Comment by gck1
9 hours ago
Yes, I have. And it's obvious that restriction was put there for a reason. The most obvious possible reason is that snatching OAuth made it possible for third party tools to utilize subscription to the fullest - like OpenClaw.
But these tools, including openclaw, didn't have to snatch the OAuth tokens, they could have used claude code built in headless stdio and consequences for Anthropic would be exactly the same. OAuth was just faster to plug in.
So if I open source my solution that allows opencode & openclaw to go through claude cli's headless mode, is this allowed? Is this a product that allows claude.ai login?
What if I open source a 1 line bash loop (e.g. ralph loop) that does the same?
What if I build a more complex bash loop that goes through my tasks in a text file, and calls claude cli for each?
I don't know at which point this becomes "offering claude.ai login" or a "product", or "building agents".
Here's my product:
while :; do cat PROMPT.md | claude ; done
Am I blacklisted now?
They just want people to pay more via API. Technically, your example would violate ToS, because the purpose matters. Like a license file may allow personal use and prohibit commercial use (unless you obtain a commercial license).
Also because normal usage has predictable usage patterns, which allows them to optimise and predict costs. Flat rate pricing only makes sense in that regime.
Before I use time responding, I want to ask again: Did you actually read the website, especially the "Compare the Agent SDK to other Claude tools" section? It answers your question pretty thoroughly.
For the second time, yes. And it's still not clear at what point does a wrapper around claude cli running in headless mode become a 'product' that is going to get my account banned.
My guess is, and others have said this as well in the thread: "when you start utilizing your weekly quotas fully".
But obviously, they can't put "you can't use your weekly allocated quota fully". That would be way too honest and we can't accept that.
No, the link clearly says that if you are not using the harness provided by Claude for the Agent SDK (such as for making tool calls), you have to use the Client SDK. So attempting to prompt the Agent SDK with a third-party app so that the third-party app can then call a tool with the output is not allowed in the Agent SDK. You have to use the Client SDK (API).It even gives an example in the section I asked you to read, which is why I am seriously doubting whether or not you read it.
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