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Comment by ctoth | Hacker News Reader

I was all set to be pissed off, "you can't tell me what I can make with your product once you've sold it to me!" but no... This outrage bait hinges on the definition of "use"

You can use Claude Code to write code to make a competitor for Claude Code. What you cannot do is reverse engineer the way the Claude Code harness uses the API to build your own version that taps into stuff like the max plan. Which? makes sense?

From the thread:

> A good rule of thumb is, are you launching a Claude code oauth screen and capturing the token. That is against terms of service.

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under the ToS, no - you cannot use claude code to make a competitor to claude code. but you’re right that that appears to mostly be unenforced.

that said, it is absolutely being enforced against other big model labs who are mostly banned from using claude.

> You can use Claude Code to write code to make a competitor for Claude Code.

No, the ToS literally says you cannot.

What's worse is that Anthropic also goes after customers who bought their services through intermediaries, even if the service was API (not subscription).

If you use Claude models through CURSOR, Anthropic still applies its own policies on usage. Just recently they cut off xAI employees' access to Claude models on Cursor [0]. X has threatened to ban Anthropic from X.

[0]: https://x.com/kyliebytes/status/2009686466746822731?s=46

How do you enforce a rule if you make it easy to bypass it?

Does it mean it will be outright banned in China? Otherwise I see DeepCode coming...

It already is. https://www.anthropic.com/news/updating-restrictions-of-sale...

And Anthropic really goes out their way in banning China. Other model providers do a decent job at restricting access in general but look away when someone tries to circumvent those restrictions. But Claude uses extra mechanisms to make it hard. And the CEO was on record about China issues: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/01/nvidia-and-anthropic-clash-o...

I wonder how that ban would be enforced, considering VPNs/tunnels are a thing

not really. Here's their own product clarifying:

Based on the terms, Section 3, subsection 2 prohibits using Claude/Anthropic's Services:

  "To develop any products or services that compete with our Services, including to develop or train any artificial intelligence or machine learning algorithms or models or resell the Services."

  Clarification:

  This restriction is specifically about competitive use - you cannot use Claude to build products that compete with Anthropic's offerings.

  What IS prohibited:
  - Using Claude to develop a competing AI assistant or chatbot service
  - Training models that would directly compete with Claude's capabilities
  - Building a product that would be a substitute for Anthropic's services

  What is NOT prohibited:
  - General ML/AI development for your own applications (computer vision, recommendation systems, fraud detection, etc.)
  - Using Claude as a coding assistant for ML projects
  - Training domain-specific models for your business needs
  - Research and educational ML work
  - Any ML development that doesn't create a competing AI service

  In short: I can absolutely help you develop and train ML models for legitimate use cases. The restriction only applies if you're trying to build something that would compete directly with Claude/Anthropic's core business.

So you can't use Claude to build your own chatbot that does anything remotely like Claude, which would be, basically any LLM chatbot.

This seems reasonable at first glance, but imagine applying it to other development tools — "You can't use Xcode/Visual Studio/IntelliJ to build a commercial IDE", "You can't use ICC/MSVC to build a commercial C/C++ compiler", etc.

In this case it’s “You can’t use our technology to teach your thinking machine from our stealing of other people’s work, because our AI is just learning stuff, not stealing, and you are stealing from us, because we say so.”

When it comes to AI stealing all IP in the world, I really don't give a crap.

What I do give a crap about is the AI companies being little bitches when you politely pilfer what they have already snatched. Their hypocrisy is unlimited.

yes

but also the prohibition goes way further as it's not limited to training competing LLMs but also for programming any of the plumbing etc. around it ....

LOL, that's so much worse than I imagined.

I know we want to turn everything into a rental economy aka the financialization of everything, but this is just super silly.

I hope we're 2-3 years away, at most, from fully open source and open weights models that can run on hardware you can buy with $2000 and that can complete most things Opus 4.5 can do today, even if slower or that needs a bit more handholding.

OpenAI, a while back said their was no moat. You'll see these AI companies panic more desperately as they all realize it's true.

That's different, though. If 20 other companies can host these models, you still have to trust them. The end result should be cheap hardware that's good enough to large a solid, mature LLM that can code comparably to a fast junior dev.

A more interim way to put it is "The current moat is hardware".

> hardware you can buy with $2000

Including how much RAM?

I assume strongly, in 3 years the prices will have dropped a lot again.

Because of increased supply or reduced demand?

Rather increased supply I assume.

Only a few memory suppliers remain, after years of competition, and they have intentionally reduced NAND wafer supply to achieve record profits and stock prices, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46467946

In theory, China could catch up on memory manufacturing and break the OMEC oligopoly, but they could also pursue high profits and stock prices, if they accept global shrinkage of PC and mobile device supply chains (e.g. Xiaomi pivoted to EVs), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46415338#46419776 | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46482777#46483079

AI-enabled wearables (watch, glass, headphones, pen, pendant) seek to replace mobile phones for a subset of consumer computing. Under normal circumstances, that would be unlikely. But high memory prices may make wearables and ambient computing more "competitive" with personal computing.

One way to outlast siege tactics would be for "old" personal computers to become more valuable than "new" non-personal gadgets, so that ambient computers never achieve mass consumer scale, or the price deflation that powered PC and mobile revolutions.

> This restriction is specifically about competitive use - you cannot use Claude to build products that compete with Anthropic's offerings.

I am not a lawyer, regardless of the list of examples below(I have been told examples in contracts and TOS are a mixed bag for enforceability), this text says that if anthropic decides to make a product like yours you have to stop using Claude for that product.

That is a pretty powerful argument against depending heavily on or solely on Claude.

It may or may not be enforceable in the court of law, but they'll definitely ban you if they notice you...

And I'm pretty sure ban evasion can become an issue in the court of law, even if the original TOS may not hold up

The part I quoted:

> This restriction is specifically about competitive use - you cannot use Claude to build products that compete with Anthropic's offerings.

Is more strict than the examples. The examples are what I think may not be enforceable.

So for example:

> What is NOT prohibited: > - General ML/AI development for your own applications (computer vision, recommendation systems, fraud detection, etc.) > - Using Claude as a coding assistant for ML projects

If you use Claude for "General ML/AI development for your own applications..." and Anthropic puts out a specific product for "General ML/AI development for your own applications..." you probably can not use Claude for "General ML/AI development for your own applications..." and have to use the new specific product instead. Well as long as the example is not enforceable.

The first quote looks enforceable and if I want to be on the same side I have to assume it takes precedence over the example.

The trick is to use Codex to write a Claude Code clone, Claude Code to write an Antigravity clone, and Antigravity to write a Codex clone.

Good luck catching me, I'm behind 7 proxies.

or you just do it and be in the EU

it's a clear anti-competive clause by a dominant market leader, such clauses tend to be void AFIK

It might suffice to just make it look like you’re European to keep their goons from harassing you, which hasn’t happened yet but will, because that’s how these stories always end. Get a PO Box for a credit card and VPN in through Europe.

I think one might argue even a VPN might be enough. Theoretically someone might be European and can have American card or any other countries cards and it would generally be okay.

So the only thing you kind of need to figure out is VPN and ProtonVPN provides free vpn service which does include EU servers access as well

I wonder if Claude Code or these AI services block VPN access though.

If they do, ehh, just buy a EU cheap vps (hetzner my beloved) and call it a day plus you also get a free dev box which can also run your code 24x7 and other factors too.

It’s pretty much table stakes to block or restrict or just investigate more closely if requests come from an IP address in a data centre provider or VPN provider ASN though.

I worked at a cloud company a while ago, and if free tier user requests came from another cloud providers IPs we’d have to double check it wasn’t fraud since that happened more often than residential ranges.

Typically anti-geo restriction circumvention takes cloud IP origin blocks as a significant indicator. You'd have better luck with a 'residential' IP.

Who is the dominant market leader? OpenAI dwarfs Anthropic.

Most people still haven’t heard of Anthropic/Claude.

(For the record, I use Claude code all day long. But it’s still pretty niche outside of programming.)

We are discussing Claude Code clones - the market _is_ programming

Those are different markets

In agentic development Claude models rule the roost.

What do you mean by void? Sure you cannot be sued for writing clone, in any country. All they can do is ban account and I think they can ban any account in EU.

void means it's not legal and it's more or less as if the text there where just void/blank

you can't violate a void clause in TOS or a contract

so you can't get a ban/termination for violating a void clause

they still can decide to not do business with you, after providing all service you already payed for

and that is _if_ you can decide to not to business with individuals without providing a reason, in certain situations companies can't do so (mainly related to unfair competition, market power abuse etc.). And this is the point where my knowledge details get to thin to really if/when/how this could or could not apply here.

> Sure you cannot be sued for writing clone, in any country.

in countries where such a clause is valid/not-void, you very well can be sued for using Claude Code to work on/develop e.g. Open Code...

> so you can't get a ban/termination for violating a void clause

> they still can decide to not do business with you

What's the difference?

> in countries where such a clause is valid/not-void, you very well can be sued for using Claude Code to work on/develop e.g. Open Code...

Has anyone in any country ever got successfully sued for violating ToS terms like these? Try to read any ToS and think that average use doesn't violate at least some of them. Even the EU's own site contains things like "including but not limited to".

[1]: https://europass.europa.eu/en/node/2161

> Has anyone in any country ever got successfully sued for violating ToS terms like these?

yes, less private people but definitely companies

> What's the difference?

e.g. YT had been forced to reinstate (and not shadow ban) channels in the EU multiple times because judges ruled that terminations did not had legal basis and they don't have the right to arbitrarily refuse doing business with the people in question (for various reasons, including but not limited to it being clearly a retaliation for suing for right you have. Through the market dominant position of YT also played a non negligible role there).

Or in other words, by itself it might not mean much but in combination with other laws, especially iff claude code because the marked dominant AI editor.

Source: Just believe me?

This whole thing got blown out of proportion because the devs of third party harnesses that use the oauth API never disclosed that they were already actively sidestepping what is a very obvious message that the oauth API is for Claude Code only. What changed recently is that they added more restrictions for the shape of the payloads it accepts, not that they just started adding restrictions for the first time.

TLDR You cannot reverse engineer the oauth API without encountering this message:

https://tcdent-pub.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/cc_oauth_api_e...

There's also a meta aspect here, where the leading third party harness in this discussion is run someone who's chronically steeped in Twitter drama and is definitely not rushing to put this to bed.

Add in various 2nd/3rd place players (Codex and Copilot) with employees openly using their personal accounts to cash in on the situation and there's a lot of amplification going on here.

Yes, I think this makes sense. I think if you are paying by token w/ an API key, then you're good to go, but if you're hijacking their login system then that's a different story.

We have to train ourselves to not be pissed off at headlines. They are most of the time bait.

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