The entire point of CC is to drive anthropic subscriptions and it's working. even with the release of the long-awaited gpt5 the anthropic models are still the best coding models.

There are plenty of alternatives for other models like opencode et al, and you can always just set ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL with claude code to have it use another provider. I don't see why they need to do anything in addition to that.

My only request would be for claude code to be a bit more open, less obfuscated and to accept PRs - but I understand the unwillingness of also wanting to manage what would be a very popular open source project.

There's also opencode which is a fork(?) of Claude Code that runs on any model: https://github.com/sst/opencode

And of course, not the same, but Aider still exists and is still a great tool for AI dev.

It's interesting how everyone is suddenly OK with vendor lock-in, quite a change from years past!

There's Claude Code Router, that lets you use any model with Claude Code. Claude is a really good model for agents though, even though Gemini 2.5 and GPT5 are better models overall, Claude uses tools and plans tasks more effectively. A better pattern is to provide sub agents in Claude Code that call out to other LLMs as tools for planning/architecture.

This piece is also covered by a bunch of other cli/tui agents (like codex-cli and opencode) allowing you to switch between Claude and other models (comes in handy depending on the task) so it really all depends on the setup you like. As mentioned in the sibling comment there are ways to get it to work with Claude Code too.