Imagine having a finite pool of GPUs worth more than their weight in gold, and an infinite pool of users obsessed with running as many queries against those GPUs in parallel as possible, mostly to review and generate copious amounts of spam content primarily for the purposes of feeling modern, and all in return for which they offer you $20 per month. If you let them, you must incur as much credit liability as OpenAI. If you don't, you get destroyed online.

It almost makes me feel sorry for Dario despite fundamentally disliking him as a person.

I don't see how they can get more clear about this, considering they have repeatedly answered it the exact same way.

Subscriptions are for first-party products (claude.com, mobile and desktop apps, Claude Code, editor extensions, Cowork).

Everything else must use API billing.

That’s very clearly a no, I don’t understand why so many people think this is unclear.

You can’t use Claude OAuth tokens for anything. Any solution that exists worked because it pretended/spoofed to be Claude Code. Same for Gemini (Gemini CLI, Antigravity)

Codex is the only one that got official blessing to be used in OpenClaw and OpenCode, and even that was against the ToS before they changed their stance on it.

I think you're just trying to see ambiguity where it doesn't exist because the looser interpretation is beneficial to you. It totally makes sense why you'd want that outcome and I'm not faulting you for it. It's just that, from a POV of someone without stake in the game, the answer seems quite clear.

It is pretty obviously no. API keys billed by the token, yes, Oauth to the flat rate plans no.

> OAuth authentication (used with Free, Pro, and Max plans) is intended exclusively for Claude Code and Claude.ai. Using OAuth tokens obtained through Claude Free, Pro, or Max accounts in any other product, tool, or service — including the Agent SDK — is not permitted and constitutes a violation of the Consumer Terms of Service.

> OAuth authentication (used with Free, Pro, and Max plans) is intended exclusively for Claude Code and Claude.ai.

I think this is pretty clear - No.

Does https://happy.engineering/ need to use the API keys or can use oauth? It's basically a frontend for claude-cli.

Not allowed. They've already banned people for this.

Anthropic has published a very clear statement. It's "no".

Usually, it is already stated in their documentation (auth section). If a statement is vague, treat it as a no. It is not worth the risk when they can ban you at any time. For example, ChatGPT allows it, but Claude and Gemini do not.

https://developers.openai.com/codex/auth

One set of applications to build with subscription is to use the claude-go binary directly. Humanlayer/Codelayer projects on GitHub do this. Granted those are not ideal for building a subscription based business to use oathu tokens from Claude and OpenaAI. But you can build a business by building a development env and gating other features behind paywall or just offering enterprise service for certain features like vertical AI(redpanada) offerings knowledge workers, voice based interaction(there was a YC startup here the other day doing this I think), structured outputs and workflows. There is lots to build on.

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They are not losing money on subscription plans. Inference is very cheap - just a few dollars per million tokens. What they’re trying to do is bundle R&D costs with inference so they can fund the training of the next generation of models.

Banning third-party tools has nothing to do with rate limits. They’re trying to position themselves as the Apple of AI companies -a walled garden. They may soon discover that screwing developers is not a good strategy.

They are not 10× better than Codex; on the contrary, in my opinion Codex produces much better code. Even Kimi K2.5 is a very capable model I find on par with Sonnet at least, very close to Opus. Forcing people to use ONLY a broken Claude Code UX with a subscription only ensures they loose advantage they had.

The secret is there is no path on making that back.

Depends on how you do the accounting. Are you counting inference costs or are you amortizing next gen model dev costs. "Inference is profitable" is oft repeated and rarely challenged. Most subscription users are low intensity users after all.

The question I have: how much are they _also_ losing on per-token billing?

I agree; unfortunately when I brought up that they're losing before I get jumped on demanding me to "prove it" and I guess pointing at their balance sheets isn't good enough.

Why do you think they're losing money on subscriptions?

But why does it matter which program you use to consume the tokens?

The sounds like a confession that claude code is somewhat wasteful at token use.

Honestly I think I am already sold on AI, who is the first company that is going to show us all how much it really costs and start enshitification? First to market wins right?

No, it is prohibited. They're just updating the docs to be more clear about their position, which haven't changed. Their docs was unclear about it.

woof, does Anthropic not have a comms team and a clear comms policy for employees that aren’t on that comms team?

Incorrect, the third-party usage was already blocked (banned) but it wasn't officially communicated or documented. This post is simply identifying that official communication rather than the inference of actual functionality.

these subscriptions have limits.. how could someone use $200 worth on $20/month.. is that not the issue with the limits they set on a $20 plan, and couldn't a claude code user use that same $200 worth on $20/month? (and how do i do this?)

It’s the same here in Hong Kong. I can’t use any of my cards (personal or corporate) for OpenAI or Anthropic.

Have to do everything through Azure, which is a mess to even understand.

And that is how it should be - the knowledge that the LLM trained on should be free, and cannot (and should never be) gatekept behind money.

It's merely the hardware that should be charged for - which ought to drop in price if/when the demand for it rises. However, this is a bottleneck at the moment, and hard to see how it gets resolved amidst the current US environment on sanctioning anyone who would try.

This is going to happen. Unfortunately.

I shudder to think what the industry will look like if software development and delivery becomes like Youtubing, where the whole stack and monetization is funneled through a single company (or a couple) get to decide who gets how much money.

I am a bit worried that this is the situation I am in with my (unpublished) commercial app right now: one of the major pain points I have is that while I have no doubt the app provides value in itself, I am worried about how many potential users will actually accept paying inference per token...

As an independent dev I also unfortunately don't have investors backing me to subsidize inference for my subscription plan.

>> there’s a million small scale AI apps that just aren’t worth building because there’s no way to do the billing that makes sense

Maybe they are not worth building at all then. Like MoviePass wasn’t.

> On a different note, it's surprising that a company that size has to clarify something as important as ToS via X

Countries clarify nation policy on X. Seriously it feels like half of the EU parliament live on twitter.

FYI a Twitter post that contradicts the ToS is NOT a clarification.

What's wrong with using X?

why wouldn't they just make it so the SDK can't use claude subs? like what are they doing here?

This feels more like the gym owner clarifying it doesn't want you using their 24-hour gym as a hotel just because you find their benches comfortable to lie down on, rather than a "roadblock to usage"

It's not, but do you really think the people having Claude build wrappers around Claude were ever aware of how services like this are typically offered.

They even block Claude Code of you've modified it via tweakcc. When they blocked OpenCode, I ported a feature I wanted to Claude Code so I could continue using that feature. After a couple days, they started blocking it with the same message that OpenCode gets. I'm going to go down to the $20 plan and shift most of my work to OpenAI/ChatGPT because of this. The harness features matter more to me than model differences in the current generation.

Opencode as well. Folks have been getting banned for abusing the OAuth login method to get around paying for API tokens or whatever. Anthropic seems to prefer people pay them.

For sure, yes. They already added attempts to block opencode, etc.

They are obviously losing money on these plans, just like all of the other companies in the space.

They are all desperately trying to stay in power, and this policy change (or clarification) is a fart in the wind in the grand scheme of what's going on in this industry.

I think they are smart making a distinction between a D2C subscription which they control the interface to and eat the losses for vs B2B use where they pay for what they use.

Allows them to optimize their clients and use private APIs for exclusive features etc. and there’s really no reason to bootstrap other wannabe AI companies who just stick a facade experience in front of Anthropic’s paying customer.

There's no decision to be made here, it's just way too expensive to have 3rd parties soak up the excess tokens, that's not the product being sold.

Especially as they are subsidized.

That’s not true, the market loves pay per use, see ”cloud”. It outperforms subscriptions by a lot, it’s not ”one-off”. And your example is not how companies building on top tend to charge, you either have your own infrastructure (key) or get charged at-cost + fees and service costs.

I don’t think Anthropic has any desire to be some B2C platform, they want high paying reliable customers (B2B, Enterprise).

OpenAI have been very generous in their plans in terms of token and what you use it with. Is Codex better or as good as Opus for coding? No. Is it a decent alternative? Very.

Kimi is amazing for this. They offer API usage as well iirc if you buy their subscription.

If you buy a 'Season's Pass' for Disneyland, you cant 'sublet' it to another kid to use on the days you don't; It's not really buying a 'daily access rate'.

Anthropic subs are not 'bulk tokens'.

It's not an unreasonable policy and it's entirely inevitable that they have to restrict.

Any user who is using a third-party client is likely self-selected into being a power user who is less profitable.

They don't get as much visibility into your data, just the actual call to/from the api. There's so much more value to them in that, since you're basically running the reinforcement learning training for them.

Probably because the $20 plan is essentially a paid demo for the higher plans.

Increasing the friction of switching providers as much as possible is part of their strategy to push users to higher subscription tiers and deny even scraps to their competitors.

They're losing money on this $200 plan and they're essentially paying you to make you dependent on Claude Code so they can exploit this (somehow) in the future.

> how can they even enforce this?

Many ways, and they’re under no obligation to play fair and tell you which way they’re using at any given time. They’ve said what the rules are, they’ve said they’ll ban you if they catch you.

So let’s say they enforce it by adding an extra nonstandard challenge-response handshake at the beginning of the exchange, which generates a token which they’ll expect on all requests going forward. You decompile the minified JS code, figure out the protocol, try it from your own code but accidentally mess up a small detail (you didn’t realize the nonce has a special suffix). Detected. Banned.

You’ll need a new credit card to open a new account and try again. Better get the protocol right on the first try this time, because debugging is going to get expensive.

Let’s say you get frustrated and post on Twitter about what you know so far. If you share info, they’ll probably see it eventually and change their method. They’ll probably change it once a month anyway and see who they catch that way (and presumably add a minimum Claude Code version needed to reach their servers).

They’ve got hundreds of super smart coders and one of the most powerful AI models, they can do this all day.

Pretty easy to enforce it - rather than make raw queries to the LLM Claude Code can proxy through Anthropic's servers. The server can then enforce query patterns, system prompts and other stuff that outside apps cannot override.

And once all the Claude subscribers move over to Codex subscriptions, I'd bet a large sum that OpenAI will make their own ToS update preventing automated/scripted usage.

They can't catch everything but they can make your product you're building on top of it non viable when it gets popular enough to look for, like they did with opencode.

> how can they even enforce this?

I would think that different tools would probably have different templates for their prompts?

You could tell by the prompt being used.

We don’t enforce speed limits, but it sucks when you get caught.

OpenAI will adjust, their investors will not allow money to be lost on ”being nice” forever, not until they’re handsomely paid back at least.

I am looking forward to switching to OpenAI once my claude max account is banned for using pi....

From 3rd party AI app use?

OpenRouter uses the API and does not use any subscription auth.

Sonnet was not trained with this information and extremely-recent-information-without-access-to-a-Web-Search-tool is the core case of hallucination.

QWEN models are quite nice for local use. Gemini 3 Pro is much better than Codex IMO.

Local? No, not currently. You need about 1TB VRAM. There are many harnesses in development at the time, keep a good look out. Just try many of them, look at the system prompts in particular. Consider DeepSeek using the official API. Consider also tweaking system prompts for whatever tool you end up using. And agree that TUI is meh; we need GUI.

Zed with CC using ACP?

Opencode with CC underneath using Gigacode?

OpenAI codex is also another viable path for what its worth.

I think the best model to my liking open source is kimi k2.5, so maybe you can run that?

Qwen is releasing some new models so I assume keep an eye on those and maybe some model can fit your use case as well?

They probably are but I don’t think that’s what this confirms. Most consumer flat rate priced services restrict usage outside of the first party apps, because 3rd party and scripted users can generate orders of magnitude more usage than a single user using the app can.

So it makes sense to offer simple flat pricing for first party apps, and usage priced apis for other usage. It’s like the difference between Google Drive and S3.

Are you implying that no one would use LLM SaaSes and everyone would self-host if energy costs were negligible?

That is...not how it works. People self-hosting don't look at their electricity bill.

You know that if you are just using a cloud service and not running local models, you could have just bought a raspberry pi.