I buy the theory that Claude Code is engineered to use things like token caching efficiently, and their Claude Max plans were designed with those optimizations in mind.
If people start using the Claude Max plans with other agent harnesses that don't use the same kinds of optimizations the economics may no longer have worked out.
(But I also buy that they're going for horizontal control of the stack here and banning other agent harnesses was a competitive move to support that.)
It should just burn quota faster then. Instead of blocking they should just mention that if you use other tools then your quota may reduce at 3x speed compared to cc. People would switch.
When I last checked a few months ago, Anthropic was the only provider that didn't have automatic prompt caching. You had to do it manually (and you could only set checkpoints a few times per context?), and most 3rd party stuff does not.
They seem to have started rejecting 3rd party usage of the sub a few weeks ago, before Claw blew up.
By the way, does anyone know about the Agents SDK? Apparently you can use it with an auth token, is anyone doing that? Or is it likely to get your account in trouble as well?
Absolutely. I installed clawdbot for just long enough to send a single message, and it burned through almost a quarter of my session allowance. That was enough for me. Meanwhile I can use CC comfortably for a few hours and I've only hit my token limit a few times.
I've had a similar experience with opencode, but I find that works better with my local models anyway.
I would be surprised if the primary reason for banning third party clients isn't because they are collecting training data via telemetry and analytics in CC. I know CC needlessly connects to google infrastructure, I assume for analytics.
In what way would it be abused? The usage limits apply all the same, they aren't client side, and hitting that limit is within the terms of the agreement with Anthropic.
The subscription services have assumptions baked in about the usage patterns; they're oversubscribed and subsidized. If 100% of subscriber customers use 100% of their tokens 100% of the time, their business model breaks. That's what wholesale / API tokens are for.
> hitting that limit is within the terms of the agreement with Anthropic
It's not, because the agreement says you can only use CC.
> It's not, because the agreement says you can only use CC.
it's like Apple: you can use macOS only on our Macs, iOS only on iPhones, etc. but at least in the case of Apple, you pay (mostly) for the hardware while the software it comes with is "free" (as in free beer).
Taking umbrage as if it matters how I use the compute I'm paying for via the harness they want me to use it within as long as I'm just doing personal tasks I want to do for myself, not trying to power an apps API with it seems such a waste of their time to be focusing on and only causes brand perception damage with their customers.
The loss of access shows the kind of power they'll have in the future. It's just a taste of what's to come.
If a company is going to automate our jobs, we shouldn't be giving them money and data to do so. They're using us to put ourselves out of work, and they're not giving us the keys.
I'm fine with non-local, open weights models. Not everything has to run on a local GPU, but it has to be something we can own.
I'd like a large, non-local Qwen3-Coder that I can launch in a RunPod or similar instance. I think on-demand non-local cloud compute can serve as a middle ground.
How do I "abuse" a token? I pass it to their API, the request executes, a response is returned, I get billed for it. That should be the end of the conversation.
(Edit due to rate-limiting: I see, thanks -- I wasn't aware there was more than one token type.)
I buy the theory that Claude Code is engineered to use things like token caching efficiently, and their Claude Max plans were designed with those optimizations in mind.
If people start using the Claude Max plans with other agent harnesses that don't use the same kinds of optimizations the economics may no longer have worked out.
(But I also buy that they're going for horizontal control of the stack here and banning other agent harnesses was a competitive move to support that.)
It should just burn quota faster then. Instead of blocking they should just mention that if you use other tools then your quota may reduce at 3x speed compared to cc. People would switch.
When I last checked a few months ago, Anthropic was the only provider that didn't have automatic prompt caching. You had to do it manually (and you could only set checkpoints a few times per context?), and most 3rd party stuff does not.
They seem to have started rejecting 3rd party usage of the sub a few weeks ago, before Claw blew up.
By the way, does anyone know about the Agents SDK? Apparently you can use it with an auth token, is anyone doing that? Or is it likely to get your account in trouble as well?
Absolutely. I installed clawdbot for just long enough to send a single message, and it burned through almost a quarter of my session allowance. That was enough for me. Meanwhile I can use CC comfortably for a few hours and I've only hit my token limit a few times.
I've had a similar experience with opencode, but I find that works better with my local models anyway.
I used it for a few mins and it burned 7M tokens. Wish there was a way to see where it's going!
(There probably is, but I found it very hard to make sense of the UI and how everything works. Hard to change models, no chat history etc.?)
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Wow, that is very surprising and alarming. I wish Anthropic would have made a more public statement as to why they blocked other harnesses.
I would be surprised if the primary reason for banning third party clients isn't because they are collecting training data via telemetry and analytics in CC. I know CC needlessly connects to google infrastructure, I assume for analytics.
If that was the real reason, why wouldn't they just make it so that if you don't correctly use caching you use up more of your limit?
Nah, their "moat" is CC, they are afraid that as other folks build effective coding agent, they are are going lose market share.
In what way would it be abused? The usage limits apply all the same, they aren't client side, and hitting that limit is within the terms of the agreement with Anthropic.
The subscription services have assumptions baked in about the usage patterns; they're oversubscribed and subsidized. If 100% of subscriber customers use 100% of their tokens 100% of the time, their business model breaks. That's what wholesale / API tokens are for.
> hitting that limit is within the terms of the agreement with Anthropic
It's not, because the agreement says you can only use CC.
> The subscription services have assumptions baked in about the usage patterns; they're oversubscribed and subsidized.
Selling dollars for $.50 does that. It sounds like they have a business model issue to me.
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That's on Anthropic for selling a mirage of limits they don't want people to actually reach for.
It's within their capability to provision for higher usage by alternative clients. They just don't want to.
> It's not, because the agreement says you can only use CC.
it's like Apple: you can use macOS only on our Macs, iOS only on iPhones, etc. but at least in the case of Apple, you pay (mostly) for the hardware while the software it comes with is "free" (as in free beer).
Taking umbrage as if it matters how I use the compute I'm paying for via the harness they want me to use it within as long as I'm just doing personal tasks I want to do for myself, not trying to power an apps API with it seems such a waste of their time to be focusing on and only causes brand perception damage with their customers.
Could have just turned a blind eye.
The loss of access shows the kind of power they'll have in the future. It's just a taste of what's to come.
If a company is going to automate our jobs, we shouldn't be giving them money and data to do so. They're using us to put ourselves out of work, and they're not giving us the keys.
I'm fine with non-local, open weights models. Not everything has to run on a local GPU, but it has to be something we can own.
I'd like a large, non-local Qwen3-Coder that I can launch in a RunPod or similar instance. I think on-demand non-local cloud compute can serve as a middle ground.
How do I "abuse" a token? I pass it to their API, the request executes, a response is returned, I get billed for it. That should be the end of the conversation.
(Edit due to rate-limiting: I see, thanks -- I wasn't aware there was more than one token type.)
You can buy this product, right here: https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/about-claude/pricing
That's not the product you buy when you a Claude Code token, though.
Claude Code supports using API credits, and you can turn on Extra Usage and use API credits automatically once your session limit is reached.
This confused me for a while, having two separate "products" which are sold differently, but can be used by the same tool.