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Comment by minimaxir | Hacker News Reader

This appears to be a part of a crackdown on third-party clients using Claude Code's credentials/subscriptions but not through Claude Code.

Not surprising as this type of credential reuse is always a gray area, but weird Anthropic deployed it on a Thursday night without any warning as the inevitable shitstorm would be very predictable.

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Yes, it appears they've been cracking down elsewhere as well: https://github.com/charmbracelet/crush/pull/1783

Are they really that strapped already? It took Netflix like 20 years before they began nickel and diming us.. with Anthro it's starting after less than 20 months in the spotlight.

I suspect it's really about control and the culture of Anthropic, rather than only finances. The message is: no more funtime, use Claude CLI, pay a lot for API tokens, or get your account banned.

All of these companies are losing money in the billions every quarter. Look at how frequent the raises are.

It isn't that simple, demand is growing and they're investing in that growth. With the exception of ElGoog the providers are all private entities, so we don't really know.

Edit: TMTD, hi! That makes sense, yeah.

Unit profitability is out of reach, the demand curve exceeds the profitability curve.

Edit: hello, good to chat again!

They've added this change at the same time they added random trick prompts to try and get you hit enter on the training opt in from late last year. I've gotten three popups inside claude code today at random times trying to trick me into having it train my data with a different selection defaulted than I've already chosen.

(edit 4 times now just today)

Last time I mentioned they are sketchy I got a ton of downvotes. I’m happy to see more support.

More evidence the EU solved the wrong problem. Instead of mandating cookie banners, mandate a single global “fuck off” switch: one-click, automatic opt-out from any feature/setting/telemetry/tracking/training that isn’t strictly required or clearly beneficial to the user as an individual. If it’s mainly there for data collection, ads, attribution, “product improvement”, or monetization, it should be off by default and remain that way so long as the “fuck off” option is toggled. Burden of proof on the provider. Fines exceeding what it takes to get growth teams and KPI hounds to have legal coach them on what “fuck off” means and why they need to.

Remember what happened do the DNT flag in the browser?

They just ignored until it was gone.

If you don’t give them a way to trick and annoy you into accept tracking they ignore completely what you want

DNT wasn't actually legally mandated.

remember how all of HN and tech people were saying that DNT is a Micro$oft scam designed to break privacy because it was enabled by default without requiring user action?

to the point that Apache web server developers added a custom rule in the default httpd.conf to strip away incoming DNT headers !!!

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/09/apach...

DNT was useless because it didn't have a legal basis. It would have been amazing if they had mandated something like this instead of the cookie walls.

Advertisers ignored it because they could. And complained that it defaulted to on, however cookies are supposed to be opt-in so this is how it's supposed to work anyway.

The "crackdown" is really mild though. To be fair to Anthropic, I don't think they have been committed to banning third-party tools.

github:anomalyco/opencode?rev=5e0125b78c8da0917173d4bcd00f7a0050590c55 (a trivial patch that works for now)

They're losing money on every inference, so of course they want as many banned users as they can get away with.

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