alt Hacker NewsThis look nice! I was curious about being allowed to use a Claude Pro/Max subscription vs an API key, since there's been so much buzz about that lately, so I went looking for a solid answer.
Thankfully the official Agent SDK Quickstart guide says that you can: https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/agent-sdk/quickstart
In particular, this bit:
"After installing Claude Code onto your machine, run claude in your terminal and follow the prompts to authenticate. The SDK will use this authentication automatically."
Replies
OP here. Yes! This was a big motivation for me to try and build this. Nervous Anthropic is gonna shut down my account for using Clawdbot.
This project uses the Agents SDK so it should be kosher in regards to terms of service. I couldn't figure out how to get the SDK running inside the containers to properly use the authenticated session from the host machine so I went with a hacky way of injecting the oauth token into the container environment. It still should be above board for TOS but it's the one security flaw that I know about (malicious person in a WhatsApp group with you can prompt inject the agent to share the oauth key).
If anyone can help out with getting the authenticated session to work properly with the agents running in containers it would be much appreciated.
Wow, thanks for posting that, news to me! In this case I don’t understand why there was a whole brouhaha with OpenClaw and the like - I guess they were invoking it without the official SDK? Because this makes it seem like if you have the sub you can build any agentic thing you like and still use your subscription, as long as you can install and login to Claude code on the machine running it.
But their docs also say:
> Unless previously approved, Anthropic does not allow third party developers to offer claude.ai login or rate limits for their products, including agents built on the Claude Agent SDK. Please use the API key authentication methods described in this document instead.
Which I have interpreted means that you can’t use your Claude code subscription with the agent SDK, only API tokens.
I really wish Anthropic would make it clear (and allow us to use our subscriptions with other tools).