpenCode (on top of, say, gemini) can be competitive.

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mcmcmc an hour ago | parent | next [-]

The modern consumer benefit doctrine means predatory pricing is impossible to prosecute in 99% of cases. I’m not saying it’s right, but legally it is toothless.

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3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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lumost 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Claude code is so successful that they could silence the api to protect the moat.

I’m surprised they didn’t go with the option of offering opus 4.6 to Claude code only.

	▲	Wowfunhappy 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The API is really expensive compared to a Max subscription! So they're probably making a lot of money (or at least losing much less) via the API. I don't think it's going anywhere. Worst case scenario they could raise the price even more.

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nebezb 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Are you suggesting Anthropic has a “duty to deal” with anyone who is trying to build competitive products to Claude Code, beyond access to their priced API? I don’t think so. Especially not to a product that’s been breaking ToS.

	▲	eli 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		No, but I think they should. Or anti-trust was enforced through some other means. Or at all really. Citing the ToS is circular logic. They set the terms and can change them whenever they want!