12 ms·

Anthropic takes legal action against OpenCode

483 points by _squared_ 6mo ago

akmarinov 6mo ago
It’s like they want people to not like them …
- solenoid0937 6mo ago
  Yeah, they're so mean for not letting you abuse their loss leading product under the terms you accepted!
adampunk 6mo ago
[flagged]
- gwd 6mo ago
  They're perfectly happy being an API provider, where they're not selling their tokens at a loss. My guess is that they're counting the losses for Claude Code Max plans as R&D: what does usage look like if people don't have to worry about the cost of tokens? Because someday they won't, and Anthropic want to skate to where the puck will be, not where it is.
  - adampunk 6mo ago
    You don't go after OpenCode because they allow for arbitrage. You go after them because they can decouple your model from your brand.
    - gwd 6mo ago
      Before this change: Opencode decouples model (Claude) from brand (Claude Code) in one of two ways: using the subscription, or pay-per-use API calls After this change: Opencode decouples model from brand in one way: pay-per-use API calls This change fails to prevent decoupling model from brand.
      - adampunk 6mo ago
        Do you have an anthropic API key with money attached to that account? Do you think most people who have a subscription to Claude code have an API key for Anthropic and have money attached to that that they’re ready to spend? Do you think those people who have an API key are ready to just give it to some random application rather than being directed to a Web or application based sign on mechanism serve served by a company they trust? Even if the consumers are programmers, an API key is not a consumer instrument. There is no universe where you convert a whole number percentage of users in the scenario.
        gwd 6mo ago
        > Do you have an anthropic API key with money attached to that account? Yes, I do. Getting a Gemini API key was annoying, but getting API keys for Claude and GPT were simple and straightforward. The web-based redirect from a command-line tool is always far weirder and more awkward than just pasting in an API key. Since we're talking about programmers here, they should realize that both the API key and the web-based redirect end up doing the same thing: generating a token that allows this program to act as you over the API.
mellosouls 6mo ago
This and threatening OpenClaw (now at OpenAI), Anthropic really on a roll making friends in Open Source. Previously discussed I think: Anthropic Explicitly Blocking OpenCode (173 points, 157 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46625918 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46625918
- noemit 6mo ago
  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.
  - shimman 6mo ago
    The dude built a mass plagiarism machine and wants to now profit off of his mass plagiarism machine, of course he's going to have antidemocratic ideas regarding people + technology.
    - hirako2000 6mo ago
      His engineers told him "I don't write code anymore. Claude writes the code, I edit it, I code around it". 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 6mo ago
    This exactly. Kimi 2.5 has coding performance hardly discernible from Claude. The only way to maintain a business edge is to crush open source clients to force people into a closed ecosystem. Once there, create context moat where people are not in control of their own context data (cannot export it to open tooling). Maybe we can call it the Oracle play? 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
hokkos 6mo ago
It's ok when Anthropic do it, like when they make deal with the army.
- hirako2000 6mo ago
  Worse, they deserve virtue signaling rewards when they don't make the deal.
jitl 6mo ago
Same thing happened with Google, but Google started actually banning user's accounts. Hopefully it doesn't come to that with Anthropic.
cedws 6mo ago
Under what law can Anthropic force OpenCode to do this? Surely it's not illegal to publish code that interacts with an API that's open for everyone to see?
- bdangubic 6mo ago
  Terms or Service
  - Ekaros 6mo ago
    Cleary they need to get AI which has not accepted those to rewrite it. That is the easy and fast solution these days. Or at most find a person who has not accepted tos do that.
    - doc_ick 6mo ago
      Just re-train your own model on your own collected data. No problem there.
  - strideashort 6mo ago
    Do you need to accept ToS to vibe code anthropic plugin? Code is one thing. Using API key is entirely different thing.
    - bdangubic 6mo ago
      using API key also has Terms of Service :)
      - strideashort 6mo ago
        Yes, which is user’s responsibility!
- anonym29 6mo ago
  The API has a very clear ToS prohibiting third-party client usage with the heavily subsidized Claude.ai subscription plans. Anthropic's right to reject or block that traffic, as well as to ban users who attempt this, is well-protected by the ToS those users neglected to read. 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.
anonym29 6mo ago
I've said it before and I'll say it again. 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...
- noemit 6mo ago
  I must be alone in this but I don't think its heavily subsidized. I see their models as really overpriced. No way they cost that much. Could they really?
  - brookst 6mo ago
    Yes. Their API rates are breakeven to profitable, the subscription that people are arbitraging is a 90% discount or so from API rates. 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.
    - exitb 6mo ago
      Are other harnesses actually using „Co-Authored-By” out of the box?
  - anonym29 6mo ago
    Cost to the business and price to customers are not the same thing. Even if it cost Anthropic nothing to run any of these (it actually costs quite a bit in electricity, infrastructure, ops teams to keep everything running smoothly, and above all else, extraordinary R&D expenses to develop the models), they could set the price at a million dollars per token if they wanted to. 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-actually-saves-you-money/ https://www.ksred.com/claude-code-pricing-guide-which-plan-a... ² https://martinalderson.com/posts/no-it-doesnt-cost-anthropic-5k-per-claude-code-user/ https://martinalderson.com/posts/no-it-doesnt-cost-anthropic...
carlos-menezes 6mo ago
I'm sure absolutely nothing will come of Anthropic's open-source acquisitions. Totally harmless, I'm sure.
- tommica 6mo ago
  Yeah, I've been looking at bun a bit, but now I am skeptical about it.
- cyanydeez 6mo ago
  The "good" news is LLMs make them 100% easier to fork.
p5v 6mo ago
What’s next - coming after all the projects that have been coded using Claude Code, claiming they are their property?
- bilekas 6mo ago
  Don't give them ideas please. They'll ask for more investment to do exactly this. 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.
  - rspeele 6mo ago
    > I miss the days when open source was... 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.
    - bilekas 6mo ago
      > Now I just regret donating fuel 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!
Handy-Man 6mo ago
Seems fine to me. Why do people think they are entitled to use heavily subsidized services outside of the tools it's intended to work with per terms.
- zadikian 6mo ago
  Was it always clear that you're not supposed to use the Claude API this way?
  - snoman 6mo ago
    Yes.
    - zadikian 6mo ago
      Ok then it's fine
  - maccam912 6mo ago
    I don't think Anthropic has a problem with you using a regular pay-per-token API key with opencode. The issue is letting someone use their "Log in with Claude" as if it were a regular API key.
FloatArtifact 6mo ago
Maybe go third party for plugins?
extr 6mo ago
The OpenCode guys have really surprised me in the way they've reacted to Anthropic shutting down the side-loaded auth scheme. Very petty and bitter. It's clearly just a business decision from Anthropic and a rational one at that, usage subsidization to keep people on the first party product surface is practically the oldest business move in the book and is completely valid.
- tietjens 6mo ago
  This is not my impression, could you explain what you're talking about?
  - extr 6mo ago
    Ever since the shutdown of the side-load they've been pretty vocally anti-anthropic on twitter. Paranoid that anthropic is going to torpedo them via some backdoor now that they own bun, insinuating that anthropic shut down the auth from a position of weakness since OpenCode is a superior product, etc. 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).
    - lostmsu 6mo ago
      I have a huge issue 10416 on OpenCode https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/issues/10416 https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/issues/10416 - their stance on privacy
      - siva7 6mo ago
        not sure i follow - do they leak my information to their own servers by default?
        lostmsu 6mo ago
valunord 6mo ago
This wouldn't be so bad if they didn't have such a sucky tui or ecosystem. AI is chef's kiss, tooling is bottom barrel.
- zozbot234 6mo ago
  Not really, GPT 5.4 is a great alternative. There's no real loss from using that over Claude Opus. And open models are quite close behind.
  - brookst 6mo ago
    I’ll try 5.4 again but when I spent a couple of hours with it, I found it much weaker than Claude code + opus 4.6 for working on large projects. Are you delegating substantial work like planning and executing refactors, or more at single-line and function-level work?
    - DetroitThrow 6mo ago
      I think the gap is smaller than it has been in the past but I largely agree with you, generally larger work is done much better with Claude Code.
  - girvo 6mo ago
    GPT 5.4 keeps erroring out when I’ve tried it on long complex tasks. Might be works harness I guess.
  - ljm 6mo ago
    I'll do most of my work in opencode with GPT 5.3/5.4 and just spin up Claude Code for a review/cleanup pass. Opencode just works faster and I prefer the UX.
strideashort 6mo ago
Can anyone explain what’s going on here? Using API is illegal? that can’t possibly be since we now know API is not even copyrighted (which personally I disagree with bit whatever)… so what is going on here?
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- 2muchtime 6mo ago
  I believe Anthropic is trying to block the use of their Claude code subscription by third party applications like OpenCode. I think they’re okay with someone using their API with anything, including OpenCode. Please someone correct me if I’m wrong.
  - Analemma_ 6mo ago
    No, you’re completely right, you can use Claude API pricing with anything you want, including OpenCode and OpenClaw.
ihsw 6mo ago
[dead]
jryio 6mo ago
Businesses exercise power and control in the market. The purpose of this is to set a precedent (perceived or actual) — the auth system was a product, not an API. Anthropic is drawing the line between 'built on us' and 'built around us.' 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...
MyHonestOpinon 6mo ago
Can anyone ELI5 what is open code and why Anthropic is asking them to delete something ?
- raincole 6mo ago
  Anthropic's ToS doesn't allow the subscribers to use third party tools that utilizes the APIs Claude Code uses. Open Code is one of those tools.
- paxys 6mo ago
  OpenCode is an agentic coding CLI, similar to Claude Code, Codex etc. It supports different LLM providers, including Claude. 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.
- Mashimo 6mo ago
  OpenCode is a agent .. harnest? The CLI or UI tool you use as an AI agent, similar to ClaudeCode. You where not allowed to use your ClaudeCode subscription with other tool then ClaudeCode. I'm not sure if this is what got removed or if there is more too it.
  - aeriose 6mo ago
    But the PR is also removing the ability to use Anthropic API key as well not just Claude Code subscription
    - theshrike79 6mo ago
      That's just them being vindictive. Anthropic doesn't care about API use, it's paid per token anyway and they set the prices for that.
  - 6mo ago
droidjj 6mo ago
It's not clear what exactly the "legal action" is based on this github link. My pure speculation is Anthropic's lawyers have come up with a liability story boiling down to OpenCode helping end users violate the Anthropic ToS (i.e. tortious interference with contract).
- paxys 6mo ago
  A vaguely threatening letter is usually all it takes
  - Cthulhu_ 6mo ago
    Doesn't even need to be threatening, a notice of "this thing you're doing is in violation of our terms of service" should be enough... although I suppose that can be construed as threatening already.
  - 0x3f 6mo ago
    I haven't used OpenCode but if not using Claude is existential then why back down? Set up limited liability somehow and just let it play out.
    - TRYEXCEPT 6mo ago
      Sometimes, it's just not worth the effort. Seriously would you rather: 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.
      - 0x3f 6mo ago
        Depends if it's existential, like I said. If my whole company depends on X and replacing it is intractable, there's not much other choice. Having looked at the landing page though, seems like they can just go with other models and it will (largely) be fine, yes.
gwd 6mo ago
"Legal action" means you filed a lawsuit. This looks more like someone sent a list of requested changes, backed up by an implicit or explicit threat of legal action.
- Cthulhu_ 6mo ago
  That's how these things usually (should) go; a good legal system (be it civil suits, insurance claims, mediation, etc) will only actually take on cases if you've tried a reasonable approach first, e.g. asking nicely.
  - lima 6mo ago
    Fun fact: In Germany, the civil courts will usually take the case anyways if it has merit, but the winner ends up paying for the whole lawsuit if they failed to make an effort to resolve the case before suing.
karmasimida 6mo ago
Just use GPT5.4, avoid the drama and it is a better model anyway
- girvo 6mo ago
  Except for, yknow, the DoD and killer robots and mass surveillance drama.
- awestroke 6mo ago
  Not all of us enjoy being glazed mercilessly while getting subpar output
  - karmasimida 6mo ago
    I have burnt billion of tokens in gpt 5.4 and I didn’t know what you are talking about
    - solenoid0937 6mo ago
      It's trash for larger codebases vs Opus unfortunately.
      - karmasimida 6mo ago
        Quite on the contrary for my experience. xhigh is the only model + thinking level that can reliably locate the bug
taf2 6mo ago
avoid bun is my take away... if anthropic decides you're a competitor and with the way AI is evolving you will be a competitor soon - don't rely on any anthropic tools or models.
- awestroke 6mo ago
  Why should anybody avoid bun? Just fork it if it ever changes license. In fact, I'm 100% sure it would be instaforked if Anthropic ever tried anything
zajio1am 6mo ago
Is this relevant for people that use regular (per-token credit-based) API key?
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- vova_hn2 6mo ago
  No, this is perfectly OK with the ToS.
I_am_tiberius 6mo ago
Driving your business on content you don't own and then this. Disgusting.
827a 6mo ago
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. Or maybe, they're extremely interested in observability of the exact prompts users are typing, and third party harnesses muck that data in with the rest of the context that gets sent, so its harder to detangle the prompt from the noise? 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.
- 0x3f 6mo ago
  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.
  - simple10 6mo ago
    Yes, this. They need as much lock-in as possible before IPO. Most likely less about cash flow and more about IPO story telling. 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.
  - stanac 6mo ago
    > If Photoshop ran in the cloud 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).
rvz 6mo ago
Once again, Anthropic are not your friends and are the bad guys.
DanielHall 6mo ago
Anthropic is set to become the second-strongest legal department in North America
- shifto 6mo ago
  Maybe Oracle should just buy Anthropic.
- fy20 6mo ago
  Maybe their next product will be Claude Lawyer.
- shrx 6mo ago
  After OpenAI?
  - NekkoDroid 6mo ago
    I assumed Nintendo of America was top.
_ache_ 6mo ago
AI company crying over IP violation. Incredible.
- pmdr 6mo ago
  Well, stealing and training on the world's IP obviously wasn't free. /s
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
exabrial 6mo ago
Remember Anthropic is supposed to be the "good guys"
ftchd 6mo ago
sorry guys, I started OpenCode after 2 weeks, my bad
malisper 6mo ago
Since there's a lot of questions about what this means, let me explain. 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-b5d5affc6941bf7bb19805cc8f556cd1b9ae73ffd99e520120700536b166f8c0R321
- sufehmi 6mo ago
  this is actually the best explanation of this situation, why is it downvoted?
  - guelo 6mo ago
    people like directing anger at a "bad guy"
- achompas 6mo ago
  Yep, well said and great, sharp explanation. I think we can attribute a bunch of consternation here to drift between assumed and actual licensing terms. The actual licensing terms for Claude Code expressly prohibit use of the product outside of the Claude Code harness. If you want Opus outside of CC, the API is available for your use anytime. Some percentage of the community seems to assume their Claude Code subscription licenses allow free usage of CC across any product surface - including competing products like OpenCode. While this is a great way to save on API costs, the assumption is incorrect. In fact, it is *so* incorrect that Anthropic has encoded their licensing terms into their Terms of Service, and a result can take legal action against any violating parties. We can have separate discussions about Anthropic’s use of the Common Crawl in pre-training, or whether foundation labs adhere to robots.txt conventions. But those don’t directly impact Anthropic’s right to bring litigation. —— Outside of that I think angry users have their own stated preferences v revealed preferences here. They claim they want Opus on their terms, and Anthropic’s actions infringe on their user rights. Angry folks: Opus is right there! You just need an API key! The reality is you want Opus in your devtools of choice at discounted rates. You could at least be honest about your consternation
matltc 6mo ago
[flagged]
segmondy 6mo ago
Anthropic is a shit company. I cancelled my subscription 2 years ago once they started calling for regulation. They might have gotten folks to side with them in the OpenAI debate, but they are just another shit company like OpenAI.
rcr-anti 6mo ago
Something that usually gets missed in these discussions is that the subscription quotas seem to rely heavily on prompt caching to be economically viable, or at least less unviable. They can and do have permutations of the system prompt, tools, skills, etc. that makes the first 20k or so tokens hit the cache and not use inference resources for that portion. In addition, from my monitoring, Claude Code with Max has about an 80% cost reduction via caching (equivalent if you had done the same work with API billing), and has been improving over time. If cache use passes on a discount of 90% I think it's fair to assume the actual cost to them is close to negligible. So they're being obtuse about it for some reason, but if you want an economically sustainable model for AI companies they have to have some kind of optimization for the otherwise ridiculously discounted subscriptions. They sell subscriptions at the same rate and quotas to enterprise now, minus the $200 tier, so this isn't just consumer marketing being subsidized by b2b revenue. Whether they're making money or just losing less, you can only get those kind of cache optimizations when you have a fixed client.
- skybrian 6mo ago
  Maybe they could charge API users less if they use the same prefix that Claude Code uses? More coding agents using the same prefix results in better caching, reducing costs.
  - solenoid0937 6mo ago
    They do charge API users less, I pay 50-90% less when structuring my prompts for caching.
unshavedyak 6mo ago
Anyone know why OpenCode is integrating to ClaudeCode in the manner they were? Ie CC gives you an SDK, and i get the impression that Anthropic is fine with you using whatever external tools you want with the SDK .. otherwise why'd they publish an SDK? So if CC has an SDK, why doesn't OC just use the SDK? I assume there's some functional reason why it doesn't perform to their needs? Maybe it's not low level enough? I'm unfamiliar with what sort of functionality a harness needs. It makes me nervous as i'm using the CC SDK for my own wrapper though. Hypothetically what i'm doing is no different than embedding CC into an IDE.. though. Fingers crossed.
- achompas 6mo ago
  The problem isn’t the SDK but the API usage. Users will say this-or-that about choice etc etc. It’s about subsidized tokens. Otherwise th users (and OpenCode) would have stopped pushing the workarounds months ago.
  - unshavedyak 6mo ago
    > The problem isn’t the SDK but the API usage. Yes, i completely agree - which was my question. To my understanding OC was using CC API directly instead of using the SDK. My question is, why? Does the SDK prevent some functionality they needed?
adangert 6mo ago
And the downfall of anthropic starts, OpenAI has had this all in the bag the whole time. Anthropic is a poor imitation of Sam's Master plan, it was over before it even started. Money grubbers, the lot of em!
0xbadc0de5 6mo ago
A few months ago, I had my Anthropic Claude Max account nuked for using OpenCode. That sucked, but I just opened a new Claude Max account under a different email. Which, yes, after re-reading their terms is also forbidden. But I had been playing by their rules ever since. Only using Claude Code and their official apps. So they got what they wanted - compliance. Today they nuked my account again. I can only assume it was because I had the gall to find so much value in their product that even after they banned me once, I still wanted to give them money! I've been around this planet a long time and I have never encountered a tech company as hostile to their users as Anthropic. And that includes Microsoft back in the 90's & 00's. I really hope they change their ways. But for now, I'm done with them. I'll take my business elsewhere.
tallesborges92 6mo ago
This is really sucks, it’s a bad move for Anthropic, OpenAI is allowing using their models in third parties apps and the china models as well … I don’t believe Anthropic will win this battle. I just want to use the tools in a way and customized way that I want, Anthropic not allowing me to me to do that forced me to use the codex models, thanks for that I’m very happy with the results. I’m cheering for OpenAI
627467 6mo ago
Hey its not suing me so i guess i shouldnt care? But what is the argument here? "OpenCode facilitates the users of their opensource tool to misuse another app they have installed"? I guess anything goes with ip law really. Its all about flexing lawyer power and willingness to drown opponents in legal costs. Maybe if you dont want people to misuse your sub dont ship the ability to do so in the app that users actually installed on their machines? This is the same as all the alternative youtube clients. Just play the cat and mouse game Anthropic
ayeteas54 6mo ago
[dead]
vova_hn2 6mo ago
I can understand how and why they are able to go after users, who violate ToS, but I do not understand how are why they can go after open source developers, who just publish some source code that seems to be protected speech under the First Amendment [0] in the US jurisdiction. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_as_speech https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_as_speech
Daviey 6mo ago
I know this is a low value comment, but Anthropic always felt like the good guys in this space. Now.. Fuck you Anthropic.
- solenoid0937 6mo ago
  Amazing how fickle people are. Yes, Anthropic are the baddies for not letting you abuse their loss leading product.
  - Daviey 6mo ago
    Can you help me understand how using Claude Code isn't abusive, but Opencode is? ('because they said so, isn't a good answer)
    - solenoid0937 6mo ago
      Claude Code is a loss leader, you agree to use it under the terms that you don't hijack the OAuth flow to use other clients. If you don't like those terms you can use the API. Using Claude Code's auth flow with OpenCode is no different than using a custom client to abuse Gmail/Google Photos free tier as blob storage. You get a loss leading product under certain good faith terms, if you break those terms you're abusing the product.
      - Daviey 6mo ago
        You've still not explained why, you've just reasserted "because they said so". What is the upside to Anthropic if we use ClaudeCode but not OpenCode? If it is such a loss leader, why would they even offer it? By using it, even within their terms, you are still abusing their good will. No? (You also said the alternative to not liking the terms is to use their API. There is another alternative, which is to keep using it against their ToS and risk a ban. Or use a different provider. So the situation is more nuanced than "this" or "that")
        solenoid0937 6mo ago
karljtaylor 6mo ago
teams enterprise customer here, we got knocked out too. the most irritating thing here? OpenCode is necessary given how incredibly buggy Claude Code is. I know Boris is a "hot shot" but the whole individual contributor developers running rough shot on that codebase + they still haven't really fixed the cache bug makes this a really poorly timed move on their part. I can't prove this, but I would bet management doesn't actually use Claude outside of the Desktop surface. They'd have known how much this would break if they were really using it at scale.
cferry 6mo ago
I believe the solution to this kind of problems is that enough legislators (thinking of USA, EU) make it illegal to require a certain implementation of a software client to use an online service, whether this restriction is built into the communications protocol or checked through a side channel. Then the owner of the client device decides which implementation they'd like to use - so corporations can keep requiring the proprietary "official" one on their own corporate devices, but customers / end users who own their devices get to choose. Like, basic rights that come with ownership. This would essentially take us back to what online services were 20 years ago, by outlawing a business model that relies on providers controlling stuff on users' devices. What's on the server is the company's business, what's on the client is the user's, and the boundary is clear. On the one hand, services that would persist would likely no longer have free tiers (which would essentially mean free lunch for customers); since it's a commercial service run by a company that has costs, it's just normal to pay for it as a user, there's no free beer anywhere. On the other hand, by paying for something, you'd get that thing and nothing else, as there's always going to be a client that doesn't leak data not necessary for the service to perform whatever you paid for, or impose arbitrary restrictions on its use. If any, these need to be server-side.
- solenoid0937 6mo ago
  This just increases the price for everyone. The API is always there if you don't want to use the loss leader. The entitlement in this thread is insane.
wklm 6mo ago
Could someone please explain in simple terms what is the legal basis for these “legal requests”?
coldtea 6mo ago
Just fucking buy them already -- they have a better product than yours
rklosowski 6mo ago
[dead]
rodchalski 6mo ago
[dead]
guru4consulting 6mo ago
Anthropic subsidizes the fees when devs use their API within their own Claude code product. They do not give any such discount when the devs use their API outside their product. Seems fair enough. But looks like lots of developers expect the subsidy even when used outside their core product. Not fair, I guess. In the end, a business gets to decide how and when to strategically subsidize their users.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
scuderiaseb 6mo ago
Worth noting something the PR comments are glossing over is that the auth plugin wasn’t actually deleted in this PR, just removed from the default bundle. A third-party plugin doing the same thing is still technically on the table. OpenCode just can’t be the one shipping it anymore. Whether that holds up legally is anyone’s guess, but it’s not a hard wall.
NamlchakKhandro 6mo ago
Local models are coming boys. As much as it kills the living shit out of me to say this... Apple M5 Ultra will probably mean for a lot of us that we wont need openai or anthropic for coding llms anymore
- alifeinbinary 6mo ago
  While the M5 is impressive, its capacity to compete against enterprise models like Opus, Sonnet etc is off by a couple orders of magnitude. Even the most sophisticated open source models top out at 100-200 billion parameters whereas Claude, OpenAI are north of a trillion parameters. While SOC is definitely the future or local AI, even if you get an M5 that's jacked to the tits, you still won't be able to store the entire model in unified memory on top of the OS and whatever other applications you have running. 128GB is the upper limit for unified memory on the M5, which on paper could support a model like gpt-oss:120b but still with a nerfed context size and quantised at that. Furthermore, the cost of a maxed out Macbook Pro M5 Max is between $8-10k depending on your storage option, screen size etc., so we can safely assume that the M5 Ultra will be even more. There's also no guarantee that the Ultra will offer double the amount of unified memory, it may only offer more cores but cores aren't the current bottleneck for local AI, memory is. If you consider what you'd be paying above and beyond your requirements barring local AI, it would be adding $5-6k to the price tag at a minimum. That equates to 5 years worth of a Claude Code subscription! Even if you shouldered that cost with your NFT fortunes you likely wouldn't achieve performance parity with CC. I'm equally as excited as you are about the future for local AI and I am actively working in this space everyday to improve it but we're still a long way off from being able to match model size, context size, token/sec, TTFB etc. A single H100 is so OP, so hosting thousands in a data centre it's expected that it should remain unrivalled. The area where I'm having success with local AI is by pairing local models with other supportive technologies like databases and the like to compensate for smaller context size. There are still many in roads to be made in this area and that bodes well for the future of local AI as models become more efficient and sophisticated.
maxwellsdeamons 6mo ago
This might be a very dumb question. But does this restriction also include the usage of claude code print mode with the -p flag and —continue or —resume? This way I can use CC inside any application? Or what exactly was OpenCode using?
rurban 6mo ago
But you still can use the superior experience of opencode, the best agent, and Opus, the best model, via the standard opencode github model selection. But right now I'm not so sure anymore, if gpt-5.4 got actually better than opus-4.6 recently.

483 points by _squared_ 6mo ago

akmarinov 6mo ago

It’s like they want people to not like them …

solenoid0937 6mo ago
Yeah, they're so mean for not letting you abuse their loss leading product under the terms you accepted!

adampunk 6mo ago

[flagged]

gwd 6mo ago
They're perfectly happy being an API provider, where they're not selling their tokens at a loss. My guess is that they're counting the losses for Claude Code Max plans as R&D: what does usage look like if people don't have to worry about the cost of tokens? Because someday they won't, and Anthropic want to skate to where the puck will be, not where it is.
- adampunk 6mo ago
  You don't go after OpenCode because they allow for arbitrage. You go after them because they can decouple your model from your brand.
  - gwd 6mo ago
    Before this change: Opencode decouples model (Claude) from brand (Claude Code) in one of two ways: using the subscription, or pay-per-use API calls After this change: Opencode decouples model from brand in one way: pay-per-use API calls This change fails to prevent decoupling model from brand.
    - adampunk 6mo ago
      Do you have an anthropic API key with money attached to that account? Do you think most people who have a subscription to Claude code have an API key for Anthropic and have money attached to that that they’re ready to spend? Do you think those people who have an API key are ready to just give it to some random application rather than being directed to a Web or application based sign on mechanism serve served by a company they trust? Even if the consumers are programmers, an API key is not a consumer instrument. There is no universe where you convert a whole number percentage of users in the scenario.
      - gwd 6mo ago
        > Do you have an anthropic API key with money attached to that account? Yes, I do. Getting a Gemini API key was annoying, but getting API keys for Claude and GPT were simple and straightforward. The web-based redirect from a command-line tool is always far weirder and more awkward than just pasting in an API key. Since we're talking about programmers here, they should realize that both the API key and the web-based redirect end up doing the same thing: generating a token that allows this program to act as you over the API.

mellosouls 6mo ago

This and threatening OpenClaw (now at OpenAI), Anthropic really on a roll making friends in Open Source. Previously discussed I think: Anthropic Explicitly Blocking OpenCode (173 points, 157 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46625918 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46625918

noemit 6mo ago
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.
- shimman 6mo ago
  The dude built a mass plagiarism machine and wants to now profit off of his mass plagiarism machine, of course he's going to have antidemocratic ideas regarding people + technology.
  - hirako2000 6mo ago
    His engineers told him "I don't write code anymore. Claude writes the code, I edit it, I code around it". 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 6mo ago
  This exactly. Kimi 2.5 has coding performance hardly discernible from Claude. The only way to maintain a business edge is to crush open source clients to force people into a closed ecosystem. Once there, create context moat where people are not in control of their own context data (cannot export it to open tooling). Maybe we can call it the Oracle play? 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

hokkos 6mo ago

It's ok when Anthropic do it, like when they make deal with the army.

hirako2000 6mo ago
Worse, they deserve virtue signaling rewards when they don't make the deal.

jitl 6mo ago

Same thing happened with Google, but Google started actually banning user's accounts. Hopefully it doesn't come to that with Anthropic.

cedws 6mo ago

Under what law can Anthropic force OpenCode to do this? Surely it's not illegal to publish code that interacts with an API that's open for everyone to see?

bdangubic 6mo ago
Terms or Service
- Ekaros 6mo ago
  Cleary they need to get AI which has not accepted those to rewrite it. That is the easy and fast solution these days. Or at most find a person who has not accepted tos do that.
  - doc_ick 6mo ago
    Just re-train your own model on your own collected data. No problem there.
- strideashort 6mo ago
  Do you need to accept ToS to vibe code anthropic plugin? Code is one thing. Using API key is entirely different thing.
  - bdangubic 6mo ago
    using API key also has Terms of Service :)
    - strideashort 6mo ago
      Yes, which is user’s responsibility!
anonym29 6mo ago
The API has a very clear ToS prohibiting third-party client usage with the heavily subsidized Claude.ai subscription plans. Anthropic's right to reject or block that traffic, as well as to ban users who attempt this, is well-protected by the ToS those users neglected to read. 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.

anonym29 6mo ago

I've said it before and I'll say it again. 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...

noemit 6mo ago
I must be alone in this but I don't think its heavily subsidized. I see their models as really overpriced. No way they cost that much. Could they really?
- brookst 6mo ago
  Yes. Their API rates are breakeven to profitable, the subscription that people are arbitraging is a 90% discount or so from API rates. 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.
  - exitb 6mo ago
    Are other harnesses actually using „Co-Authored-By” out of the box?
- anonym29 6mo ago
  Cost to the business and price to customers are not the same thing. Even if it cost Anthropic nothing to run any of these (it actually costs quite a bit in electricity, infrastructure, ops teams to keep everything running smoothly, and above all else, extraordinary R&D expenses to develop the models), they could set the price at a million dollars per token if they wanted to. 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-actually-saves-you-money/ https://www.ksred.com/claude-code-pricing-guide-which-plan-a... ² https://martinalderson.com/posts/no-it-doesnt-cost-anthropic-5k-per-claude-code-user/ https://martinalderson.com/posts/no-it-doesnt-cost-anthropic...

carlos-menezes 6mo ago

I'm sure absolutely nothing will come of Anthropic's open-source acquisitions. Totally harmless, I'm sure.

tommica 6mo ago
Yeah, I've been looking at bun a bit, but now I am skeptical about it.
cyanydeez 6mo ago
The "good" news is LLMs make them 100% easier to fork.

p5v 6mo ago

What’s next - coming after all the projects that have been coded using Claude Code, claiming they are their property?

bilekas 6mo ago
Don't give them ideas please. They'll ask for more investment to do exactly this. 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.
- rspeele 6mo ago
  > I miss the days when open source was... 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.
  - bilekas 6mo ago
    > Now I just regret donating fuel 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!

Handy-Man 6mo ago

Seems fine to me. Why do people think they are entitled to use heavily subsidized services outside of the tools it's intended to work with per terms.

zadikian 6mo ago
Was it always clear that you're not supposed to use the Claude API this way?
- snoman 6mo ago
  Yes.
  - zadikian 6mo ago
    Ok then it's fine
- maccam912 6mo ago
  I don't think Anthropic has a problem with you using a regular pay-per-token API key with opencode. The issue is letting someone use their "Log in with Claude" as if it were a regular API key.

FloatArtifact 6mo ago

Maybe go third party for plugins?

extr 6mo ago

The OpenCode guys have really surprised me in the way they've reacted to Anthropic shutting down the side-loaded auth scheme. Very petty and bitter. It's clearly just a business decision from Anthropic and a rational one at that, usage subsidization to keep people on the first party product surface is practically the oldest business move in the book and is completely valid.

tietjens 6mo ago
This is not my impression, could you explain what you're talking about?
- extr 6mo ago
  Ever since the shutdown of the side-load they've been pretty vocally anti-anthropic on twitter. Paranoid that anthropic is going to torpedo them via some backdoor now that they own bun, insinuating that anthropic shut down the auth from a position of weakness since OpenCode is a superior product, etc. 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).
  - lostmsu 6mo ago
    I have a huge issue 10416 on OpenCode https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/issues/10416 https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/issues/10416 - their stance on privacy
    - siva7 6mo ago
      not sure i follow - do they leak my information to their own servers by default?
      - lostmsu 6mo ago

valunord 6mo ago

This wouldn't be so bad if they didn't have such a sucky tui or ecosystem. AI is chef's kiss, tooling is bottom barrel.

zozbot234 6mo ago
Not really, GPT 5.4 is a great alternative. There's no real loss from using that over Claude Opus. And open models are quite close behind.
- brookst 6mo ago
  I’ll try 5.4 again but when I spent a couple of hours with it, I found it much weaker than Claude code + opus 4.6 for working on large projects. Are you delegating substantial work like planning and executing refactors, or more at single-line and function-level work?
  - DetroitThrow 6mo ago
    I think the gap is smaller than it has been in the past but I largely agree with you, generally larger work is done much better with Claude Code.
- girvo 6mo ago
  GPT 5.4 keeps erroring out when I’ve tried it on long complex tasks. Might be works harness I guess.
- ljm 6mo ago
  I'll do most of my work in opencode with GPT 5.3/5.4 and just spin up Claude Code for a review/cleanup pass. Opencode just works faster and I prefer the UX.

strideashort 6mo ago

Can anyone explain what’s going on here? Using API is illegal? that can’t possibly be since we now know API is not even copyrighted (which personally I disagree with bit whatever)… so what is going on here?

deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
2muchtime 6mo ago
I believe Anthropic is trying to block the use of their Claude code subscription by third party applications like OpenCode. I think they’re okay with someone using their API with anything, including OpenCode. Please someone correct me if I’m wrong.
- Analemma_ 6mo ago
  No, you’re completely right, you can use Claude API pricing with anything you want, including OpenCode and OpenClaw.

ihsw 6mo ago

[dead]

jryio 6mo ago

Businesses exercise power and control in the market. The purpose of this is to set a precedent (perceived or actual) — the auth system was a product, not an API. Anthropic is drawing the line between 'built on us' and 'built around us.' 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...

MyHonestOpinon 6mo ago

Can anyone ELI5 what is open code and why Anthropic is asking them to delete something ?

raincole 6mo ago
Anthropic's ToS doesn't allow the subscribers to use third party tools that utilizes the APIs Claude Code uses. Open Code is one of those tools.
paxys 6mo ago
OpenCode is an agentic coding CLI, similar to Claude Code, Codex etc. It supports different LLM providers, including Claude. 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.
Mashimo 6mo ago
OpenCode is a agent .. harnest? The CLI or UI tool you use as an AI agent, similar to ClaudeCode. You where not allowed to use your ClaudeCode subscription with other tool then ClaudeCode. I'm not sure if this is what got removed or if there is more too it.
- aeriose 6mo ago
  But the PR is also removing the ability to use Anthropic API key as well not just Claude Code subscription
  - theshrike79 6mo ago
    That's just them being vindictive. Anthropic doesn't care about API use, it's paid per token anyway and they set the prices for that.
- 6mo ago

droidjj 6mo ago

It's not clear what exactly the "legal action" is based on this github link. My pure speculation is Anthropic's lawyers have come up with a liability story boiling down to OpenCode helping end users violate the Anthropic ToS (i.e. tortious interference with contract).

paxys 6mo ago
A vaguely threatening letter is usually all it takes
- Cthulhu_ 6mo ago
  Doesn't even need to be threatening, a notice of "this thing you're doing is in violation of our terms of service" should be enough... although I suppose that can be construed as threatening already.
- 0x3f 6mo ago
  I haven't used OpenCode but if not using Claude is existential then why back down? Set up limited liability somehow and just let it play out.
  - TRYEXCEPT 6mo ago
    Sometimes, it's just not worth the effort. Seriously would you rather: 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.
    - 0x3f 6mo ago
      Depends if it's existential, like I said. If my whole company depends on X and replacing it is intractable, there's not much other choice. Having looked at the landing page though, seems like they can just go with other models and it will (largely) be fine, yes.

gwd 6mo ago

"Legal action" means you filed a lawsuit. This looks more like someone sent a list of requested changes, backed up by an implicit or explicit threat of legal action.

Cthulhu_ 6mo ago
That's how these things usually (should) go; a good legal system (be it civil suits, insurance claims, mediation, etc) will only actually take on cases if you've tried a reasonable approach first, e.g. asking nicely.
- lima 6mo ago
  Fun fact: In Germany, the civil courts will usually take the case anyways if it has merit, but the winner ends up paying for the whole lawsuit if they failed to make an effort to resolve the case before suing.

karmasimida 6mo ago

Just use GPT5.4, avoid the drama and it is a better model anyway

girvo 6mo ago
Except for, yknow, the DoD and killer robots and mass surveillance drama.
awestroke 6mo ago
Not all of us enjoy being glazed mercilessly while getting subpar output
- karmasimida 6mo ago
  I have burnt billion of tokens in gpt 5.4 and I didn’t know what you are talking about
  - solenoid0937 6mo ago
    It's trash for larger codebases vs Opus unfortunately.
    - karmasimida 6mo ago
      Quite on the contrary for my experience. xhigh is the only model + thinking level that can reliably locate the bug

taf2 6mo ago

avoid bun is my take away... if anthropic decides you're a competitor and with the way AI is evolving you will be a competitor soon - don't rely on any anthropic tools or models.

awestroke 6mo ago
Why should anybody avoid bun? Just fork it if it ever changes license. In fact, I'm 100% sure it would be instaforked if Anthropic ever tried anything

zajio1am 6mo ago

Is this relevant for people that use regular (per-token credit-based) API key?

deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
vova_hn2 6mo ago
No, this is perfectly OK with the ToS.

I_am_tiberius 6mo ago

Driving your business on content you don't own and then this. Disgusting.

827a 6mo ago

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. Or maybe, they're extremely interested in observability of the exact prompts users are typing, and third party harnesses muck that data in with the rest of the context that gets sent, so its harder to detangle the prompt from the noise? 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.

0x3f 6mo ago
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.
- simple10 6mo ago
  Yes, this. They need as much lock-in as possible before IPO. Most likely less about cash flow and more about IPO story telling. 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.
- stanac 6mo ago
  > If Photoshop ran in the cloud 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).

rvz 6mo ago

Once again, Anthropic are not your friends and are the bad guys.

DanielHall 6mo ago

Anthropic is set to become the second-strongest legal department in North America

shifto 6mo ago
Maybe Oracle should just buy Anthropic.
fy20 6mo ago
Maybe their next product will be Claude Lawyer.
shrx 6mo ago
After OpenAI?
- NekkoDroid 6mo ago
  I assumed Nintendo of America was top.

_ache_ 6mo ago

AI company crying over IP violation. Incredible.

pmdr 6mo ago
Well, stealing and training on the world's IP obviously wasn't free. /s

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

exabrial 6mo ago

Remember Anthropic is supposed to be the "good guys"

ftchd 6mo ago

sorry guys, I started OpenCode after 2 weeks, my bad

malisper 6mo ago

Since there's a lot of questions about what this means, let me explain. 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-b5d5affc6941bf7bb19805cc8f556cd1b9ae73ffd99e520120700536b166f8c0R321

sufehmi 6mo ago
this is actually the best explanation of this situation, why is it downvoted?
- guelo 6mo ago
  people like directing anger at a "bad guy"
achompas 6mo ago
Yep, well said and great, sharp explanation. I think we can attribute a bunch of consternation here to drift between assumed and actual licensing terms. The actual licensing terms for Claude Code expressly prohibit use of the product outside of the Claude Code harness. If you want Opus outside of CC, the API is available for your use anytime. Some percentage of the community seems to assume their Claude Code subscription licenses allow free usage of CC across any product surface - including competing products like OpenCode. While this is a great way to save on API costs, the assumption is incorrect. In fact, it is *so* incorrect that Anthropic has encoded their licensing terms into their Terms of Service, and a result can take legal action against any violating parties. We can have separate discussions about Anthropic’s use of the Common Crawl in pre-training, or whether foundation labs adhere to robots.txt conventions. But those don’t directly impact Anthropic’s right to bring litigation. —— Outside of that I think angry users have their own stated preferences v revealed preferences here. They claim they want Opus on their terms, and Anthropic’s actions infringe on their user rights. Angry folks: Opus is right there! You just need an API key! The reality is you want Opus in your devtools of choice at discounted rates. You could at least be honest about your consternation

matltc 6mo ago

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segmondy 6mo ago

Anthropic is a shit company. I cancelled my subscription 2 years ago once they started calling for regulation. They might have gotten folks to side with them in the OpenAI debate, but they are just another shit company like OpenAI.

rcr-anti 6mo ago

Something that usually gets missed in these discussions is that the subscription quotas seem to rely heavily on prompt caching to be economically viable, or at least less unviable. They can and do have permutations of the system prompt, tools, skills, etc. that makes the first 20k or so tokens hit the cache and not use inference resources for that portion. In addition, from my monitoring, Claude Code with Max has about an 80% cost reduction via caching (equivalent if you had done the same work with API billing), and has been improving over time. If cache use passes on a discount of 90% I think it's fair to assume the actual cost to them is close to negligible. So they're being obtuse about it for some reason, but if you want an economically sustainable model for AI companies they have to have some kind of optimization for the otherwise ridiculously discounted subscriptions. They sell subscriptions at the same rate and quotas to enterprise now, minus the $200 tier, so this isn't just consumer marketing being subsidized by b2b revenue. Whether they're making money or just losing less, you can only get those kind of cache optimizations when you have a fixed client.

skybrian 6mo ago
Maybe they could charge API users less if they use the same prefix that Claude Code uses? More coding agents using the same prefix results in better caching, reducing costs.
- solenoid0937 6mo ago
  They do charge API users less, I pay 50-90% less when structuring my prompts for caching.

unshavedyak 6mo ago

Anyone know why OpenCode is integrating to ClaudeCode in the manner they were? Ie CC gives you an SDK, and i get the impression that Anthropic is fine with you using whatever external tools you want with the SDK .. otherwise why'd they publish an SDK? So if CC has an SDK, why doesn't OC just use the SDK? I assume there's some functional reason why it doesn't perform to their needs? Maybe it's not low level enough? I'm unfamiliar with what sort of functionality a harness needs. It makes me nervous as i'm using the CC SDK for my own wrapper though. Hypothetically what i'm doing is no different than embedding CC into an IDE.. though. Fingers crossed.

achompas 6mo ago
The problem isn’t the SDK but the API usage. Users will say this-or-that about choice etc etc. It’s about subsidized tokens. Otherwise th users (and OpenCode) would have stopped pushing the workarounds months ago.
- unshavedyak 6mo ago
  > The problem isn’t the SDK but the API usage. Yes, i completely agree - which was my question. To my understanding OC was using CC API directly instead of using the SDK. My question is, why? Does the SDK prevent some functionality they needed?

adangert 6mo ago

And the downfall of anthropic starts, OpenAI has had this all in the bag the whole time. Anthropic is a poor imitation of Sam's Master plan, it was over before it even started. Money grubbers, the lot of em!

0xbadc0de5 6mo ago

A few months ago, I had my Anthropic Claude Max account nuked for using OpenCode. That sucked, but I just opened a new Claude Max account under a different email. Which, yes, after re-reading their terms is also forbidden. But I had been playing by their rules ever since. Only using Claude Code and their official apps. So they got what they wanted - compliance. Today they nuked my account again. I can only assume it was because I had the gall to find so much value in their product that even after they banned me once, I still wanted to give them money! I've been around this planet a long time and I have never encountered a tech company as hostile to their users as Anthropic. And that includes Microsoft back in the 90's & 00's. I really hope they change their ways. But for now, I'm done with them. I'll take my business elsewhere.

tallesborges92 6mo ago

This is really sucks, it’s a bad move for Anthropic, OpenAI is allowing using their models in third parties apps and the china models as well … I don’t believe Anthropic will win this battle. I just want to use the tools in a way and customized way that I want, Anthropic not allowing me to me to do that forced me to use the codex models, thanks for that I’m very happy with the results. I’m cheering for OpenAI

627467 6mo ago

Hey its not suing me so i guess i shouldnt care? But what is the argument here? "OpenCode facilitates the users of their opensource tool to misuse another app they have installed"? I guess anything goes with ip law really. Its all about flexing lawyer power and willingness to drown opponents in legal costs. Maybe if you dont want people to misuse your sub dont ship the ability to do so in the app that users actually installed on their machines? This is the same as all the alternative youtube clients. Just play the cat and mouse game Anthropic

ayeteas54 6mo ago

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vova_hn2 6mo ago

I can understand how and why they are able to go after users, who violate ToS, but I do not understand how are why they can go after open source developers, who just publish some source code that seems to be protected speech under the First Amendment [0] in the US jurisdiction. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_as_speech https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_as_speech

Daviey 6mo ago

I know this is a low value comment, but Anthropic always felt like the good guys in this space. Now.. Fuck you Anthropic.

solenoid0937 6mo ago
Amazing how fickle people are. Yes, Anthropic are the baddies for not letting you abuse their loss leading product.
- Daviey 6mo ago
  Can you help me understand how using Claude Code isn't abusive, but Opencode is? ('because they said so, isn't a good answer)
  - solenoid0937 6mo ago
    Claude Code is a loss leader, you agree to use it under the terms that you don't hijack the OAuth flow to use other clients. If you don't like those terms you can use the API. Using Claude Code's auth flow with OpenCode is no different than using a custom client to abuse Gmail/Google Photos free tier as blob storage. You get a loss leading product under certain good faith terms, if you break those terms you're abusing the product.
    - Daviey 6mo ago
      You've still not explained why, you've just reasserted "because they said so". What is the upside to Anthropic if we use ClaudeCode but not OpenCode? If it is such a loss leader, why would they even offer it? By using it, even within their terms, you are still abusing their good will. No? (You also said the alternative to not liking the terms is to use their API. There is another alternative, which is to keep using it against their ToS and risk a ban. Or use a different provider. So the situation is more nuanced than "this" or "that")
      - solenoid0937 6mo ago

karljtaylor 6mo ago

teams enterprise customer here, we got knocked out too. the most irritating thing here? OpenCode is necessary given how incredibly buggy Claude Code is. I know Boris is a "hot shot" but the whole individual contributor developers running rough shot on that codebase + they still haven't really fixed the cache bug makes this a really poorly timed move on their part. I can't prove this, but I would bet management doesn't actually use Claude outside of the Desktop surface. They'd have known how much this would break if they were really using it at scale.

cferry 6mo ago

I believe the solution to this kind of problems is that enough legislators (thinking of USA, EU) make it illegal to require a certain implementation of a software client to use an online service, whether this restriction is built into the communications protocol or checked through a side channel. Then the owner of the client device decides which implementation they'd like to use - so corporations can keep requiring the proprietary "official" one on their own corporate devices, but customers / end users who own their devices get to choose. Like, basic rights that come with ownership. This would essentially take us back to what online services were 20 years ago, by outlawing a business model that relies on providers controlling stuff on users' devices. What's on the server is the company's business, what's on the client is the user's, and the boundary is clear. On the one hand, services that would persist would likely no longer have free tiers (which would essentially mean free lunch for customers); since it's a commercial service run by a company that has costs, it's just normal to pay for it as a user, there's no free beer anywhere. On the other hand, by paying for something, you'd get that thing and nothing else, as there's always going to be a client that doesn't leak data not necessary for the service to perform whatever you paid for, or impose arbitrary restrictions on its use. If any, these need to be server-side.

solenoid0937 6mo ago
This just increases the price for everyone. The API is always there if you don't want to use the loss leader. The entitlement in this thread is insane.

wklm 6mo ago

Could someone please explain in simple terms what is the legal basis for these “legal requests”?

coldtea 6mo ago

Just fucking buy them already -- they have a better product than yours

rklosowski 6mo ago

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rodchalski 6mo ago

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guru4consulting 6mo ago

Anthropic subsidizes the fees when devs use their API within their own Claude code product. They do not give any such discount when the devs use their API outside their product. Seems fair enough. But looks like lots of developers expect the subsidy even when used outside their core product. Not fair, I guess. In the end, a business gets to decide how and when to strategically subsidize their users.

deleted 6mo ago

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scuderiaseb 6mo ago

Worth noting something the PR comments are glossing over is that the auth plugin wasn’t actually deleted in this PR, just removed from the default bundle. A third-party plugin doing the same thing is still technically on the table. OpenCode just can’t be the one shipping it anymore. Whether that holds up legally is anyone’s guess, but it’s not a hard wall.

NamlchakKhandro 6mo ago

Local models are coming boys. As much as it kills the living shit out of me to say this... Apple M5 Ultra will probably mean for a lot of us that we wont need openai or anthropic for coding llms anymore

alifeinbinary 6mo ago
While the M5 is impressive, its capacity to compete against enterprise models like Opus, Sonnet etc is off by a couple orders of magnitude. Even the most sophisticated open source models top out at 100-200 billion parameters whereas Claude, OpenAI are north of a trillion parameters. While SOC is definitely the future or local AI, even if you get an M5 that's jacked to the tits, you still won't be able to store the entire model in unified memory on top of the OS and whatever other applications you have running. 128GB is the upper limit for unified memory on the M5, which on paper could support a model like gpt-oss:120b but still with a nerfed context size and quantised at that. Furthermore, the cost of a maxed out Macbook Pro M5 Max is between $8-10k depending on your storage option, screen size etc., so we can safely assume that the M5 Ultra will be even more. There's also no guarantee that the Ultra will offer double the amount of unified memory, it may only offer more cores but cores aren't the current bottleneck for local AI, memory is. If you consider what you'd be paying above and beyond your requirements barring local AI, it would be adding $5-6k to the price tag at a minimum. That equates to 5 years worth of a Claude Code subscription! Even if you shouldered that cost with your NFT fortunes you likely wouldn't achieve performance parity with CC. I'm equally as excited as you are about the future for local AI and I am actively working in this space everyday to improve it but we're still a long way off from being able to match model size, context size, token/sec, TTFB etc. A single H100 is so OP, so hosting thousands in a data centre it's expected that it should remain unrivalled. The area where I'm having success with local AI is by pairing local models with other supportive technologies like databases and the like to compensate for smaller context size. There are still many in roads to be made in this area and that bodes well for the future of local AI as models become more efficient and sophisticated.

maxwellsdeamons 6mo ago

This might be a very dumb question. But does this restriction also include the usage of claude code print mode with the -p flag and —continue or —resume? This way I can use CC inside any application? Or what exactly was OpenCode using?

rurban 6mo ago

But you still can use the superior experience of opencode, the best agent, and Opus, the best model, via the standard opencode github model selection. But right now I'm not so sure anymore, if gpt-5.4 got actually better than opus-4.6 recently.