This is analogous to when Google launched Gmail with 1GB of storage and then a bunch of third-party apps cropped up that took advantage of it to use it as a generic online file storage drive.

There was GMailFS[0] and Gmail Drive[1] - this is before S3, dropbox, and a time where web hosting would give you ~10MB or so of space.

Google updated their ToS and shut down accounts using their service in ways they weren't intended via these apps - because obviously the 1GB of storage was a loss-leader into Google's ecosystem (and it worked)

Same thing today - "unauthorized" third parties taking advantage of a loss-leading[2] deal - complete with similar trademark violations to boot[3].

Google have more cash to burn in the AI race so can be more forgiving today in how their codex plans are used. Anthropic are still a private company and can't.

[0] https://handwiki.org/wiki/GmailFS

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2005/07/31/profile-gmail-drive/

[2] it's a big q just how large a loss leader the max plans are considering a fixed harness, prompt caching etc. but point still stands. you're getting up to $5k of RRP tokens for $200

[3] Clawd Bot -> OpenClaw

You can use OpenCode programmatically, thus turning that $200/mo Claude Code account into a very cheap Opus 4.6 API service.

I don't think there's anything really to it past that.

1. If alternate UX exists, the user can easily replace them with another model as soon as it comes out.

2. All 'all-you-can-eat' plans everywhere comes with clause. Whether it is lunch at a restaurant or it is token-proxy-providers who might think of reselling Max plan to individuals at 20% markup.

> Let the weirdos at Anthropic do what weirdos do, and hopefully one day their name is never mentioned again in polite society.

Woof, that is a bit harsh... :) OpenAI will also face the same problem. They are doing it right now because they need to stand out in some way.

My guess is that the telemetry data they can collect from interacting with claude code is the "secret sauce" behind a lot of the improvements we're seeing with coding models right now. Look at cursors Composer-2 release today. Clicking "accept" during plan mode, committing changes and pushing to a remote repo, etc. is a really strong reward signal.

Can't collect telemetry from applications you don't control.

> I'm really struggling to understand how Anthropic is benefited by not allowing this. Its bad PR for no good reason. The only thing I can figure is that Claude Code is hemorrhaging money, they're too afraid to actually enforce reasonable token limits, and the only thing that's keeping it from totally bankrupting the company tomorrow is: controlling the harness and having the harness dynamically route toward Haiku or Sonnet over Opus when Opus is overloaded, without telling the user.

I have noticed odd behavior when choosing a model, it automatically switches after sometime. Some tasks do not require lots of power, so when I select Haiku, few prompts later, I see Sonnet popping up in the cost/spending. Happened few times.

This is my theory. They don't want other harnesses to use this because it costs them more. I don't know exactly how OpenCode works, but I'm assuming when people are using this plugin they are mostly using Opus for everything while Claude Code really only uses Opus for writing the actual code. It uses Haiku and Sonnet for almost all of the tasks outside of writing code.

So it hard for them to control and understand the costs of subscriptions if people are using them on different hardnesses that do things that they have no control over.

There are a plethora of models that you can use with open code. Anthropic is well within its rights to limit third-party usage of services that violate the TOS. As a Claude code user I’d much rather have the very best experience on Claude code than the largest supportability matrix for Anthropic models.

They want lock-in for their UI/X, presumably. If Photoshop ran in the cloud, I doubt Adobe would let you make an alternative front-end either. Not that I'm sympathetic to them.

They're trying for the vertical integration monopoly.

The times it works, it works well for the company at great cost to society.

Imagine the world we'd have if comcast got to control your web browsing experience.

If ISPs got started today, they'd sell the open web at API prices that no one can afford. Then sell the ISP's lock-in 'internet' for a low monthly fee.

My question is why people who don't want comcast's internet think other vertical integrated lock-in is fine.

Our markets game only works for the benefit of society if we have fair markets.

VC-backed loss-leader dumping to starve competition model breaks the game.

also for economic reason. Anthropic design Claude code so they are in control regarding how token get burned. To a degree.

With 3rd party, designers have not incentive to be token consumption conscious.

Gemini has a 1M token context, flash can be used for free via the web interface, can't paste more than handful thousands token.

> OpenCode is awesome. Claude Code is nothing special at all.

It's weird, my experience is the exact opposite: OpenCode had the weirdest issue of interpreting C:\Users\some-user\Documents\Projects\... as a bunch of escaped characters without \ and created some trash files even with Anthropic models. Before then, OpenCode had the issue of me copying multiple lines of text into it from clipboard somehow quitting the program (crashing?) and then making every following line (of text, notes etc.) be passed to the shell directly. Happened in both Terminal app and also Git Bash on Windows. It might just be that Windows is a shit OS, but Claude Code doesn't really seem to exhibit those problems (and neither does Codex, in their defense). I hope OpenCode has fixed at least some of those since.

> Let the weirdos at Anthropic do what weirdos do, and hopefully one day their name is never mentioned again in polite society.

What an odd thing to say. Maybe I'm out of the loop about some drama (aside from Anthropic having a bit of a spine in regards to govt. while being otherwise flawed still), but pretty happy with my Max subscription, they even fixed the Code GUI mode in their Electron app recently, it finally feels usable and I don't just need to juggle 4 terminal sessions.

One possible factor is reinforcement training: by forcing users to use their own CLI, they gather usage and training data which serves as feedback training data for their own tools. Users operating with a different agent with different tool implementation and quirks might poison that data.

The sibling reply given by strictnein is very likely a factor.

The business driver I assume is not lock-in on UX (as some say here) but the additional signal Anthropic gets when using their harness vs a 3P one. It makes sense to discount the price if that signal helps you improve your models, but that discount makes no sense if the user is running your model in another harness and you just get regular API usage signal.

You are wayy overestimating the negative press. HN commenters are a negligible fraction of Anthropic's user base, and I can guarantee that even people here will forget about this and go right back to using Claude Code in a couple days when there is something else to be outraged about. The company needs to do what is best for its business.

Since I discovered pi I cancelled my Claude subscription and subscribed to ChatGPT. On one hand, the competition is making miracles. On the other hand, it's pretty dooming that there is only one (1) company that keeps my agent cost reasonable.

I use both.. Claude Code memory smokes OpenCode's lack of it when memory is important.

> they must be losing so much money on each Claude Code subscriber that if a million people all said "we're switching" they just wouldn't care.

You're looking at it completely wrong. Claude Code is Anthropic's flagship product, not the API. They want to attract as many users as possible to Claude Code and lock them into their ecosystem, so they can squeeze them later. All of their questionable actions surrounding Claude Code and its subscription are ultimately in service of this goal.

The subscription isn't some kind of charity, it exists specifically because they know the average user isn't willing to pay the exorbitant API prices to vibe code their groundbreaking new B2B SaaS idea, but they want to capture that market share anyway, because it's the core of their long-term strategy. The subscription arose from that: it's a form of predatory pricing designed to attract as many users as possible while they still have VC money to burn.

Once that runs out and the time comes to IPO and start making real profits, they are going to increase the price drastically, and what's where the lock-in comes into play. If everyone is using some open-source alternative that natively supports every other provider on earth, they will be far less likely to continue paying for Claude specifically instead of just switching to a competitor. Not to mention, they'd also lose out on the free advertising from things like CLAUDE.md and the commit co-signing (because that's all those things are, the only reason Claude Code doesn't support AGENTS.md is because CLAUDE.md serves as an advertisement in public repositories).

> like they all think they're Gods above mere mortals, serving some higher purpose, and nothing matters to them except Building the Machine God.

This is all just part of their marketing strategy, and you shouldn't read too much into it.

>I seriously get the feeling that Anthropic doesn't just not care about their users

AI companies would have to be one of the worst for actually caring about their user's health and wellbeing.

Eventually (several years max) there will self-hosted Chinese LLM devices with the quality of cloud models for the price of a smartphone.

The only sticky part that will remain will be the UX of particular harness and post-training flavors.

This seems harsh and unfair. You aren’t allowed to stream Netflix through a third party streaming service because then the experience is controlled by the third party and there is no lock in to using Netflix and thus no benefit to the subsidy they give you in the plan.

OpenAI is allowing it as a PR stunt and because they have seemingly unlimited cash they can throw at user growth.

Anthropic doesn't care and it is all to look good for their IPO.

They are still losing billions of dollars and will do anything to keep people hooked onto the API and will litigate against their own customers.

They will even lobby against open-weight models which is their biggest threat and want to make them illegal to run in the US just for them to succeed.

Anthropic are not your friends and want you to become addicted / over-reliant on Claude Code (hence the free $20 spins at the roulette until March, 27 2026) and charging others on their overpriced API.

> I'm really struggling to understand how Anthropic is benefited by not allowing this.

Closed ecosystem like Apple. They want you to use their tools, not someone else's.

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