Comment by tomashubelbauer
9 hours ago
Anthropic banned my account when I whipped up a solution to control Claude Code running on my Mac from my phone when I'm out and about. No commercial angle, just a tool I made for myself since they wouldn't ship this feature (and still haven't). I wasn't their biggest fanboy to begin with, but it gave me the kick in the butt needed to go and explore alternatives until local models get good enough that I don't need to use hosted models altogether.
I control it with ssh and sometimes tmux (but termux+wireguard lead to a surprisingly generally stable connection). Why did you need more than that?
I didn't like the existing SSH applications for iOS and I already have a local app that I made that I have open 24/7, so I added a screen that used xterm.js and Bun.spawn with Bun.Terminal to mirror the process running on my Mac to my phone. This let me add a few bells and whistles that a generic SSH client wouldn't have, like notifications when Claude Code was done working etc.
How did they even know you did this? I cannot imagine what cause they could have for the ban. They actively want folks building tooling around and integrating with Claude Code.
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How did this work? The ban, I mean. Did you just wake up to find out an email and that your creds no longer worked? Were you doing things to sub-process out to the Claude Code CLI or something else?
I left a sibling comment detailing the technical side of things. I used the `Bun.spawn` API with the `terminal` key to give CC a PTY and mirrored it to my phone with xterm.js. I used SSE to stream CC data to xterm.js and a regular request to send commands out from my phone. In my mind, this is no different than using CC via SSH from my phone - I was still bound by the same limits and wasn't trying to bypass them, Anthropic is entitled to their different opinion of course.
And yeah, I got three (for some reason) emails titled "Your account has been suspended" whose content said "An internal investigation of suspicious signals associated with your account indicates a violation of our Usage Policy. As a result, we have revoked your access to Claude.". There is a link to a Google Form which I filled out, but I don't expect to hear back.
I did nothing even remotely suspicious with my Anthropic subscription so I am reasonably sure this mirroring is what got me banned.
Edit: BTW I have since iterated on doing the same mirroring using OpenCode with Codex, then Codex with Codex and now Pi with GPT-5.2 (non-Codex) and OpenAI hasn't banned me yet and I don't think they will as they decided to explicitly support using your subscription with third party coding agents following Anthropic's crackdown on OpenCode.
> Anthropic is entitled to their different opinion of course.
I'm not so sure. It doesn't sound like you were circumventing any technical measures meant to enforce the ToS which I think places them in the wrong.
Unless I'm missing some obvious context (I don't use Mac and am unfamiliar with the Bun.spawn API) I don't understand how hooking a TUI up to a PTY and piping text around is remotely suspicious or even unusual. Would they ban you for using a custom terminal emulator? What about a custom fork of tmux? The entire thing sounds absurd to me. (I mean the entire OpenCode thing also seems absurd and wrong to me but at least that one is unambiguously against the ToS.)
> Anthropic is entitled to their different opinion of course.
It’d be cool if Anthropic were bound by their terms of use that you had to sign. Of course, they may well be broad enough to fire customers at will. Not that I suggest you expend any more time fighting this behemoth of a company though. Just sad that this is the state of the art.
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There is weaponized malaise employed by these frontier model providers and I feel like that dark-pattern, what you pointed out, and others are employed to rate-limit certain subscriptions.
They have two products:
* Subscription plans, which are (probably) subsidized and definitely oversubscribed (ie, 100% of subscribers could not use 100% of their tokens 100% of the time).
* Wholesale tokens, which are (probably) profitable.
If you try to use one product as the other product, it breaks their assumptions and business model.
I don't really see how this is weaponized malaise; capacity planning and some form of over-subscription is a widely accepted thing in every industry and product in the universe?
I am curious to see how this will pan out long-term. Is the quality gap of Opus-4.5 over GPT-5.2 large enough to overcome the fact that OpenAI has merged these two bullet points into one? I think Anthropic might have bet on no other frontier lab daring to disconnect their subscription from their in-house coding agent and OpenAI called their bluff to get some free marketing following Anthropic's crackdown on OpenCode.
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So, if I rent out my bike to you for an hour a day for really cheap money and I do so a 50 more times to 50 others, so that my bike is oversubscribed and you and others don't get your hours, that's OK because it is just capacity planning on my side and widely accepted? Good to know.
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They did ship that feature, it's called "&" / teleport from web. They also have an iOS app.
That's non-local. I am not interested in coding assistants that work on cloud based work-spaces. That's what motivated me to developed this feature for myself.
But... Claude Code is already cloud-based. It relies on the Anthropic API. Your data is all already being ingested by them. Seems like a weird boundary to draw, trusting the company's model with your data but not their convenience web ui. Being local-only (ie OpenCode & open weights model running on your own hw) is consistent, at least.
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