I don’t really see where the “walled garden” complaint is coming from. Anthropic spends a lot of effort to keep you from churning through trillions of tokens on their flat-rate subscription plan, but that’s a billing detail, and one that I honestly don’t share the outrage about. The technology part of CC is still totally open: skills, MCP, etc. are all open informal standards and there hasn’t been any movement to lock that down.

No, Anthropic spends a lot of effort to keep you from churning through those tokens with any binary other than their own.

Allowing users to take advantage of their monthly/weekly/daily token limits with the software of their choosing is a perfectly valid expectation.

Restricting it to their own underperforming, buggy TUI client is textbook walled garden.

Claude subscription is restricted to Claude Code harness

Really walled garden is the only direction that makes sense--models will slowly become commodities