alt Hacker NewsWhile Anthropic can choose whatever tool uses their api or subscription but I never fully understood what they gain from having the subscription explicitly only work for claude code. Is the issue that it disincentivizes the use of their API?
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Perhaps concentrated use of Claude Code increases their perceived market value.
It also perhaps tries to preserve some moat around their product/service.
Are they ZDR with prompts and completions and possibly rely on usage statistics from their CLI to infer how people are using it?
Owning the client gives them full control over which model to use for which query, prompt caching, rate limiting and lots more. So they can drive massive savings for the ~same output over just giving unrestricted access to the API.
The issue is that claude code is cheap because it uses API's unused capacity. These kind of circumventions hurt them both ways, one they dont know how to estimate api demand, and two, the nature of other harnesses is more bursty (eg: parallel calls) compared to claude code, so it screws over other legit users. Claude code very rarely makes parallel calls for context commands etc. but these ones do.
re the whole unused capacity is the nature of inference on GPUs. In any cluster, you can batch inputs (ie takes same time for say 1 query or 100 as they can be parallelized) and now continuous batching[1] exists. With API and bursty nature of requests, clusters would be at 40%-50% of peak API capacity. Makes sense to divert them to subscriptions. Reduces api costs in future, and gives anthropic a way to monetize unused capacity. But if everyone does it, then there is no unused capacity to manage and everyone loses.
It’s basic market segmentation.
They gave Claude Code a discount to make it work as a product.
The API is priced for all general purpose usage.
They never sold the Claude Code endpoint as a cheaper general purpose API. The stories about “blocking OpenCode” are getting kind of out of hand because they’d block any use of the Claude Code endpoint that wasn’t coming from their Claude Code tool.