Yeah I think Anthropic has the "right" to do this. That's fine.
But they also have shown a weakness by failing to understand why people might want to do this (use their Max membership with OpenCode etc instead).
People aren't using opencode or crush with their Claude Code memberships because they're trying to exploit or overuse tokens or something. That isn't possible.
They do it because Claude Code the tool itself is full of bugs and has performance issues, and OpenCode is of higher quality, has more open (surprise) development, is more responsive to bug fixes, and gives them far more knobs and dials to control how it works.
I use Claude Code quite a bit and there isn't a session that goes by where I don't bump into a sharp edge of some kind. Notorious terminal rendering issues, slow memory leaks, or compaction related bugs that took them 3 months to fix...
Failure to deal with quality issues and listen to customers is hardly a good sign of company culture, leading up to IPO... If they're trying to build a moat... this isn't a strong way to do it.
If you want to own the market and have complete control at the tooling level, you're simply going to have to make a better product. With their mountain of cash and army of engineers at their disposal ... they absolutely could. But they're not.
> "For me personally, I have decided I will never be an Anthropic customer, because I refuse to do business with a company that takes its customers for granted."
The best pressure on companies comes from viable alternatives, not from boycotts that leave you without tools altogether.
> For me personally, I have decided I will never be an Anthropic customer, because I refuse to do business with a company that takes its customers for granted.
Archaeologist.dev Made a Big Mistake
If guided by this morality column, Archaeologist should immediately stop using pretty-much anything they are using in their life. There's no company today that doesn't have their hands dirty. The life is a dance between choosing the least bad option, not radically cutting off any sight of "bad".
A good example of an extremely small but extremely vocal minority doing their best to punish a company for not catering to their explicitly disallowed use case for no reason other than they want it. I'd bet this has 0 negative impact on their business.
What I learned from all this is that OpenAI is willing to offer a service compatible with my preferred workflow/method of billing and Anthropic clearly is not. That's fine but disappointing, I'm keeping my Codex subscription and letting my Claude subscription lapse but sure, it would be nice if Anthropic changed their mind to keep that option available because yes, I do want it.
I'm a bit perplexed by some comments describing the situation like OpenCode users were getting something for free and stealing from CC users when the plan quota was enforced either way and were paying the same amount for it. Or why you seem to think this post pointing out that Anthropic's direct competitor endorses that method of subscription usage is somehow malicious or manipulative behavior.
Commerce is a two-way street and customers giving feedback/complaining/cancelling when something changes is normal and healthy for competition. As evidenced by OpenAI immediately jumping in to support OpenCode users on Codex without needing to break their TOS.
I mean... I don't like it either but this is pretty standard stuff and it's obvious why they're doing it.
Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok are all more or less on par with each other, or a couple months behind at most. Chinese open models are also not far behind.
There's nothing inherent to these products to make them "sticky". If your tooling is designed for it, you can trivially switch models at any time. Mid-conversation, even. And it just works.
When you have basically equivalent products with no switching cost, you have perfect competition. They are all commodities. And that means: none of them can make a profit. It's a basic law of economics.
If they can't make a profit, no matter how revolutionary the tech is, their valuation is not justified, and they will be in big trouble when people figure this out.
So they need to make the product sticky somehow. So they:
1. Add a subscription payment model. Once you are paying a subscription fee, then the calculus on switching changes: if you only maintain one subscription, you have a strong reason to stick with it for everything.
2. Force you to use their client app, which only talks to their model, so you can't even try other models without changing your whole workflow, which most people won't bother to do.
These are bog standard tactics across the tech industry and beyond for limiting competitive pressure.
Everyone is mad about #2 but honestly I'm more mad about #1. The best thing for consumers would be if all these model providers strictly provided usage-based API pricing, which makes switching easy. But right now the subscription prices offer an enormous discount over API pricing, which just shows how much they are really desperate to create some sort of stickiness. The subscriptions don't even provide the "peace of mind" benefit that Spotify-like subscription models provide, where you don't have to worry about usage, because they still have enforced usage limits that people regularly hit. It's just purely a discount offered for locking yourself in.
But again I can't really be that mad because of course they are doing this, not doing it would be terrible business strategy.
> The best thing for consumers would be if all these model providers strictly provided usage-based API pricing
Using openrouter myself I find the costs of APIs to be extremely low and affordable? I don't send the whole codebase to every question, I just ask about what I need, and everything is actually ridiculously cheap? $20 lasts about 3 months.
> they really, really want to own the entire value chain rather than being relegated to becoming just another "model provider"
I remember the story used to be the other way around - "just a wrapper", "wrapper AI startups" were everywhere, nobody trusted they can make it.
Maybe being "just a model provider" or "just a LLM wrapper" matter less than the context of work. What I mean is that benefits collect not at the model provider, nor at the wrapper provider, but where the usage takes place, who sets the prompts and uses the code gets the lion share of benefits from AI.
Q: Do I need extra AI subscriptions to use OpenCode?
A: Not necessarily, OpenCode comes with a set of free models that you can use without creating an account. Aside from these, you can use any of the popular coding models by creating a Zen account. While we encourage users to use Zen, OpenCode also works with all popular providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI etc. You can even connect your local models.
I'll be honest; I'm pretty sure this "mistake" will be completely forgotten by the next month. Their enforcing that their subscription only works with their product should not really come as a surprise to anyone, and the alt-agent users are a small enough minority that they'll get over it.
Can't Opencode just modify their implementation to use the anthropic claude code SDK directly? The issue is they were spoofing oauth. I tried OpenCode before this whole drama and immediately noticed the oauth spoofing and never authorized it. Doesn't opencode speak ACP? https://agentclientprotocol.com/overview/agents
The people defending Anthropic because “muh terms of service” are completely missing the point. These are bad terms. You should not accept these terms and bet the future of your business on proprietary tooling like this. It might be a good deal right now, but they only want to lock you in so that they can screw you later.
This reads like an overreaction. I think both OpenAI and Anthropic are soon to settle upon their target markets; that each of them are attracting separate crowds/types of coders and that the people already sold on Claude Code don’t care about this decision.
They did not. Anthropic is protecting its huge asset: the Claude Code value chain, which has proven itself to be a winner among devs (me included, after trying everything under the sun in 2025). If anything, Anthropic's mistake is that they are incapable of monetizing their great models in the chat market, where ChatGPT reigns: ie. Anthropic did not invest in image generation, Google did and Gemini has a shot at the market now.
Apparently nobody gets the Anthropic move: they are only good at coding and that's a very thin layer. Opencode and other tools are game for collecting inputs and outputs that can later be used to train their own models - not necessarily being done now, but they could - Cursor did it. Also Opencode makes it all easily swappable, just eval something by popping another API key and let's see if Codex or GLM can replicate the CC solution. Oh, it does! So let's cancel Claude and save big bucks!
Even though CC the agent supports external providers (via the ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL env var), they are working hard on making it impossible for other models to support their every increasing agent feature set (skills, teleport and remote sessions, LSP, Chrome integration, etc). The move totally makes sense, like it or not.
They’re betting that the stickiness of today’s regular users is more valuable than the market research and training data they were receiving from those nerdy, rule-breaking users.
I rather have a product that is only good at one single thing than mid for everything else especially when the developer experience for me is much more consistent than using gemini and chatgpt to the point that I only have chatgpt for productivity reasons and also sometimes making better prompts to claude (when I don't use claude to make a better prompt). After realizing that Anthropic is discounting token usages for claude code they should have made that more explicit and also the API key (but hindsight is 20/20) they should already have been blocking third party apps or just have you make another API key that has no discount but even then this could have pissed off developers.
It's all easily swappable without OpenCode. Just symlink CLAUDE.md -> AGENTS.md and run `codex` instead of `claude`.
> they are working hard on making it impossible for other models to support their every increasing agent feature set (skills, teleport and remote sessions, LSP, Chrome integration, etc).
Every feature you listed has an open-source MCP server implementation, which means every agent that supports MCP already has all those features. MCP is so epic because it has already nailed the commodification coffin firmly shut. Besides, Anthropic has way less funding than OAI or Google. They wouldn't win the moat-building race even if there were one.
That said, the conventional wisdom is that lowering switching costs benefits the underdogs, because the incumbents have more market share to lose.
Models each have their own, often competing, quirks on how they utilize AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md. It's very likely a CLAUDE.md written for use with Claude Code utilizes prompting techniques that results in worse output if taken directly and used with Codex. For example, Anthropic recommends putting info that an agent must adhere to in statements like "MUST run tests after writing code" and other all-caps directives, whereas people have found using the same language with GPT-5.2 results in less instruction following, more timid responses than if the AGENTS.md were written without them.
The problem the second you stop subsidizing Claude Code and start making money on it the incentive to use it over opencode disappears. If opencode is the better tool than claude code - and that's the reason people are using their claude subscription with it instead of claude code - people will end up switching to it.
Maybe they can hope to murder opencode in the meantime with predatory pricing and build an advantage that they don't currently have. It seems unlikely though - the fact that they're currently behind proves the barrier to building this sort of tool isn't that high, and there's lots of developers who build their own tooling for fun that you can't really starve out of doing that.
I'm not convinced that attempting to murder opencode is a mistake - if you're losing you might as well try desperate tactics. I think the attempt is a pretty clear signal that Antrhopic is losing though.
> ie. Anthropic did not invest in image generation, Google did and Gemini has a shot at the market now.
They're after the enterprise market - where office / workspace + app + directory integration, security, safety, compliance etc. are more important. 80% of their revenue is from enterprise - less churn, much higher revenue per W/token, better margins, better $/user.
Microsoft adopting the Anthropic models into copilot and Azure - despite being a large and early OpenAI investor - is a much bigger win than yet another image model used to make memes for users who balk at spending $20 per month.
Same with the office connector - which is only available to enterprises[0] (further speaking to where their focus is). There hasn't yet been a "claude code" moment for office productivity, but Anthropic are the closest to it.
[0] This may be a mistake as Claude Code has been adopted from the ground up
Anthropic is rather obnoxious about training on user data, and I wonder if enterprises (and small businesses!) will grow up soon and start using competing products instead.
(Not that Google is amazing in this regard — their purchasable product options are all over the place to the point where it might be nearly a full time (human!) job to keep track of how to correctly purchase Gemini. Gemini itself seems incapable of figuring this out, or at least I haven’t found the right prompt yet. Gemini is absolutely amazing at hallucinating Google product offerings. OpenAI, on the other hand, seems to have nailed this.)
> Anthropic's mistake is that they are incapable of monetizing their great models in the chat market
The types of people who would use this tool are precisely the types of people who don't pay for licenses or tools. They're in a race to the bottom and they don't even know it.
> and that's a very thin layer
I don't think Anthropic understands the market they just made massive investments in.
i think they're trading future customer acquisition and model quality for the current claude code userbase which they might also lose from this choice.
the reason i got the subscription wasnt to use claude code. when i subscribed you couldnt even use it for claude code. i got it because i figured i could use those tokens for anything, and as i figured out useful stuff, i could split it off onto api calls.
now that exploration of "what can i do with claude" will need to be elsewhere, and the results of a working thing will want to stay with the model that its working on.
Agreed. The system is ALL about who controls the customer relationship.
If Anthropic ended up in a position that they had to beg various Client providers to be integrated (properly) and had to compete with other LLMs on the same clients and could be swapped out at a moment's notice, they would just become a commodity and lose all leverage. They don't want to end up in such situation. They do need to control the delivery of the product end-to-end to ensure that they control the customer relationship and the quality.
This is also going to be KEY in terms of democratizing the AI industry for small startups because this model of ai-outside-tools-inside provides an alternative to tools-outside-ai-inside platforms like Lovable, Base44 and Replit which don't leave as much flexibility in terms of swapping out tooling.
> making it impossible for other models to support their every increasing agent feature set (skills, teleport and remote sessions, LSP, Chrome integration, etc)
I use CC as my harness but switch between third party models thanks to ccs. If Anthropic decided to stop me from using third party models in CC, I wouldn't just go "oh well, let's buy another $200/mo Claude subscription now". No. I'd be like: "Ok, I invested in CC—hooks/skills/whatever—but now let's ask CC to port them all to OpenCode and continue my work there".
> they are working hard on making it impossible for other models to support their every increasing agent feature set (skills, teleport and remote sessions, LSP, Chrome integration, etc). The move totally makes sense, like it or not.
I don't understand, why would other models not be able to support any, or some, or even a particular single one of these? I don't even see most of these as relevant to the model itself, but rather the harness/agentic framework around it. You could argue these require a base degree of model competence for following instructions, tool calling, etc, but these things are assumed for any SOTA model today, we are well past this. Almost all of these things, if not all, are already available in other CLI + IDE-based agentic coding tools.
This is really not the point. Anthropic isn’t cutting off third-party. You can use their models via API all you want. Why are people conflating this issue? Anthropic doesn’t owe anyone anything to offer their “unlimited” pro tiers outside of Claude Code. It’s not hard to build your own Opencode and use API keys. CLI interface by itself is not a moat.
>They did not. Anthropic is protecting its huge asset: the Claude Code value chain
that's just it, it has been proven over and over again with alternatives that CC isn't the moat that Anthropic seems to think it is. This is made evident with the fact that they're pouring R&D into DE/WM automation meanwhile CC has all the same issues it has had for months/years -- it's as if they think CC is complete.
if anything MCP was a bigger moat than CC.
also : I don't get the opencode reference. Yes, it's nice -- but codex and gemini-cli are largely compatible with cc generated codebases.
There will be some initial bumpiness as you tell the agent to append the claude.md file to all agent reads -- or better yet just merge it into agent file.) -- but that's about as rough as it'll get.
Claude Code isn't a good as the other tools. The models are the attractive part about Anthropic. I love Opus 4.5, but won't ever use it with Claude Code. Ok... never is strong...I won't use it any time soon. It has a long ways to go. Might get there, we'll see.
I am sure the company is going to get very upset at people no longer paying who were using their product in a way that they did not intend. Just going to be heartbroken. I will never understand the people that make a big deal about "I will never support this business again because of x" when X not something the company ever officially said they cared about.
In all seriousness, I really don't think it should be a controversial opinion that if you are using a companies servers for something that they have a right to dictate how and the terms. It is up to the user to determine if that is acceptable or not.
Particularly when there is a subscription involved. You are very clearly paying for "Claude Code" which is very clearly a piece of software connected to an online component. You are not paying for API access or anything along those lines.
Especially when they are not blocking the ability to use the normal API with these tools.
I really don't want to defend any of these AI companies but if I remove the AI part of this and just focus on it being a tool, this seems perfectly fine what they are doing.
Anthropic doesn’t want you to use a tool that makes it easy to switch to a competitor’s model when you reach a cap. They want to nudge you toward upgrading - Pro -> Max -> Max 20× -> extra usage - rather than switching to Codex. They can afford to make moves like this as long as they stay on top. OpenAI isn’t the good guy here - it’s just an opportunity for them to bite off a bit more of the cake.
I just cancelled, citing this as the reason. I’m actually not all that torn up about it. I mostly want to see how Anthropic responds to the community about this issue.
I was paying for Max but after trying GLM 4.7 I am a convert. Hardly hit the limit but even if I do it is cheaper to get two accounts from Z.ai than one Max from Anthropic
Honestly very confused by the people happy or agreeing with Anthropic here. You can use their API on a pay-per-use basis, or (as I interpreted the agreement) you can prepay as a subscription and use their service with hourly & weekly session limits.
What's changed is that I thought I was subscribing to use their API services, claude code as a service. They are now pushing it more as using only their specific CLI tool.
As a user, I am surprised, because why should it matter to them whether I open my terminal and start up using `claude code`, `opencode`, `pi`, or any other local client I want to send bits to their server.
Now, having done some work with other clients, I can kind of see the point of this change (to play devils' advocate): their subscription limits likely assume aggregate usage among all users doing X amount of coding, which when used with their own cli tool for coding works especially well with client side and service caching and tool-calls log filtering— something 3rd party clients also do to varying effectivness.
So I can imagine a reason why they might make this change, but again, I thought I was subscribing to a prepaid account where I can use their service within certain session limits, and I see no reason why the cli tool on my laptop would matter then.
After reading this opinion ten times today. Can someone explain to me why OpenCode is a “better harness”? Or is it just because it’s open source that people support it?
No matter what the answer to the question is.. IMO "just" is out of place here. Being free/open source software is a big deal, particularly for a developer tool.
> they really, really want to own the entire value chain rather than being relegated to becoming just another "model provider"
This is really the salient point for everything. The models are expensive to train but ultimately worthless if paying customers aren't captive and can switch at will. The issue it that a lot of the recent gains are in the prefill inference, and in the model's RAG, which aren't truly a most (except maybe for Google, if their RAG include Google scholar). That's where the bubble will pop.
105 comments
[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 89.7 ms ] threadwhat? that's a thing ? why would a vibe coder be "renowned"? I use Claude every day but this is just too much.
But they also have shown a weakness by failing to understand why people might want to do this (use their Max membership with OpenCode etc instead).
People aren't using opencode or crush with their Claude Code memberships because they're trying to exploit or overuse tokens or something. That isn't possible.
They do it because Claude Code the tool itself is full of bugs and has performance issues, and OpenCode is of higher quality, has more open (surprise) development, is more responsive to bug fixes, and gives them far more knobs and dials to control how it works.
I use Claude Code quite a bit and there isn't a session that goes by where I don't bump into a sharp edge of some kind. Notorious terminal rendering issues, slow memory leaks, or compaction related bugs that took them 3 months to fix...
Failure to deal with quality issues and listen to customers is hardly a good sign of company culture, leading up to IPO... If they're trying to build a moat... this isn't a strong way to do it.
If you want to own the market and have complete control at the tooling level, you're simply going to have to make a better product. With their mountain of cash and army of engineers at their disposal ... they absolutely could. But they're not.
The best pressure on companies comes from viable alternatives, not from boycotts that leave you without tools altogether.
Archaeologist.dev Made a Big Mistake
If guided by this morality column, Archaeologist should immediately stop using pretty-much anything they are using in their life. There's no company today that doesn't have their hands dirty. The life is a dance between choosing the least bad option, not radically cutting off any sight of "bad".
What I learned from all this is that OpenAI is willing to offer a service compatible with my preferred workflow/method of billing and Anthropic clearly is not. That's fine but disappointing, I'm keeping my Codex subscription and letting my Claude subscription lapse but sure, it would be nice if Anthropic changed their mind to keep that option available because yes, I do want it.
I'm a bit perplexed by some comments describing the situation like OpenCode users were getting something for free and stealing from CC users when the plan quota was enforced either way and were paying the same amount for it. Or why you seem to think this post pointing out that Anthropic's direct competitor endorses that method of subscription usage is somehow malicious or manipulative behavior.
Commerce is a two-way street and customers giving feedback/complaining/cancelling when something changes is normal and healthy for competition. As evidenced by OpenAI immediately jumping in to support OpenCode users on Codex without needing to break their TOS.
Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok are all more or less on par with each other, or a couple months behind at most. Chinese open models are also not far behind.
There's nothing inherent to these products to make them "sticky". If your tooling is designed for it, you can trivially switch models at any time. Mid-conversation, even. And it just works.
When you have basically equivalent products with no switching cost, you have perfect competition. They are all commodities. And that means: none of them can make a profit. It's a basic law of economics.
If they can't make a profit, no matter how revolutionary the tech is, their valuation is not justified, and they will be in big trouble when people figure this out.
So they need to make the product sticky somehow. So they:
1. Add a subscription payment model. Once you are paying a subscription fee, then the calculus on switching changes: if you only maintain one subscription, you have a strong reason to stick with it for everything.
2. Force you to use their client app, which only talks to their model, so you can't even try other models without changing your whole workflow, which most people won't bother to do.
These are bog standard tactics across the tech industry and beyond for limiting competitive pressure.
Everyone is mad about #2 but honestly I'm more mad about #1. The best thing for consumers would be if all these model providers strictly provided usage-based API pricing, which makes switching easy. But right now the subscription prices offer an enormous discount over API pricing, which just shows how much they are really desperate to create some sort of stickiness. The subscriptions don't even provide the "peace of mind" benefit that Spotify-like subscription models provide, where you don't have to worry about usage, because they still have enforced usage limits that people regularly hit. It's just purely a discount offered for locking yourself in.
But again I can't really be that mad because of course they are doing this, not doing it would be terrible business strategy.
Using openrouter myself I find the costs of APIs to be extremely low and affordable? I don't send the whole codebase to every question, I just ask about what I need, and everything is actually ridiculously cheap? $20 lasts about 3 months.
I remember the story used to be the other way around - "just a wrapper", "wrapper AI startups" were everywhere, nobody trusted they can make it.
Maybe being "just a model provider" or "just a LLM wrapper" matter less than the context of work. What I mean is that benefits collect not at the model provider, nor at the wrapper provider, but where the usage takes place, who sets the prompts and uses the code gets the lion share of benefits from AI.
It looks like they need to update their FAQ:
Q: Do I need extra AI subscriptions to use OpenCode? A: Not necessarily, OpenCode comes with a set of free models that you can use without creating an account. Aside from these, you can use any of the popular coding models by creating a Zen account. While we encourage users to use Zen, OpenCode also works with all popular providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI etc. You can even connect your local models.
Apparently nobody gets the Anthropic move: they are only good at coding and that's a very thin layer. Opencode and other tools are game for collecting inputs and outputs that can later be used to train their own models - not necessarily being done now, but they could - Cursor did it. Also Opencode makes it all easily swappable, just eval something by popping another API key and let's see if Codex or GLM can replicate the CC solution. Oh, it does! So let's cancel Claude and save big bucks!
Even though CC the agent supports external providers (via the ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL env var), they are working hard on making it impossible for other models to support their every increasing agent feature set (skills, teleport and remote sessions, LSP, Chrome integration, etc). The move totally makes sense, like it or not.
The CLI tool is terrible compared to opencode.
That is the unfortunate reality, we are now being foisted claude code. :( I wish they just fork opencode.
It's all easily swappable without OpenCode. Just symlink CLAUDE.md -> AGENTS.md and run `codex` instead of `claude`.
> they are working hard on making it impossible for other models to support their every increasing agent feature set (skills, teleport and remote sessions, LSP, Chrome integration, etc).
Every feature you listed has an open-source MCP server implementation, which means every agent that supports MCP already has all those features. MCP is so epic because it has already nailed the commodification coffin firmly shut. Besides, Anthropic has way less funding than OAI or Google. They wouldn't win the moat-building race even if there were one.
That said, the conventional wisdom is that lowering switching costs benefits the underdogs, because the incumbents have more market share to lose.
Maybe they can hope to murder opencode in the meantime with predatory pricing and build an advantage that they don't currently have. It seems unlikely though - the fact that they're currently behind proves the barrier to building this sort of tool isn't that high, and there's lots of developers who build their own tooling for fun that you can't really starve out of doing that.
I'm not convinced that attempting to murder opencode is a mistake - if you're losing you might as well try desperate tactics. I think the attempt is a pretty clear signal that Antrhopic is losing though.
They're after the enterprise market - where office / workspace + app + directory integration, security, safety, compliance etc. are more important. 80% of their revenue is from enterprise - less churn, much higher revenue per W/token, better margins, better $/user.
Microsoft adopting the Anthropic models into copilot and Azure - despite being a large and early OpenAI investor - is a much bigger win than yet another image model used to make memes for users who balk at spending $20 per month.
Same with the office connector - which is only available to enterprises[0] (further speaking to where their focus is). There hasn't yet been a "claude code" moment for office productivity, but Anthropic are the closest to it.
[0] This may be a mistake as Claude Code has been adopted from the ground up
Anthropic is rather obnoxious about training on user data, and I wonder if enterprises (and small businesses!) will grow up soon and start using competing products instead.
(Not that Google is amazing in this regard — their purchasable product options are all over the place to the point where it might be nearly a full time (human!) job to keep track of how to correctly purchase Gemini. Gemini itself seems incapable of figuring this out, or at least I haven’t found the right prompt yet. Gemini is absolutely amazing at hallucinating Google product offerings. OpenAI, on the other hand, seems to have nailed this.)
But that means they lose on inference. Which isn't good.
The types of people who would use this tool are precisely the types of people who don't pay for licenses or tools. They're in a race to the bottom and they don't even know it.
> and that's a very thin layer
I don't think Anthropic understands the market they just made massive investments in.
the reason i got the subscription wasnt to use claude code. when i subscribed you couldnt even use it for claude code. i got it because i figured i could use those tokens for anything, and as i figured out useful stuff, i could split it off onto api calls.
now that exploration of "what can i do with claude" will need to be elsewhere, and the results of a working thing will want to stay with the model that its working on.
If Anthropic ended up in a position that they had to beg various Client providers to be integrated (properly) and had to compete with other LLMs on the same clients and could be swapped out at a moment's notice, they would just become a commodity and lose all leverage. They don't want to end up in such situation. They do need to control the delivery of the product end-to-end to ensure that they control the customer relationship and the quality.
This is also going to be KEY in terms of democratizing the AI industry for small startups because this model of ai-outside-tools-inside provides an alternative to tools-outside-ai-inside platforms like Lovable, Base44 and Replit which don't leave as much flexibility in terms of swapping out tooling.
I use CC as my harness but switch between third party models thanks to ccs. If Anthropic decided to stop me from using third party models in CC, I wouldn't just go "oh well, let's buy another $200/mo Claude subscription now". No. I'd be like: "Ok, I invested in CC—hooks/skills/whatever—but now let's ask CC to port them all to OpenCode and continue my work there".
I don't understand, why would other models not be able to support any, or some, or even a particular single one of these? I don't even see most of these as relevant to the model itself, but rather the harness/agentic framework around it. You could argue these require a base degree of model competence for following instructions, tool calling, etc, but these things are assumed for any SOTA model today, we are well past this. Almost all of these things, if not all, are already available in other CLI + IDE-based agentic coding tools.
I'd be pretty happy if Anthropic acquired Midjourney
that's just it, it has been proven over and over again with alternatives that CC isn't the moat that Anthropic seems to think it is. This is made evident with the fact that they're pouring R&D into DE/WM automation meanwhile CC has all the same issues it has had for months/years -- it's as if they think CC is complete.
if anything MCP was a bigger moat than CC.
also : I don't get the opencode reference. Yes, it's nice -- but codex and gemini-cli are largely compatible with cc generated codebases.
There will be some initial bumpiness as you tell the agent to append the claude.md file to all agent reads -- or better yet just merge it into agent file.) -- but that's about as rough as it'll get.
In all seriousness, I really don't think it should be a controversial opinion that if you are using a companies servers for something that they have a right to dictate how and the terms. It is up to the user to determine if that is acceptable or not.
Particularly when there is a subscription involved. You are very clearly paying for "Claude Code" which is very clearly a piece of software connected to an online component. You are not paying for API access or anything along those lines.
Especially when they are not blocking the ability to use the normal API with these tools.
I really don't want to defend any of these AI companies but if I remove the AI part of this and just focus on it being a tool, this seems perfectly fine what they are doing.
> It is up to the user to determine if that is acceptable or not.
It sounds like you understand it perfectly.
And if I was making any money, the Max tiers would be pennies in the bucket.
What's changed is that I thought I was subscribing to use their API services, claude code as a service. They are now pushing it more as using only their specific CLI tool.
As a user, I am surprised, because why should it matter to them whether I open my terminal and start up using `claude code`, `opencode`, `pi`, or any other local client I want to send bits to their server.
Now, having done some work with other clients, I can kind of see the point of this change (to play devils' advocate): their subscription limits likely assume aggregate usage among all users doing X amount of coding, which when used with their own cli tool for coding works especially well with client side and service caching and tool-calls log filtering— something 3rd party clients also do to varying effectivness.
So I can imagine a reason why they might make this change, but again, I thought I was subscribing to a prepaid account where I can use their service within certain session limits, and I see no reason why the cli tool on my laptop would matter then.
Just pay per token if you want to use third party tools. Stop feeling entitled to other people's stuff.
This is really the salient point for everything. The models are expensive to train but ultimately worthless if paying customers aren't captive and can switch at will. The issue it that a lot of the recent gains are in the prefill inference, and in the model's RAG, which aren't truly a most (except maybe for Google, if their RAG include Google scholar). That's where the bubble will pop.