Comment by Aurornis
7 days ago
This is a misunderstanding of the regulations.
They’re not obligated to give other companies access to their services at a discounted rate.
7 days ago
This is a misunderstanding of the regulations.
They’re not obligated to give other companies access to their services at a discounted rate.
They may however be obligated to not give customers access to their services at a discounted rate either - predatory pricing is at least some of the time and in some jurisdictions illegal.
Predatory pricing? They have a public API that anyone can use for a public rate. There is no predatory pricing here.
The Claude Code endpoint is a private API. They’re free to control usage of their private API.
Predatory pricing is selling something below cost to acquire/maintain market dominance.
The Claude subscription used for Claude Code is to all appearances being sold substantially below the cost to run it, and it certainly seems that this is being done to maintain Claude Code's market dominance and force out competitors who cannot afford to subsidize LLM inference in the same way such as OpenCode.
It's not a matter of there being a public API, I don't believe they are obligated to offer one at all, it's a matter of the Claude Subscription being priced fairly so that OpenCode (on top of, say, gemini) can be competitive.
5 replies →
Claude code is so successful that they could silence the api to protect the moat.
I’m surprised they didn’t go with the option of offering opus 4.6 to Claude code only.
The API is really expensive compared to a Max subscription! So they're probably making a lot of money (or at least losing much less) via the API. I don't think it's going anywhere. Worst case scenario they could raise the price even more.
That’s what OpenAI is doing with GPT-5.2-Codex
What makes it predatory?
The Claude subscription (i.e. the pro and max plans, not the API) is sold at what appears to be well below cost in what appears to be a blatant attempt to preserve/create market dominance for claude code, destroying competitors by making it impossible to compete without also having a war chest of money to give away.
3 replies →