The underlying issue here is that OAuth credential reuse is different from API key scraping, and Anthropic hasn't really made that distinction clear. CLI-style usage that respects rate limits and uses official libraries is, architecturally, the same thing Max subscribers do in the web app, same auth, same endpoints. The problem isn't the use case. It's that companies get nervous about anything that looks like it could scale past what they priced in.

It'd be a lot cleaner if they just published explicit rate limits for each subscription tier instead of these vague policy statements.