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Comment by extr | Hacker News Reader

The OpenCode guys have really surprised me in the way they've reacted to Anthropic shutting down the side-loaded auth scheme. Very petty and bitter. It's clearly just a business decision from Anthropic and a rational one at that, usage subsidization to keep people on the first party product surface is practically the oldest business move in the book and is completely valid.

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This is not my impression, could you explain what you're talking about?

Ever since the shutdown of the side-load they've been pretty vocally anti-anthropic on twitter. Paranoid that anthropic is going to torpedo them via some backdoor now that they own bun, insinuating that anthropic shut down the auth from a position of weakness since OpenCode is a superior product, etc.

The thing is OpenCode IS a great product, I'm not sure it's "superior", but unfortunately the way things are evolving where the model + harness pairing is so important, it does seem like they are in a similar position to Cursor (and do not have the resources to try to pivot into developing their own foundational model).

I have a huge issue 10416 on OpenCode

https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/issues/10416

- their stance on privacy

not sure i follow - do they leak my information to their own servers by default?

This is probably the most exhaustive answer to your question as of Jan 7: https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/issues/459#issuecommen...

The also leaked all prompts to OpenAI until very recently.

Why does Anthropic care how the tokens are consumed?

Why does Netflix care how the movies they stream to you are consumed? Shouldn't your $8/mo allow you to stream any movie to OpenFlix and consume however you like?

Unironically, you should. In a more just world, laws would mandate service providers not obstruct third party clients.

The pricing would also be different.

Yes, content providers would have to compete with each other on price and library, and client providers could compete on UX and privacy.

You are also not allowed to show these Netflix movies on a big screen in front of your house and charge people. The 8 dollar are for a specific use case, just like the tokens in the subscription.

Because they're selling discounted tokens to use with their tooling.

Same reason movie theaters care about you not bringing your own snacks

You pay for snacks in the cinema and they lose money if you buy elsewhere. Where does Anthropic lose money when I use OpenCode?

This has been explained many times in this thread. Your subscription to Claude models for use in Claude Code is subsidized. That is, it is only meant to be used with that harness.

When you use that API key with OpenCode, you're circumventing that.

That doesn't make sense.

The PS5 is subsidized because the make money with the games.

Printers are subsidized because the make money with the ink.

The API use is subsidized because they make money with Claude Code? I would understand if Claude Code could only be used with Anthropics API but not the other way around. 1 million tokens is 1 million tokens unless Claude Code is burning tokens and others are more efficient in token use.

They want you to become dependent on Claude Code, so that later they can milk you.

I'd say that they want Claude Code to become the standard, so that they can milk corporations on enterprise plans. We individual subscribers are nothing, but we'll go to work and be vocal about specifically having Claude.

The AI companies can spare their whining about contempt of business model. They're selling a service.

because he is giving them at 90% discount in their subscription. they are more than happy if you use the tokens at api pricing, but when subsidized they want you to use their claude code surface.

Because models are quickly moving toward commoditization, whether the big three like it or not. The differentiator now is tooling around those models. By eliminating OpenCode's auth stuff, they prevent leaking customers onto another platform that allows model choice (they will likely lose paying customers to one of the major inference catalogs like OpenRouter once they move from Claude Code to OpenCode).

If you use Claude through an interface that’s not Claude Code, you’ll only stick with it for as long as it proves itself the best. With other interfaces, you can experiment with multiple models and switch from one to another for different tasks or different periods of time.

Those tokens going to other providers are tokens not going to Anthropic, so they want to lock you in with Claude Code. And it clearly works, since a lot of people swear by it.

Valid question. It's because they have a separate product intended for use with general tools: Their API.

Their subscription plans aren't actually "Claude Code Plans". They're subscription plans for their tool suite, which includes claude code. It's offered at a discount because they know the usage of this customer base.

OpenCode used a private API to imitate Claude Code and connect as if it was an Anthropic product, bypassing the need to pay for the API that was for this purpose.

Anthropic has been consistent on this from the start. The subscription plans were never for general use with other tools. They looked the other way for a while but OpenCode was openly flaunting it, so they started doing detection and blocking.

OpenCode and maintainers have gone on the offense on Twitter with some rather juvenile behavior and now they're trying to cheekily allow a plugin system so they can claim they're not supporting it while very obviously putting work into supporting it.

Most of the anger in this thread comes from people who want their monthly subscription to be usable as a cheaper version of the public API, even though it was never sold as that.

> Paranoid that anthropic is going to torpedo them via some backdoor

Like with lawyers or something?

Rather the hypothetical situation where anthropic makes a code change to bun to have a backdoor.

Anthropic leadership is delusional, not suicidal, so they would rather use their lawyers.

The OpenCode bun dependency is an unsettling issue I would imagine.

I think frankly OpenCode is delusional to think that Anthropic is actually "concerned" with them in any way. Anthropic's concerns at this point are on the geopolitical level. I doubt stamping out ToS-violating usage of their subscription services is even on executive radar. OpenAI only allows it because it's a cheap PR win and they take those where they can get them.

Opencode is not delusional, it would be delusional to think Anthropic won't after they have already threatened them.

if you look at the last few weeks of commits, you can see they've been systematically ripping out everything bun-specific and moving to node

opencode is a very meh agent.

Source: i run pretty much all of these agents (codex, cc, droid, opencode, amp, etc) side-by-side in agentastic.dev and opencode had basically 0 win-rate over other agents.

I've been using opencode and would be curious to try something else. What would recommend for self hosted llms?

Very new to self-hosted LLM, but I was able to run Codex with my local ollama server. (codex --oss)

Yeah, I recognized the PR author from Twitter (same avatar) and man he really does come across as incredibly juvenile. Shamelessly talking up OpenAI while shitting on Claude models and the motivation is just so transparent.

I wouldn't call OpenCode a "great" product tbh. It's nice that it's FLOSS of course, but the overall quality is a bit underwhelming and it's clearly possible to build much better open agentic harnesses. It would be nice if more people tried to do this.

Anthropic provides subsidized access to Claude models through Claude Code. It is well understood to be 'a loss leader' so that they can incentivize people to use Claude Code.

OpenCode lets people take the Claude-Code-only-API-Key, and lets them use it in a different harness. Anthropic's preferred way for such interaction is getting a different, Claude API key (and not Claude Code SDK API key).

---

A rough analogy might be something like getting subsidized drinks from a cafe, provided you sit there a eat food. What if someone says, go to the cafe and get free drink and come sit over at our cafe and order food. It is a loose analogy, but you get the idea.

Thank you, I understand all of this. My question was about the reference to "petty and bitter."

> It is well understood to be 'a loss leader'

You have zero proof for this claim. It's like people read somewhere that stuff and keep spitting it out again and again without understanding..

It's not a loss leader - as in they're not making a loss on the subscription.

Because they control the harness(es) and the backend, they can optimise caching and thus the costs to them.

I'm giving up. Caching is optimized server-side on a product for which they can't control the client.

Loss leader doesnt mean $0. Loss leader means it is subsidized to attain another, larger goal.

If it wasn't the case, the Claude API pricing would be the same, $200 for unlimited use. But it's metered.

We don't know if Claude Code bleeds money for every user that touches it. Probably not. But the different pricing is a strong enough clue that it's an appeal product with subsidized tokens consumption.

> If it wasn't the case, the Claude API pricing would be the same, $200 for unlimited use.

How do you figure? That doesn't make any sense to me.

API is intended for a different audience - companies with a big pocket who aren't as price sensitive as private users. So the pricing will be different than for a private subscription.

That is not true at all. I, as an individual, can go and get access to Claude models via API today, for, I dont know, for a custom workflow I have.

What Anthropic is saying is - please dont use the API key from Claude Code for that.

There is huge value in getting people to subscribe to recurring payments. Giving people a discount to do so makes sense and does not mean that the subscription service loses money.

It revolves around how Open AI has much better models and how Claude Code engineers are a bunch of kids (which is kind of ironic).

What exactly are you referring to?

>usage subsidization

Is this actually the case though? Because I can't imagine what kind of hardware they're running to have costs per 1M tokens be above like $3.

This seems like pure misinformation. The code lines that are actually changed:

              hint: {
                opencode: "recommended",
                -anthropic: "API key",
                openai: "ChatGPT Plus/Pro or API key",
              }[x.id],

They're removing the ability to use OpenCode via Anthropic API key

Is this what the legal request demanded or is this just something that OpenCode is doing out of spite? Seems unclear. To me the meat of this change is that they're removing support for `opencode-anthropic-auth` and the prompt text that allows OpenCode to mimic Claude Code behavior. They have been skirting the intent of the original C&D for awhile now with these auth plugins and prompt text.

Using your API key in third-party harnesses has always been allowed. They just don't like using the subsidized subscription plan outside of first-party harnesses. So this seems to be out of spite

Anthropic's issue was always them spoofing OpenCode as Claude Code, piggybacking on the subscription plan.

Banning them from using the pay-per-token API key would be bad business.

It is what the legal demands are. They requested removal of all Anthropic (trademark?) mentions.

This is what most people in the comments are missing. They are removing the ability to even use Anthropic APIs not just your Max subscription.

this not true. api keys are supported. only "claude code" is being dropped.

that code is just a cli hint to which LLM they recommend using. so they stop recommending anthropic. rightfully so.

I believe parent is talking about a separate topic, not about this change.

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