I don't normally like to come down on the side of the megabigcorp but in this case anthropic aren't being evil. Not yet anyway.
The key question is about why they want to you to use the CLI. If you're not the customer, you're the product.
There's also a monopolistic aspect to this. Having the best model isn't something over can legally exploit to gain advantage in adjacent markets.
It reeks of "Windows isn't done until Lotus won't run," Windows showing spurious error messages for DR-DOS, and Borland C++ losing to the then-inferior Visual C++ due to late support of new Windows features. And Internet Explorer bundling versus Netscape.
Yes, Microsoft badly wanted you to use Office, Visual C++, MS-DOS, and IE, but using Windows to get that was illegal.
Microsoft lost in court, paid a nominal fine, and executives were crying all the way to the bank.
You are the customer, you're paying them directly.
The generic term is predatory pricing and it's regulated to some extent in pretty much every country. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing#Legal_aspect...
When carried out at the international level it's known as dumping. The WTO has provisions against it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)#Legal...
In any case, all this depends on how you define the "market", and the entire market for AI-assisted coding is very nascent and fast-moving to make any reliable calls about dominance at this point.
I was asked for examples of behavior that distorts the market being regulated and provided two of them. There are other examples out there as well.
Both scraping and on-demand agent-driven interactions erode that. So you could look at people doing the same to them as a sort of poetic justice, from a purely moral standpoint at least.