Anthropic Explicitly Blocking OpenCode

> Any tool that used it would get blocked.

Isn't that misleading from Anthropic side? The gist shows that only certain tools are block, not all. They're selectively enforcing their ToS.

They’re not literally blocking OpenCode. You can use OpenCode with their API like any other tool.

They’ve blocked the workaround OpenCode was using to access a private API that was metered differently.

Any tool that used that private endpoint would be blocked. They’re not pushing an agenda. They’re just enforcing their API terms like they would for any use.

Hey! It was a lot of work stealing everything from you, of course you have to pay me a premium to get access to it!

> protect their investment

Viewed another way, the preferential pricing they're giving to Claude Code (and only Claude Code) is anticompetitive behavior that may be illegal.

Seems like another donation to python is coming to mitigate this pr scandal

They cannot actually do this as long as they keep Claude code open source. It is always going to be trivial to replicate how it sends requests in a third party tool.

Is opencode that much better than Codex / Claude Code for cli tooling that people are prepared forsake[1] Sonnet 4.5/Opus 4.5 and switch to GPT 5.2-codex ?

The moat is Sonnet/Opus not Claude Code it can never be a client side app.

Cost arbitrage like this is short lived, until the org changes pricing.

For example Anthropic could release say an ultra plan at $500-$1000 with these restrictions removed/relaxed that reflects the true cost of the consumption, or get cost of inference down enough that even at $200 it is profitable for them and they will stop caring if higher bracket does not sell well, Then $200 is what market is ready to pay, there will be a % of users who will use it more than the rest as is the case in any software.

Either way the only money here i.e. the $200(or more) is only going to Anthropic.

[1] Perceived or real there is huge gulf in how Sonnet 4.5 is seen versus GPT 5.2-codex .

I hope the upcoming DeepSeek coding model puts a dent in Anthropic’s armor. Claude 4.5 is by far the best/fastest coding model, but the company is just too slimy and burning enough $$$ to guarantee enshitification in the near future.

Honestly, I'm a big Claude Code fan, even despite how bad its CLI application is, because it was so much better than other models. Anthropic's move here pretty much signals to me that the model isn't much better than other models, and that other models are due for a second chance.

If their model was truly ahead of the game, they wouldn't lock down the subsidized API in the same week they ask for 5-year retention on my prompts and permission to use for training. Instead, they would have been focusing on delivering the model more cheaply and broadly, regardless of which client I use to access it.

You're not wrong, but most people on this forum are generally positive about companies using private APIs (which this is) for a competitive advantage.

This is pretty undisputed I think... So if we're going to condemn anthropic for it, it'd be pretty one-sided unless we also took it up with any other companies doing so, like Apple, Google, ... And frankly basically all closed source companies.

It's just coincidentally more obvious with this Claude code API because the only difference between it and the public one is the billing situation...

The only basis we'd have to argue otherwise is that the subscription predates Claude code

https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-pro (years ago)

But I didn't think we're strangers to companies pivoting the narrative like this

I don’t know if the Streisand Effect is relevant here since Anthropic will block any other uses of their private APIs, not just OpenCode. The private Claude Code API was never advertised nor sold as a general purpose API for use with any tool.

OpenCode is an interesting tool but if this is your first time hearing of it you should probably be aware of their recent unauthenticated RCE issues and the slow response they’ve had to fixing it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46581095 They say they’re going to do better in the future but it’s currently on my list of projects to keep isolated until their security situation improves.

agreed. This is definitely free PR for OpenCode. I didn't try it myself until I heard the kerfuffle around Anthropic enforcing their ToS. It definitely has a much nicer UX than claude-code, so I might give the GPT subscription a shot sometime, given that it's officially supported w/ 3rd party harnesses, and gpt 5.2 doesn't appear to be that far behind Opus (based on what other people say).

OpenCode is kind of a security disaster though: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46581095. To be clear, I know all software has bugs, including security bugs. But that wasn't an obscure vulnerability, that was "our entire dev team fundamentally has no fucking clue what they're doing, and our security reporting and triage process is nonexistent". No way am I entrusting production code and secrets to that.

I want more customers like you, eat your slop and say thank you.

I use claude.ai with Firefox and have never had this problem.

How can you be sure the issue is not with ublock?

I would be so furious if fucking LLM agents are what finally give browser attestation a foothold on our hardware.

You can't control it to the level of individual LLM requests and orchestration of those. And that is very valuable, practically required, to build a tool like this. Otherwise, you just have a wrapper over another big program and can barely do anything interesting/useful to make it actually work better.

This is what ACP and https://github.com/zed-industries/claude-code-acp enables. ACP controls agents - there is native support in Copilot CLI and Gemini and adapters for claude code and codex.

Switching models is too easy and the models are turning into commodities. They want to own your dev environment, which they can ultimately charge more when compared to access to their model.

I think the focus on OpenCode is distorting the story. If any tool tried to use the CC API instead of the regular API they’d block it.

Claude Code as a product doesn’t use their pay per call API, but they’ve never sold the Claude Code endpoint as a cheaper way to access their API without paying for the normal API

It’s basic market segmentation.

They gave Claude Code a discount to make it work as a product.

The API is priced for all general purpose usage.

They never sold the Claude Code endpoint as a cheaper general purpose API. The stories about “blocking OpenCode” are getting kind of out of hand because they’d block any use of the Claude Code endpoint that wasn’t coming from their Claude Code tool.

Perhaps concentrated use of Claude Code increases their perceived market value.

It also perhaps tries to preserve some moat around their product/service.

Are they ZDR with prompts and completions and possibly rely on usage statistics from their CLI to infer how people are using it?

Owning the client gives them full control over which model to use for which query, prompt caching, rate limiting and lots more. So they can drive massive savings for the ~same output over just giving unrestricted access to the API.

The issue is that claude code is cheap because it uses API's unused capacity. These kind of circumventions hurt them both ways, one they dont know how to estimate api demand, and two, the nature of other harnesses is more bursty (eg: parallel calls) compared to claude code, so it screws over other legit users. Claude code very rarely makes parallel calls for context commands etc. but these ones do.

re the whole unused capacity is the nature of inference on GPUs. In any cluster, you can batch inputs (ie takes same time for say 1 query or 100 as they can be parallelized) and now continuous batching[1] exists. With API and bursty nature of requests, clusters would be at 40%-50% of peak API capacity. Makes sense to divert them to subscriptions. Reduces api costs in future, and gives anthropic a way to monetize unused capacity. But if everyone does it, then there is no unused capacity to manage and everyone loses.

[1]: https://huggingface.co/blog/continuous_batching

that's a separate enforcement of all 3rd party auth (on the 9th)

some of them worked around it, but it looked like they added something specifically for OpenCode today, which seems to have been worked around again after the OpenCode-specific block: https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode-anthropic-auth/commits...

This level of hypocrisy is comical. Exploiting the pricing gap between API usage and subscription leads to vastly increased efficiency and productivity therefore it needs to be legally protected. That's the argument when it comes to LLM training and copyright.

It’s because their models burn tokens like crazy. API use is way too expensive

Edit: or should I say, the subscription is artificially cheap

Well, they are paying. Just not for the product Anthropic wants to sell. Really at root this is a marketing failure. They really, really want to push Claude CLI as a loss leader, and are having to engage in this disaster of a anti-PR campaign to plug all the leaks from people sneaking around.

The root cause is and remains their pricing: the delta between their token billing and their flat fee is just screaming to be exploited by a gray market.

You're hitting an important point. I might go on a tangent here.

It's up to operating systems to offer a content consumption experience for end users which reverses the role of platforms back to their original, most basic offers. They all try to force you into their applications which are full of tracking, advertisements, upsells, and anti-consumer interface design decisions.

Ideally the operating system would untangle the content from these applications and allow the end user to consume the content in a way that they want. For example Youtube offers search, video and comments. The operating system should extract these three things and create a good UI around it, while discarding the rest. Playlists and viewing history can all be managed in the offline part of the application. Spotify offers music, search and lyrics but they want you to watch videos and use social media components in their very opinionated UIs, while actively fighting you to create local backup of your music library.

Software like adblockers, yt-dlp and streamlink are already solving parts of these issues by untangling content from providers for local consumption in a trusted environment. For me the fight by Anthropic against OpenCode fits into this picture.

These companies are acting hostile even towards paying customers, each of them trying to build their walled gardens.

I believe they want you to use the API subscription if you want to use their service with OpenCode. It's possible, just more expensive.

Fwiw, your main point seems scattered across your post where sentences refer to supposed context established by other sentences. It's making it hard to understand your position.

Maybe try the style where you start off with your position in a self-contained sentence, and then write a paragraph elaborating on it.

It's exactly like water. Use their API, and you pay as much water as you drink. But visit them in their pub, and you get a pretty big buffet with lots of water for a one-time price.

This is what the APIs are for. You pay for what you use, just like water.

Accurate.

You can clearly run the provided gist. Calling “You are OpenCode” in the system prompt fails, but not if you replace the name with another tool name (e.g. “You are Cursor”, “You are Devin”). Pretty blatant difference in behavior based on a blacklisted value.