I’m not seeing the open source connection at all?

Anthropic sells a service that bundles server and client. They are not wild about people taking their server part and using their own clients because the business model relies on both client behaviors (Claude code does a lot of work to achieve > 95% cache hit rates; third party clients likely don’t) and flywheel of usage data.

If Microsoft went after third party clients that emulated M365 and used their backend, would that also “make friends” in open source somehow?

Anthropic's position has been consistent from the start. Subscription plans are for first-party clients. Everyone else should be on per-token billing.

That's really all there is to it. It has nothing to do with open or closed source.

Dario has stated multiple times he doesn't believe there is any value in open-weight models. Not surprised. This is not the behavior of an innovative company - it is fear-driven. They are seeing a rapidly shrinking moat.

> threatening OpenClaw

IIRC it was called Clawdbot when Anthropic complained. IANAL but I believe the holder of a trademark is obligated to defend it against infringement. Hard to say that Clawdbot was not potentially infringing, given its purpose. It's not clear how much leeway Anthropic had given his initial choice of name.

Is open source really open source if it can be bought by big companies and manipulated freely? Technically one day it can just be pulled off github.

I guarantee you that Cursor will be next to be targeted by Anthropic.

"Safety" is just complete control for them.