Comment by zmmmmm

3 days ago

> building products around claude -p

But OpenClaw is not a product. It's just a pile of open source code that the user happens to choose to run. It's the user electing to use the functionality provided to them in the manner they want to. There's nothing fundamental to distinguish the user from running claude -p inside OpenClaw from them running it inside their own script.

I've mostly defended Anthropic's position on people using the session ids or hidden OAuth tokens etc. But this is directly externally exposed functionality and they are telling the user certain types of uses are banned arbitrarily because they interfere with Anthropic's business.

This really harms the concept of it as a platform - how can I build anything on Claude if Anthropic can turn around and say they don't like it and ban me arbitrarily.

Claude Code is not a platform and you’re not meant to be building on it. Netflix is also not a platform and you shouldn’t be running code (open source or not) to mass download Netflix movies either.

  • It's a reasonable comment, and I should be clear, I don't expect it to be a platform. But I do expect to be able to use its advertised features for any reasonable purpose they can support.

    Where it leaves me is is sort of like the DoD - nobody should use Claude for anything. Because Anthropic has set as principle here that if they don't like what you do, they will interfere with your usage. There is no principle to guide you on what they might not like and therefore ban next. So you can't do anything you want to be able to rely on. If you need to rely on it, don't use Claude Code.

    And to be clear, I'm not arguing at all against using their API per-token billed services.

    • That rather hinges on exactly what "can support" means. Can they support use cases which work individually but would exceed their capacity to provide if done by a large number of their subscribers?

  • Is using claude -p supposed to be dangerous? Could someone be confused as openclaw or other things?

    If yes, why do Anthropic provide this cli flag?