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Comment by cedws | Hacker News Reader

This argument has been decapitated countless times already on HN. Anthropic already enforce usage limits for everyone. If those limits are higher than what they want users to actually consume, that's Anthropic's problem.

This move is anti-competitive and Anthropic knows it. They're hurriedly trying to lock the gates and lay landmines behind everyone after a massive surge of new subscribers so that they're stuck using Claude Code. They see it as vital to their survival to not just to be the gas pump for tokens, they need to control the platform.

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I'm baffled how people don't seem intellectually able to grasp what you described here. Claude Code users on Anthropic subscriptions aren't subsidizing those using other harnesses because usage limits aren't counted on the harness layer. It's an anti-competitive move against vc-backed commercial harnesses like Opencode (vc-backed) or Openclaw (openai-affiliated).

> This argument has been decapitated countless times already on HN.

No it hasn't, because the argument is completely correct, and the people mad about it are mad they can't have unlimited usage instead of paying the token API prices.

> This move is anti-competitive and Anthropic knows it.

No it isn't, that's not what "anti-competitive" means, and no court in the world would label it as such. You can't go flailing around looking for legal jargon to attach to behavior just because you don't like it.

API is intended for massive scaled operations (companies) and has no hard usage limits, a subscription is intended only for individual usage (solo dev) and has therefore hard usage limits. Is it that difficult to grasp the difference between API and subscription models?

> Anthropic already enforce usage limits for everyone. If those limits are higher than what they want users to actually consume, that's Anthropic's problem.

I mean, OpenCode is the one changing their app here. So it kinda seems like it's actually everyone else's problem.

I hate these non lawyer HN takes that call anything they don’t like “anti competitive”. Let’s just start with looking up “no duty to deal”.

I don't mean anti-competitive in the legal sense of the word, I mean that it literally is hostile to competition.

It’s a company’s job to be hostile to competition

That’s a very ruthless American capitalist view. I would say a company’s job is to make the best product without resorting to cheap tricks.

Right because other capitalist countries have companies that make it easy for competition

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