Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use

It might be some confirmation bias here on my part but it feels as if companies are becoming more and more hostile to their API users. Recently Spotify basically nuked their API with zero urgency to fix it, redit has a whole convoluted npm package your obliged to use to create a bot, Facebook requires you to provide registered company and tax details even for development with some permissions. Am I just old man screaming at cloud about APIs used to being actually useful and intuitive?

I'm only waiting for OpenAI to provide an equivalet ~100 USD subscription to entirely ditch Claude.

Opus has gone down the hill continously in the last week (and before you start flooding with replies, I've been testing opus/codex in parallel for the last week, I've plenty of examples of Claude going off track, then apologising, then saying "now it's all fixed!" and then only fixing part of it, when codex nailed at the first shot).

I can accept specific model limits, not an up/down in terms of reliability. And don't even let me get started on how bad Claude client has become. Others are finally catching up and gpt-5.3-codex is definitely better than opus-4.6

Everyone else (Codex CLI, Copilot CLI etc...) is going opensource, they are going closed. Others (OpenAI, Copilot etc...) explicitly allow using OpenCode, they explicitly forbid it.

This hostile behaviour is just the last drop.

I think I've made two good decisions in my life. The first was switching entirely to Linux around '05 even though it was a giant pain in the ass that was constantly behind the competition in terms of stability and hardware support. It took awhile but wow no regrets.

The second appears to be hitching my wagon to Mistral even though it's apparently nowhere as powerful or featureful as the big guys. But do you know how many times they've screwed me over? Not once.

Maybe it's my use cases that make this possible. I definitely modified my behavior to accommodate Linux.

I really hope someone from any of those companies (if possible all of them) would publish a very clear statement regarding the following question: If I build a commercial app that allows my users to connect using their OAuth token coming from their ChatGPT/Claude etc. account, do they allow me (and their users) to do this or not?

I totally understand that I should not reuse my own account to provide services to others, as direct API usage is the obvious choice here, but this is a different case.

I am currently developing something that would be the perfect fit for this OAuth based flow and I find it quite frustrating that in most cases I cannot find a clear answer to this question. I don't even know who I would be supposed to contact to get an answer or discuss this as an independent dev.

EDIT: Some answers to my comment have pointed out that the ToS of Anthropic were clear, I'm not saying they aren't if taken in a vacuum, yet in practice even after this being published some confusion remained online, in particular regarding wether OAuth token usage was still ok with the Agent SDK for personal usage. If it happens to be, that would lead to other questions I personally cannot find a clear answer to, hence my original statement. Also, I am very interested about the stance of other companies on this subject.

Maybe I am being overly cautious here but I want to be clear that this is just my personal opinion and me trying to understand what exactly is allowed or not. This is not some business or legal advice.

The economic tension here is pretty clear: flat-rate subscriptions are loss leaders designed to hook developers into the ecosystem. Once third parties can piggyback on that flat rate, you get arbitrage - someone builds a wrapper that burns through $200/month worth of inference for $20/month of subscription cost, and Anthropic eats the difference.

What is interesting is that OpenAI and GitHub seem to be taking the opposite approach with Copilot/OpenCode, essentially treating third-party tool access as a feature that increases subscription stickiness. Different bets on whether the LTV of a retained subscriber outweighs the marginal inference cost.

Would not be surprised if this converges eventually. Either Anthropic opens up once their margins improve, or OpenAI tightens once they realize the arbitrage is too expensive at scale.

I don't think it's a secret that AI companies are losing a ton of money on subscription plans. Hence the stricter rate limits, new $200+ plans, push towards advertising etc. The real money is in per-token billing via the API (and large companies having enough AI FOMO that they blindly pay the enormous invoices every month).

I pay a Max subscription since a long time, I like their model but I hate their tools:

- Claude Desktop looks like a demo app. It's slow to use and so far behind the Codex app that it's embarassing.

- Claude Code is buggy has hell and I think I've never used a CLI tool that consume so much memory and CPU. Let's not talk about the feature parity with other agents.

- Claude Agent SDK is poorly documented, half finished, and is just thin wrapper around a CLI tool…

Oh and none of this is open source, so I can do nothing about it.

My only option to stay with their model is to build my own tool. And now I discover that using my subscription with the Agent SDK is against the term of use?

I'm not going to pay 500 USD of API credits every months, no way. I have to move to a different provider.

Your core customers are clearly having a blast building their own custom interfaces, so obviously the thing to do is update TOS and put a stop to it! Good job lol.

I know, I know, customer experience, ecosystem, gardens, moats, CC isn't fat, just big boned, I get it. Still a dick move. This policy is souring the relationship, and basically saying that Claude isn't a keeper.

I'll keep my eye-watering sub for now because it's still working out, but this ensures I won't feel bad about leaving when the time comes.

Update: yes yes, API, I know. No, I don't want that. I just want the expensive predictable bill, not metered corporate pricing just to hack on my client.

Not according to this guy who works on Claude Code: https://x.com/trq212/status/2024212378402095389?s=20

What a PR nightmare, on top of an already bad week. I’ve seen 20+ people on X complaining about this and the related confusion.

This is how you gift wrap the agentic era to the open source chinese LLMs. devs don't need the best model, they need one without lawyers attached.

Going to keep using the agents sdk with my pro subscription until I get banned. It's not openclaw it's my own project. It started by just proxying requests to claude code though the command line, the sdk just made it easier. Not sure what difference it makes to them if I have a cron job to send Claude code requests or an agent sdk request. Maybe if it's just me and my toy they don't care. We'll see how the clarify tomorrow.

Not sure what the problem is, I am on Max and use Claude Code, never get usage issues, that's what I pay for and want that to always be an option (capped monthly cost). For other uses it makes sense to go through their API service. This is less confusing and provides clarity for users, if you are a first party user use Claude's tools to access's the models otherwise API

Anthropic is dead. Long live open platforms and open-weight models. Why would I need Claude if I can get Minimax, Kimi, and Glm for the fraction of the price?

The pressure is to boost revenue by forcing more people to use the API to generate huge numbers of tokens they can charge more for. LLMs are becoming common commodities as open weight models keep catching up. There are similarities with pirating in the 90s when users realize they can ctrl+c ctrl+v to copy a file/model and you don't need to buy a cd/use their paid API.

AI is the new high-end gym membership. They want you to pay the big fee and then not use what you paid for. We'll see more and more roadblocks to usage as time goes on.

OpenClaw, NanoClaw, et al all use AgentSDK which will from now on be forbidden.

They are literally alienating a large percentage of OpenClaw, NanoClaw, PicoClaw, customers because those customers will surely not be willing to pay API pricing, which is at least 6-10x Max Plan pricing (for my usage).

This isn’t too surprising to me since they probably have a direct competitor to openclaw et al in the works right now, but until then I am cancelling my subscription and porting my nanoclaw fork with mem0 integration to work with OpenAI instead.

Thats not a “That’ll teach ‘em” statement, it is just my own cost optimization. I am quite fond of Anthropic’s coding models and might still subscribe again at the $20 level, but they just priced me out for personal assistant, research, and 90% of my token use case.

And because of this i'll obviously opt to not subscribe to a Claude plan, when i can just use something like Copilot and use the models that way via OpenCode.

OK I hope someone from anthropic reads this. Your API billing makes it really hard to work with it in India. We've had to switch to openrouter because anthropic keeps rejecting all the cards we have tried. And these are major Indian banks. This has been going on for MONTHS

I would expect, it still is only enforced in a semi-strict way.

I think what they want to achieve here is less "kill openclaw" or similar and more "keep our losses under control in general". And now they have a clear criteria to refer when they take action and a good bisection on whom to act on.

In case your usage is high they would block / take action. Because if you have your max subscription and not really losing them money, why should they push you (the monopoly incentive sounds wrong with the current market).

It's a bit unclear to me. I'm building a system around the Claude Agent SDK. Am I allowed to use it or not? Apparently not.

I got banned for violating terms of use apparently, but I'm mystified as to what I rule I broke, and appealing just vanishes into the ether.

In enterprise software, this is an embedded/OEM use case.

And historically, embedded/OEM use cases always have different pricing models for a variety of reasons why.

How is this any different than this long established practice?

Seems fair enough really, not that I like it either, but they could easily not offer the plans and only have API pricing. Makes it make more sense to have the plans be 'the Claude Code pricing' really.

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. If anthropic wanted to own that market, they could introduce a bring-your-own-Claude metaphor, where you login with Claude and token costs get billed to your personal account (after some reasonable monthly freebies from your subscription).

But the big guys don’t seem interested in this, maybe some lesser known model will carve out this space

From the legal docs:

> Authentication and credential use

> Claude Code authenticates with Anthropic’s servers using OAuth tokens or API keys. These authentication methods serve different purposes:

> 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.

> Developers building products or services that interact with Claude’s capabilities, including those using the Agent SDK, should use API key authentication through Claude Console or a supported cloud provider. Anthropic does not permit third-party developers to offer Claude.ai login or to route requests through Free, Pro, or Max plan credentials on behalf of their users.

> Anthropic reserves the right to take measures to enforce these restrictions and may do so without prior notice.

Thariq has clarified that there are no changes to how SDK and max suscriptions work:

https://x.com/i/status/2024212378402095389

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

That page is... confusing.

> Advertised usage limits for Pro and Max plans assume ordinary, individual usage of Claude Code and the Agent SDK.

This is literally the last sentence of the paragraph before the "Authentication and credential use"

Their moat is evaporating before our eyes. Anthropic is Microsoft's side piece, but Microsoft is married with kids to OpenAI.

And OpenAI just told Microsoft why they shouldn't be seeing Anthropic anymore; Gpt-5.3-codex.

RIP Anthropic.

¡Quick reminder! We are in the golden era of big company programming agents. Enjoy it while you can because it is likely going to get worse over time. Hopefully, there were will be competitive open source agents and some benevolent nerds put together a reasonable service. Otherwise I can see companies investing in their own AI infrastructure and developers who build their own systems becoming the top performers.

This is the VC funded startup playbook. It has been repeated many times, but maybe for the younger crowd it is new. Start a new service that is relatively permissive, then gradually restrict APIs and permissions. Finally, start throwing in ads and/or making it more expensive to use. Part of the reason is in the beginning they are trying to get as many users as possible and burning VC money. Then once the honey moon is over, they need to make a profit so they cut back on services, nerf stuff, increase prices and start adding ads.

Is this a direct shot at things like OpenClaw, or am I reading it wrong?

Does this mean that in an absurd way you can get banned if you use CodexBar https://github.com/steipete/CodexBar to keep track of your usage? It does use your credentials to fetch the usage, could they be so extreme that this would be an issue?

I think that their main problem is that they don't have enough resources to serve too many users, so they resort to this kind of limitations to keep Claude usage under control. Otherwise I wouldn't be able to explain a commercial move that limits their offer so strongly in comparison to competitors.

This article is somewhat reassuring to me, someone experimenting with openclaw on a Max subscription. But idk anything about the blog so would love to hear thoughts.

https://thenewstack.io/anthropic-agent-sdk-confusion/

In my opinion (which means nothing). If you are using your own hardware and not profiting directly from Claude’s use (as in building a service powered by your subscription). I don’t see how this is a problem. I am by no means blowing through my usage (usually <50% weekly with max x5).

Why does it matter to Anthropic if my $200 plan usage is coming from Claude Code or a third party?

Doesn’t both count towards my usage limits the same?

At this point, where Kimi K2.5 on Bedrock with a simple open source harness like pi is almost as good the big labs will soon have to compete for users,... openai seems to know that already? While anthropic bans bans bans

What is the point of developing against the Agent SDK after this change.

how can they even enforce this? can't you just spoof all your network requests to appear like it's coming from claude code?

in any case Codex is a better SOTA anyways and they let you do this. and if you aren't interested in the best models, Mistral lets you use both Vibe and their API through your vibe subscription api key which is incredible.

This month was the first month i spent >$100 on it and it didn't feel like it was money well spent. I feel borderline scammed.

I'm just going to accept that my €15 (which with vat becomes €21) is just enough usage to automate some boring tasks.

Honestly seeing throttling of AI usuage across all providers:

- Google reduced AI Studio's free rate limits by 1/10th

- Perplexity imposing rate limits, card filing to continue free subscriptions

- Now Anthropic as well

There has been a false narrative that AI will get cheaper and more ubiquitous, but model providers have been stuck in a race for ever more capabilities and performance at higher costs.

That's it. That's all the moat they have.

In the old days, think Gmail, or before the "unlimited" marketing scam. People genuinely are smart enough to know they are doing something that they are not suppose to be doing. Even Pirating software, say Windows or Adobe. I mean who can afford those when they were young?

Things get banned, but that is OK along as they give us weeks or days to prep for alternative solution. Users ( Not Customers ) are happy with it. Too bad, the good days are over.

Somewhere along the line, no just in software but even in politics, the whole world on entitlement. They somehow believe they deserve this, what they were doing were wrong but if it is allowed in the first place they should remain allowed to do so.

Judging from account opening time and comments we can also tell the age group and which camp they are on.

I wrote a mcp bridge so that I don't have to copy and paste prompt back and forth between CLI and claude, chatgpt, grok, gemini

https://github.com/agentify-sh/desktop

Does this mean I have to remove claude now and go back to copy & pasting prompts for a subscription I am paying for ?!

wth happened to fair use ?

OpenAI has endorsed OAuth from 3rd party harnesses, and their limits are way higher. Use better tools (OpenCode, pi) with an arguably better model (xhigh reasoning) for longer …

Their model actually doesn't have that much of a moat if at all. Their agent harness also doesn't, at least not for long. Writing an agent harness isn't that difficult. They are desperately trying to stay in power. I don´t like being a customer of this company and am investing lots of my time in moving away from them completely.

Not surprised, its the official stance by Anthropic.

I'm more surprised by people using subscription auth for OpenClaw when its officially not allowed.

Too bad will stick with codex as thinker and glm5 as hands, at a fraction of the cost.

I'm a bit lost on this one.

I can get a ridiculous amount of tokens in and out of something like gpt-5.2 via the API for $100.

Is this primarily about gas town and friends?