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.)

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mirekrusin 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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andai 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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?

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volkercraig 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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andai 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I used it for a few mins and it burned 7M tokens. Wish there was a way to see where it's going!

(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.?)

	▲	giancarlostoro 20 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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giancarlostoro 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Wow, that is very surprising and alarming. I wish Anthropic would have made a more public statement as to why they blocked other harnesses.

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pluralmonad 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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ImprobableTruth 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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?

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segmondy 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Nah, their "moat" is CC, they are afraid that as other folks build effective coding agent, they are are going lose market share.

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cedws 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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bri3d 8 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

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Nemi 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> The subscription services have assumptions baked in about the usage patterns; they're oversubscribed and subsidized.

Selling dollars for $.50 does that. It sounds like they have a business model issue to me.

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bri3d 7 hours ago | parent [-]

This is how every cloud service and every internet provider works. If you want to get really edgy you could also say it's how modern banking works.

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.

	▲	Tossrock 7 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Don't forget gyms and other physical-space subscriptions. It's right up there with razor-and-blades for bog standard business models. Imagine if you got a gym membership and then were surprised when they cancelled your account for reselling gym access to your friends.
	▲	muyuu 7 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		If they rely on this to be competitive, I have serious doubts they will survive much longer. 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.
	▲	djeastm 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		>Without knowing the numbers it's hard to tell if the business model for these AI providers actually works 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)
	▲	Nemi 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		> selling an oversubscribed product with baked in usage assumptions is a functional business model in a lot of spaces 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.
	▲	7 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		[deleted]
	▲	cyanydeez 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		The Business model is Uber. It doesn't work unless you corner the market and provide a distinct value replacement. 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.

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cedws 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That's on Anthropic for selling a mirage of limits they don't want people to actually reach for.

It's within their capability to provision for higher usage by alternative clients. They just don't want to.

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behnamoh 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> 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).

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whywhywhywhy 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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echelon 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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CamperBob2 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.)

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bri3d 8 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

	▲	s5fs 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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.