Branding and customer relationships matter as much or more than the "billable service" part of Claude Code.

It's not unheard of for companies that have strong customer mindshare to find themselves intermediated by competitors or other products to the point that they just became part of the infrastructure and eventually lose that mindshare.

I doubt Anthropic wants to become a swappable backend for the actual thing that developers reach for to do their work (the CLI tool).

Don't get me wrong, I think developers should 100% have the choice of tooling they want to use.

But from a business standpoint I think maintaining that direct or first-party connection to the developer is what Anthropic are trying to protect here.