I'm out of the loop on Claude, hasn't it always been possible to use the Anthropic API with a tool like OpenClaw, paying per request? Is this limitation just for using your monthly subscription account?
If I'm paying for compute, why should it matter whether I use Anthropic's harness (e.g., Claude Code) or a 3rd-party harness?
With Claude Code they can predict what the traffic would look like with third party harness they cannot.
Anthropic is constantly destroying goodwill and now seems to be in panic mode.
Well, enough people complained that Anthropic reversed their stance. Additionally, their primary competitor doesn't have any compute restrictions, which should help clarify why this decision was made.
As someone who has been building ML/AI tools (@ MS & Apple) for almost 25 years, I can say that much of the value of the underlying model comes from the harness. Why shouldn't I be able to use the exact same compute with my own bespoke harness when the compute cost is the same?
The Claude Code team continues to push out half-baked features that literally hamper my ability to use their tools.
If I'm paying $200/month for compute, I should be able to use it however I like.
If I pay $200/month for a Max subscription, I can access ALL of Anthropic's tools (CC, Design, Cowork, etc.).
If I pay $200/month for API access, then the only thing I can use is the API.
You don't see how ridiculous that is? No other SOTA model company has these restrictions, which is why Anthropic keeps losing subscribers.
You cannot use a ChatGPT subscription with a CLI tool, if you want to build your own harness you have to go through the API. I'm unsure about Gemini. Claude Code seems to be a special case because it is itself a CLI tool and so it becomes much easier to build a custom harness around, but its not surprising or unusual that it would have restrictions.
Subscription products normally have terms of use that limit how you use it that are shaped by the infrastructure they rely on. A harness is often tuned to usage that fits with the constraints of the service, the backend that supports the tool is engineered for that usage. A custom harness could easily bypass that tuning and become unsustainable.
On top of that, the API tends to be a much more flexible product to use directly. I can understand why you'd have more expectations paying for the max product, but this doesn't sound unusual or unreasonable to me.
Okay, I'm done here. You obviously have no idea how this works (I have a ChatGPT subscription that I use with Codex).
I know you're new to HN, but when someone says: I've literally built subscription tools at both Microsoft and Apple for over 25 years, you might want to stop and reconsider if you might be missing something. You are.
/blocked