While Anthropic can choose whatever tool uses their api or subscription but I never fully understood what they gain from having the subscription explicitly only work for claude code. Is the issue that it disincentivizes the use of their API?
They gave Claude Code a discount to make it work as a product.
The API is priced for all general purpose usage.
They never sold the Claude Code endpoint as a cheaper general purpose API. The stories about “blocking OpenCode” are getting kind of out of hand because they’d block any use of the Claude Code endpoint that wasn’t coming from their Claude Code tool.
It also perhaps tries to preserve some moat around their product/service.
re the whole unused capacity is the nature of inference on GPUs. In any cluster, you can batch inputs (ie takes same time for say 1 query or 100 as they can be parallelized) and now continuous batching[1] exists. With API and bursty nature of requests, clusters would be at 40%-50% of peak API capacity. Makes sense to divert them to subscriptions. Reduces api costs in future, and gives anthropic a way to monetize unused capacity. But if everyone does it, then there is no unused capacity to manage and everyone loses.
they have usage limits on subscription. I dont know about rate limits. Certainly not per request.
> it uses API's unused capacity
I see no waiting or scheduling on my usage - it runs, what appears to be, full speed till I hit my 4 hour / 7 day limit and then it stops.
Claude code is cheap (via a subscription) because it is burning piles of investor cash, while making a bit back on API / pay per token users.
With continuous batching, you don't wait for entire previous batch to finish. The request goes in as one finishes. Hence the wait time is negligible.