a 200 dollar a month customer isn't trying to get around paying for tokens, theyre trying to use the tooling they prefer. opencode is better in a lot of ways.
tokens get counted and put against usage limits anyway, unless theyre trying to eat analytics that are CC exclusive they should allow paying customers to consume to the usage limits in however way they want to use the models.
If openclaw chews my 200/month up in 15 days... I don't get more requests for free
I think I agree, but it's their business to run however they like. They have competition if we don't like it.
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.
I can't find anything official from OpenAI, but they have worked with the OpenCode people to support using your ChatGPT subscription in OpenCode.
> 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.
None of this is legal advice, I'm just trying to understand what exactly is allowed or not.
Pro and Max are both limited
You can’t use Claude OAuth tokens for anything. Any solution that exists worked because it pretended/spoofed to be Claude Code. Same for Gemini (Gemini CLI, Antigravity)
Codex is the only one that got official blessing to be used in OpenClaw and OpenCode, and even that was against the ToS before they changed their stance on it.
I think this is pretty clear - No.
Subscriptions are for first-party products (claude.com, mobile and desktop apps, Claude Code, editor extensions, Cowork).
Everything else must use API billing.
On the other hand OpenAI and GitHub Copilot have, as far as I know, explicitly allowed their users to connect to at least some third party tools and use their quotas from there, notably to OpenCode.
What is unclear to me is whether they are considering also allowing commercial apps to do that. For instance if I publish a subscription based app and my users pay for the app itself rather than for LLM inference, would that be allowed?
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
Plus it's not a real clarification in anyway. It's just PR. Even if it's posted on Mastodon or Github or anywhere, I highly doubt you can use it to defend yourself if you get banned from violating their ToS.
I presume zero.. but nonetheless seems like people will take it as valid anyway.
That can be dangerous I think.
Countries clarify nation policy on X. Seriously it feels like half of the EU parliament live on twitter.
For instance, the other day, the Siri button in maps told me it couldn't start navigation because it didn't know where it was. It was animating a blue dot with my real time position at the same time.
Don't get me started about the new iOS 26 notification and messaging filters. Those are causing real harm multiple times a day.
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.
I would think that different tools would probably have different templates for their prompts?
Many ways, and they’re under no obligation to play fair and tell you which way they’re using at any given time. They’ve said what the rules are, they’ve said they’ll ban you if they catch you.
So let’s say they enforce it by adding an extra nonstandard challenge-response handshake at the beginning of the exchange, which generates a token which they’ll expect on all requests going forward. You decompile the minified JS code, figure out the protocol, try it from your own code but accidentally mess up a small detail (you didn’t realize the nonce has a special suffix). Detected. Banned.
You’ll need a new credit card to open a new account and try again. Better get the protocol right on the first try this time, because debugging is going to get expensive.
Let’s say you get frustrated and post on Twitter about what you know so far. If you share info, they’ll probably see it eventually and change their method. They’ll probably change it once a month anyway and see who they catch that way (and presumably add a minimum Claude Code version needed to reach their servers).
They’ve got hundreds of super smart coders and one of the most powerful AI models, they can do this all day.
you just need to inspect the network traffic with Claude code and mimic that
There are lots of ways they could be doing this. And remember again, if they get you, they don’t have to tell you how they got you (so you might not be able to even glean information in return for the $200 you’d be losing).
Sure the internet has hundreds of thousands of super smart coders, but the subset who are willing to throw money and credit cards down the drain in order to maintain a circumvention strategy for something like this is pretty low. I’m sure a few people will figure it out, but they won’t want to tell anyone lest Anthropic nerf their workaround, so I doubt that exploits of this will become widespread.
And if you’re Anthropic, that’s probably good enough.
OpenAI will adjust, their investors will not allow money to be lost on ”being nice” forever, not until they’re handsomely paid back at least.
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?
Can’t this restriction for the time being be bypassed via -p command line flag?
Enterprise products with sufficient market share and "stickiness", will not.
For historical precedent, see the commercial practices of Oracle, Microsoft, Vmware, Salesforce, at the height of their power.
Despite the high price, the Bentley factory is running 24/7 and still behind schedule due to orders placed by the rental-car company, who has nearly-infinite money.
I also think we're, as ICs, being given Bentleys meanwhile they're trying to invent Waymos to put us all out of work.
Humans are the cost center in their world model.
Finance 101 tldr explanation: The contribution margin (= price per token -variable cost per token ) this is positive
Profit (= contribution margin x cuantity- fix cost)
The sounds like a confession that claude code is somewhat wasteful at token use.
I find that competitive edge unlikely to last meaningfully in the long term, but this is still a contrarian view.
More recently, people have started to wise up to the view that the value is in the application layer
https://www.iconiqcapital.com/growth/reports/2026-state-of-a...
Banning third-party tools has nothing to do with rate limits. They’re trying to position themselves as the Apple of AI companies -a walled garden. They may soon discover that screwing developers is not a good strategy.
They are not 10× better than Codex; on the contrary, in my opinion Codex produces much better code. Even Kimi K2.5 is a very capable model I find on par with Sonnet at least, very close to Opus. Forcing people to use ONLY a broken Claude Code UX with a subscription only ensures they loose advantage they had.
It's merely the hardware that should be charged for - which ought to drop in price if/when the demand for it rises. However, this is a bottleneck at the moment, and hard to see how it gets resolved amidst the current US environment on sanctioning anyone who would try.
And i would also argue that the researchers doing this are built on shoulders of other public knowledge - things funded by public institutions with taxpayer money.
The markets value recurring subscription revenue at something like 10x “one-off” revenue, Anthropic is leaving a lot of enterprise value on the table with this approach.
In practice this approach forces AI apps to pay Anthropic for tokens, and then bill their customers a subscription. Customers could bring their own API key but it’s sketchy to put that into every app you want to try, and consumers aren’t going to use developer tools. And many categories of free app are simply excluded, which could in aggregate drive a lot more demand for subscriptions.
If Anthropic is worried about quota, seems they could set lower caps for third-party subscription usage? Still better than forcing API keys.
(Maybe this is purely about displacing other IDE products, rather than a broader market play.)
Especially as they are subsidized.
Allows them to optimize their clients and use private APIs for exclusive features etc. and there’s really no reason to bootstrap other wannabe AI companies who just stick a facade experience in front of Anthropic’s paying customer.
I don’t think Anthropic has any desire to be some B2C platform, they want high paying reliable customers (B2B, Enterprise).
But the big guys don’t seem interested in this, maybe some lesser known model will carve out this space
Maybe they are not worth building at all then. Like MoviePass wasn’t.
As an independent dev I also unfortunately don't have investors backing me to subsidize inference for my subscription plan.
And OpenAI just told Microsoft why they shouldn't be seeing Anthropic anymore; Gpt-5.3-codex.
RIP Anthropic.
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.
Unfortunately neither political party can get all of the above.
That is...not how it works. People self-hosting don't look at their electricity bill.
So, which two parties could they be referring to? The Republicans and the Freedom Caucus?
Doesn’t both count towards my usage limits the same?
Anthropic subs are not 'bulk tokens'.
It's not an unreasonable policy and it's entirely inevitable that they have to restrict.
I’m using their own SDK in my own CLI tool.
At its core it’s a tragedy of commons situation. Using a third party tool like OpenClaw is augmenting your usage far beyond what was anticipated when the subscription plan was made.
Same deal for unlimited storage on drive until people started abusing it.
I didn’t set the limits on the plan; change those if it’s a problem, not irritate your customer base.
It's more buying a season pass for Disneyland, then getting told you can't park for free if you're entering the park even though free parking is included with the pass. Still not unreasonable, but brings to light the intention of the tool is to force the user into an ecosystem rather.
But 'you can't park even though the ticket includes parking' is not an appropriate analogy because 3rd party use is definitely not intended. They did not 'state one thing' and the 'disallow it'.
This is a pretty straight forward case of people using their subscription for 'adjacent' use, and Anthropic being more explicit about it.
There's nothing fancy going on here.
So, I guess it's time to look into OpenAI Codex. Any other viable options? I have a 128GB iGPU, so maybe a local model would work for some tasks?
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 entirely mind, and am just considering it an even better work:life balance, but if this is $200 worth of queries, then all I can say is LOL.
I'm more surprised by people using subscription auth for OpenClaw when its officially not allowed.
So it makes sense to offer simple flat pricing for first party apps, and usage priced apis for other usage. It’s like the difference between Google Drive and S3.
For me, flat rates are simply unfair either ways - if I'm not using the product much, I'm overpaying (and they're ok with that), otherwise it magically turns out that it's no longer ok when I actually want to utilize what I paid for :)
> 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"
theahura•2h ago
> 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.
spullara•1h ago
adastra22•1h ago