Whether Claude Code can keep pace with the variety of demand remains to be seen. My guess is no and that unlike OpenAI, they are interested in suing and not buying competing harnesses.
Good luck!
Code is one thing. Using API key is entirely different thing.
Regarding the legal demands here, anyone can issue anyone else a cease and desist order at any time, for anything, in the USA. The demands do not need to have merit.
"Illegal" generally refers to criminal law, not civil suits, this was essentially Anthropic threatening to file a lawsuit. Opencode was under no legal obligation to comply and was not breaking any laws, they simply decided it was easier and cheaper to comply than to fight.
Bad analogy but the getaway driver doesn’t need to enter the bank to be guilty in the robbery.
More broadly, you do not need to establish any kind of contractual right to "go after" anyone legally, that's not how civil law works. A cease and desist letter isn't even really legal action, it's a threat of legal action, but even then, Anthropic doesn't need your permission to sue you, just like you don't need Anthropic's permission to sue them.
If you think that inside the U.S., you have some kind of legal immunity to or protection from cease and desist letters or lawsuits from any company, for any reason¹, you would largely be mistaken. If this is important to you, you might want to talk to a lawyer.
¹ Some states have anti-SLAPP statutes that offer limited protections in certain context, but this isn't applicable in the context of this example between Anthropic and AnomalyCo.
What is the relevance?
If I understand correctly, OpenCode, i.e. the creator of the tool, does not use Anthropic's API. Their users do.
I am unsure where the connection can be made between the users violating some terms of service and a maker of a tool.
The people mad about this feel they are entitled to the heavily subsidized usage in any context they want, not in the context explicitly allowed by the subsidizer.
It's kind of like a new restaurant started handing out coupons for "90% off", wanting to attract diners to the restaurant, customers started coming in and ordering bulk meals then immediately packaging them in tupperware containers and taking it home (violating the spirit of the arrangement, even if not the letter of the arrangement), so the restaurant changed the terms on the discount to say "limited to in-store consumption only, not eligible for take-home meals", and instead of still being grateful that they're getting food for 90% off, the cheapskate customers are getting angry that they're no longer allowed to exploit the massive subsidy however they want.
Anthropic has every right to place rules around their generous subsidization of the Claude subscription plans, which give limits of ~8-12x as many tokens as you'd get for the same expenditure in the PAYG API.
That said, demanding an open source repo remove information that Anthropic openly publishes and distributes for free (the prompt) is a bit odd...
This move is anti-competitive and Anthropic knows it. They're hurriedly trying to lock the gates and lay landmines behind everyone after a massive surge of new subscribers so that they're stuck using Claude Code. They see it as vital to their survival to not just to be the gas pump for tokens, they need to control the platform.
I mean, OpenCode is the one changing their app here. So it kinda seems like it's actually everyone else's problem.
No it hasn't, because the argument is completely correct, and the people mad about it are mad they can't have unlimited usage instead of paying the token API prices.
> This move is anti-competitive and Anthropic knows it.
No it isn't, that's not what "anti-competitive" means, and no court in the world would label it as such. You can't go flailing around looking for legal jargon to attach to behavior just because you don't like it.
There’s a reason 5% of GitHub commits are from Claude code and no other provider is above 0.1%… it’s quality, but it’s also subsidy.
That clarified: yes, every major lab is losing money on full utilization of their inference subscription plans. The API prices are what the business has determined they need to achieve profitability, and are not reflective of actual costs as you point out, but the discounts vs API pricing can get pretty extreme. Some users report 50x+ (98%+) discounts on the $100/mo Max subscription plans vs PAYG API pricing¹. Even the skeptical, contrarian takes that focus on cost to the business will tell you that, yes, Anthropic is losing money on those subscriptions, even using generously low estimates on costs².
¹ https://www.ksred.com/claude-code-pricing-guide-which-plan-a...
² https://martinalderson.com/posts/no-it-doesnt-cost-anthropic...
Opencode to a lot of people is a nicer and more feature rich harness than CC, it doesn’t consume any more tokens than CC, and if it did, the bounds of how many tokens each account is allowed to use is tied to the users payment and rate limits.
I miss the days when open source was a way to get your product in the developers hands and build trust. Stuff like this shows that the tide has shifted to primary focus on shareholders and potential hold on patents and trademarks.
Me too. I also miss the days when I was proud of my little open source projects. Now I just regret donating fuel, even a miniscule amount in the grand scheme of things, to the soulless lawnmower that has already chopped down so much of my joy in work and promises to eventually shred the paycheck, too.
I hear yah, especially knowing that AI crawlers just don't respect ROBOTS.txt or anything similar, but there's still nothing wrong with writing code for fun.. No need to lose that!
The thing is OpenCode IS a great product, I'm not sure it's "superior", but unfortunately the way things are evolving where the model + harness pairing is so important, it does seem like they are in a similar position to Cursor (and do not have the resources to try to pivot into developing their own foundational model).
https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/issues/10416
- their stance on privacy
Those tokens going to other providers are tokens not going to Anthropic, so they want to lock you in with Claude Code. And it clearly works, since a lot of people swear by it.
Like with lawyers or something?
Anthropic leadership is delusional, not suicidal, so they would rather use their lawyers.
Source: i run pretty much all of these agents (codex, cc, droid, opencode, amp, etc) side-by-side in agentastic.dev and opencode had basically 0 win-rate over other agents.
OpenCode lets people take the Claude-Code-only-API-Key, and lets them use it in a different harness. Anthropic's preferred way for such interaction is getting a different, Claude API key (and not Claude Code SDK API key).
---
A rough analogy might be something like getting subsidized drinks from a cafe, provided you sit there a eat food. What if someone says, go to the cafe and get free drink and come sit over at our cafe and order food. It is a loose analogy, but you get the idea.
You have zero proof for this claim. It's like people read somewhere that stuff and keep spitting it out again and again without understanding..
Because they control the harness(es) and the backend, they can optimise caching and thus the costs to them.
We don't know if Claude Code bleeds money for every user that touches it. Probably not. But the different pricing is a strong enough clue that it's an appeal product with subsidized tokens consumption.
How do you figure? That doesn't make any sense to me.
Is this actually the case though? Because I can't imagine what kind of hardware they're running to have costs per 1M tokens be above like $3.
hint: {
opencode: "recommended",
-anthropic: "API key",
openai: "ChatGPT Plus/Pro or API key",
}[x.id],
Banning them from using the pay-per-token API key would be bad business.
that code is just a cli hint to which LLM they recommend using. so they stop recommending anthropic. rightfully so.
Are you delegating substantial work like planning and executing refactors, or more at single-line and function-level work?
Opencode just works faster and I prefer the UX.
I think they’re okay with someone using their API with anything, including OpenCode.
Please someone correct me if I’m wrong.
I don't necessarily see this as an evil action. It doesn't inhibit open source, it sets terms of service and practice boundaries.
Granted this is a wildly unpopular approach, worse has happened in the OSS world...
It originally had support for copying over your Claude subscription token and calling the same backend APIs as Claude Code, which meant you could use OpenCode with your Claude Pro/Max plans, but Anthropic came out and said that the plans were only meant for first-party clients, and everyone else should be using per-token billing.
Now OpenCode is removing this option from their product, it seems because of legal threats from Anthropic.
A) Get invovled in a lengthy back and forth, potential legal proceedings with a billion dollar company.
or
B) Listen to the message being sent, be pragmatic, and then get on with building things.
Like, in any event, I seriously get the feeling that Anthropic doesn't just not care about their users, but actively dislikes them. Like, 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. I get this vibe even from watching videos of people working on the Antrhopic team; like they all think they're Gods above mere mortals, serving some higher purpose, and nothing matters to them except Building the Machine God.
OpenCode is awesome. Claude Code is nothing special at all. Last month I switched to just using OpenCode with a Codex $200/mo subscription, and that's been great. Let the weirdos at Anthropic do what weirdos do, and hopefully one day their name is never mentioned again in polite society.
We'll know for sure when they add full OpenClaw-like features to Claude Code like remote channels & heartbeat support. Both are partially implemented already.
Off topic, but there is something like that: photopea, it's free and it's good enough for my use cases (I need it once a year maybe).
Closed ecosystem like Apple. They want you to use their tools, not someone else's.
I don't think there's anything really to it past that.
> 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.
Though there was that tweet [0] a while back by someone from Anthropic that just muddied the water. It's frustrating because I feel like the line between the Agent SDK and `claude -p` is not that large but one can use the subscription and one can't... or we don't know, the docs seem unambiguous but the tweet confuses things and you can find many people online saying you can, or you can't.
I'd love to play around with the Agent SDK and try out some automations but it seems I can only do that if I'm willing to pay for tokens, even though I could use Claude Code to write the code "for" the Agent SDK, but not "run" the Agent SDK.
Where is the line? Agent SDK is not allowed with subscription, but if I write a harness around passing data to and parsing the JSON response from `claude -p '<Your Prompt>' --output-format json` would that be allowed? If I run it on a cron locally? I literally have no idea and, not wanting my account to be banned, I'm not interested in finding out. I wish they would clarify it.
[0]
Twitter: https://x.com/trq212/status/2024212378402095389 XCancel: https://xcancel.com/trq212/status/2024212378402095389 Text:
> Apologies, this was a docs clean up we rolled out that’s caused some confusion.
> Nothing is changing about how you can use the Agent SDK and MAX subscriptions!
> We want to encourage local development and experimentation with the Agent SDK and claude -p.
> If you’re building a business on top of the Agent SDK, you should use an API key instead. We’ll make sure that’s clearer in our docs.
It feels like the only safe thing to do is use Claude Code, which, thankfully, I find tolerable, but unfortunate.
Can you explain what you mean by this?
If you know anything about subscription models, you know that ALL of them are built on the fact that most of the users don't use the full capacity available all the time.
https://opencode.ai/docs/sdk/#structured-output
You can stand up an OpenAI compatible API layer in front of it and just feed the requests back and forth. Adds a little delay, but not much.
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.
I do fully expect the limits on these subscriptions to be brought down. But that's not the problem people have with Anthropic today, nor the problem we'd have with OpenAI when they have to eventually do it. That's just the way of things.
The problem is: These actions by Anthropic scream: "Our internal unit economics are going nuclear and we need to do anything we can to regain control."
Low-key: I think the DoW situation was an inflection point for their usage internally. It spiked up hard after that. Dario spent all of 2025 being told "you're not investing enough into compute", but really didn't listen because he wanted to be "responsible" or whatever, and now they're shopping to every provider trying to find compute and are being told that there isn't any.
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.
How? If I used open code I'd hope it to not eat tokens unnecessarily so my subscription quota lasts longer.
I add 'only do this if...' to every single skill I write. It's a bit of voodoo-style wishful thinking, I admit.
Can't collect telemetry from applications you don't control.
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.
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.
Sorry, what is pi and how are you using it with ChatGPT for agentic coding?
https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono/tree/main/packages/codin...
> how are you using it with ChatGPT for agentic coding?
OpenAI has publically blessed people using their subscriptions with different harnesses, like OpenCode and Pi.
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.
OpenAI is allowing it as a PR stunt and because they have seemingly unlimited cash they can throw at user growth.
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.
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
Even despite the larger cash pile to burn, Google is in the middle of their own controversy around what many feel is a rug-pull around how Gemini "AI credits" work and are priced.
See:
https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/12/users_protest_as_goog...
https://old.reddit.com/r/google_antigravity/comments/1rv4cec...
etc
The sibling reply given by strictnein is very likely a factor.
Anthropic has two different products that are relevant here: the Claude API and Claude Code. The Claude API has usage based pricing. The more you use, the more you pay. With Claude Code, you can get a monthly subscription which gives you a fixed amount of usage. Comparing equivalent token generation between the Claude API and Claude Code, Claude Code with a subscription is much cheaper.
When it comes to third party products such as OpenClaw and OpenCode, Anthropic has made it clear those products should be using the Claude API and not the internal Claude Code APIs. OpenClaw and OpenCode have both been using the internal Claude Code APIs as when a user has a Claude Code subscription, the internal Claude Code API gives you tokens at a much cheaper rate than the Claude API. Presumably Anthropic makes Claude Code cheaper than the Claude API because they are willing to give users a discount for them to use Claude Code vs a competing product such as OpenCode.
It looks like until recently OpenCode tried to get around Anthropic's requirements by offering "plugins" in OpenCode that would allow users to use their Claude Code subscription in OpenCode. This PR mentions as much at[0][1]:
> There are plugins that allow you to use your Claude Pro/Max models with OpenCode. Anthropic explicitly prohibits this.
> Previous versions of OpenCode came bundled with these plugins but that is no longer the case as of 1.3.0
This PR seems to be in response to Anthropic threatening OpenCode with legal action if they keep using the internal Claude Code APIs.
[0] https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/pull/18186/changes#diff-b5d5affc6941bf7bb19805cc8f556cd1b9ae73ffd99e520120700536b166f8c0L310
[1] https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/pull/18186/changes#diff-b5d5affc6941bf7bb19805cc8f556cd1b9ae73ffd99e520120700536b166f8c0R321This file contains hidden or bidirectional Unicode text that may be interpreted or compiled differently than what appears below. To review, open the file in an editor that reveals hidden Unicode characters. Learn more about bidirectional Unicode characters Add this suggestion to a batch that can be applied as a single commit.This suggestion is invalid because no changes were made to the code.Suggestions cannot be applied while the pull request is closed.Suggestions cannot be applied while viewing a subset of changes.Only one suggestion per line can be applied in a batch.Add this suggestion to a batch that can be applied as a single commit.Applying suggestions on deleted lines is not supported.You must change the existing code in this line in order to create a valid suggestion.This suggestion has been applied or marked resolved.Suggestions cannot be applied from pending reviews.Suggestions cannot be applied on multi-line comments.Suggestions cannot be applied while the pull request is queued to merge.Suggestion cannot be applied right now. Please check back later. You can’t perform that action at this time.
mellosouls•1h ago
Previously discussed I think:
Anthropic Explicitly Blocking OpenCode (173 points, 157 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46625918
noemit•1h ago
shimman•1h ago
hirako2000•43m ago
In 6 months, people won't work anymore. They will all use my products, outsource the thinking, why bother.
Oh and open weight models have no value...
There is a paper out there showing 30% of CEOs/C-suite have some psychopath tendencies. Not sure if they even used the term narcissistic , but I would add delusional.
danny_codes•1h ago
It’ll be interesting to see if companies get tricked. I think it’s inevitable that it goes like MySQL/Postgres, where the open tools gets way better
tim-star•1h ago
hirako2000•47m ago
If distillation wasn't a thing, they would certainly exist, they would have trained them from scratch or via a decent base models to remain economically viable.
What's for sure is that Claude wouldn't exist if it wasn't for data stolen from millions of creators. As they found themselves admittedly guilty of.
einr•41m ago
extr•57m ago
theshrike79•56m ago
Nowadays the harness matters more than the model itself. For example pi.dev + GPT5-codex is a lot smarter than plain codex cli
brookst•1h ago
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?
pixl97•1h ago
Typically services that try to gatekeep standard http don't get very far with the kind of people that like to modify their software.
LZ_Khan•1h ago
doc_ick•1h ago
runako•1h ago
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.
linux2647•1h ago
awestroke•1h ago
DanielHall•1h ago
browningstreet•59m ago
I wonder why conversation can never progress. When a stake goes in the ground, it never ever comes out.
FWIW OpenAI didn't buy OpenClaw.
hirako2000•41m ago
browningstreet•13m ago
Jgrubb•58m ago
segmondy•25m ago
paxys•1h ago
That's really all there is to it. It has nothing to do with open or closed source.
ViewTrick1002•49m ago
rvz•54m ago
"Safety" is just complete control for them.
hirako2000•40m ago