They are not blacklisted. You are allowed to use the API at commercial usage pricing. You are just not allowed to use your Claude Code subscription with OpenCode (or any other third‑party harness for the record).
If you're not paying full-fat API prices, then probably.
From what I've heard, the metrics used by Anthropic to detect unauthorized clients is pretty easy to sidestep if you look at the existing solutions out there. Better than getting your account banned.
Sometimes people want to be real pedants about licensing terms when it comes to OSS, assuming such terms are completely bulletproof, other times people don't think the terms of their agreement with a service provider should have any force at all.
The highest in in the industry for API pricing right now is GPT-5.4-Pro, OpenRouter adding that as an option in their Auto Router was when I had to go customise the routing settings because it was not even close to providing $30/m input tokens and $180/m output tokens of value (for context Opus 4.6 is $5/m input and $25/m output)
(Ok, technically o1-pro is even more expensive, but I'm assuming that's a "please move on" pricing)
With Anthropic, you either pay per token with an API key (expensive), or use their subscription, but only with the tools that they provide you - Claude, Claude Cowork and Claude Code (both GUI and CLI variants). Individuals generally get to use the subscriptions, companies, especially the ones building services on top of their models, are expected to pay per token. Same applies to various third party tools.
The belief is that the subscriptions are subsidized by them (or just heavily cut into profit margins) so for whatever reason they're trying to maintain control over the harness - maybe to gather more usage analytics and gain an edge over competitors and improve their models better to work with it, or perhaps to route certain requests to Haiku or Sonnet instead of using Opus for everything, to cut down on the compute.
Given the ample usage limits, I personally just use Claude Code now with their 100 USD per month subscription because it gives me the best value - kind of sucks that they won't support other harnesses though (especially custom GUIs for managing parallel tasks/projects). OpenCode never worked well for me on Windows though, also used Codex and Gemini CLI.
>or perhaps to route certain requests to Haiku or Sonnet instead of using Opus for everything, to cut down on the compute
You can point Claude Code at a local inference server (e.g. llama.cpp, vLLM) and see which model names it sends each request to. It's not hard to do a MITM against it either. Claude Code does send some requests to Haiku, but not the ones you're making with whatever model you have it set to - these are tool result processing requests, conversation summary / title generation requests, etc - low complexity background stuff.
Now, Anthropic could simply take requests to their Opus model and internally route them to Sonnet on the server side, but then it wouldn't really matter which harness was used or what the client requests anyway, as this would be happening server-side.
Sounds pretty sane, the same way how OpenWebUI and probably other software out there also has a concept of “tool models”, something you use for all the lower priority stuff.
Actually curious to hear what others think about why Anthropic is so set on disallowing 3rd party tools on subscriptions.
The sota models are largely undifferentiated from each other in performance right now. And it’s possible open weight models will get “good enough” relatively soonish. This creates a classic case where inference becomes a commodity. Commodities have very low margins. Training puts them in an economic hole where low margins will kill them.
So they have to move up the stack to higher margin business solutions. Which is why they offer subsidized subscription plans in the first place. It’s a marketing cost. But they want those marketing dollars to drive up the stack not commodity inference use cases.
Anthropic's model deployments for Claude Code are likely optimized for Claude Code. I wouldn't be surprised if they had optimizations like sharing of system prompt KV-cache across users, or a speculative execution model specifically fine-tuned for the way Claude Code does tool calls.
When setting your token limits, their economics calculations likely assume that those optimizations are going to work. If you're using a different agent, you're basically underpaying for your tokens.
It’s probably a mixture of things including direct control over how the api is called and used as pointed out above and giving a discount for using their ecosystem. They are in fact a business so it should not surprise anyone they act as one.
It might well be a mixture, but 95% of that mixture is vendor lock in. Same reason they don't support AGENTS.md, they want to add friction in switching.
It's very straightforward to instrument CC under tmux with send-keys and capturep. You could easily use that for distillation, IMO. There are also detailed I/O logs.
Yup. And right now I'm straight-up breaking Claude's TOS by modifying OpenCode to still accept tokens. But I only have a few days left and don't care if they ban me. I'm using what I paid for.
Anthropic has an API, you can use any client but they charge per input/output/cache token.
One-price-per-month subscriptions (Claude Code Pro/MAX @ $20/$100/$200 a month) use a different authentication mechanism, OAUTH. The useful difference is you get a lot more inference than you can for the same cost using the API but they require you to use Claude Code as a client.
Some clients have made it simple to use your subscription key with them and they are getting cease and desist letters.
Even being non-American with my necessarily flawed understanding of the US constitution, the scenario you described strikes me as a clear violation of the first amendment. First, you would have to compel someone to write new code that changes the way bitcoin fundamentally works. Assuming you manage to do so, you would then have to compel "everyone" to recognise the hard-fork as the "true" chain, again something clearly at odds with the first amendment, and I suspect the laws in many other jurisdictions as well (for obvious reasons).
It wouldn't violate the First Amendment, since the court isn't going to be a government actor for that purpose. A court absolutely could order someone to change their code to comport with the judgement--I mean, this happened to Apple in the not-too-distant past. What the court can't do is compel everybody to use the new hard fork, first for the simple reason that most of those people aren't being sued, but somewhat more fundamentally for the reason that it doesn't really remedy any judicially-cognizable harm. (That said, it's similarly hard to envision a scenario where the court orders someone to modify Bitcoin's code, especially if you're talking about something that retroactively adjusts balances).
Miners investing hundred millions dollars into operation. If court will tell them, like for example 3 biggest miners from US to make that block, they will do it to protect investment, because other way they will get sanctions from gov. Other people on non-mining nodes can fork it, but noone with millions dollars at stake will be on forked chain and only miners make blocks. Court will not be stupid and believe, that such move is legal way to disobey court.
That isn't how Bitcoin works. Miners can't violate the protocol, since the protocol decides what is and isn't mining.
Wright wants a version of Bitcoin created with a backdoor to transaction authentication that lets him take coins without presenting the required credentials. If he created such a version and convinced some miners to run it, they'd simply stop producing blocks (at least from the perspective of anyone who didn't also adopt his backdoor).
So the situation you imagine would just result in hashrate going down-- which can be a bit of an an annoyance since it slows down transaction settlement temporarily, but isn't a dire issue (e.g. Bitcoin lost on the order of half its hash power for a while after china issued a ban).
In any case, if Wright shared your theory and was acting in good faith the target of his actions would be miners and not volunteer open source developers. He's stated outright in public that he expects the ruinous cost of his litigation to destroy the lives of his targets.
In the apple case you're referring to the government dropped its case after Apple argued that the government's demand constituted unconstitutional compelled speech.
In the united states the courts only have power at the pleasure of the constitution, the constitution is binding on all actions of a court. (Now, the courts could conclude some action doesn't violate the constitution-- but that's a different matter)
Except in some narrow cases in civil matters US courts do not order specific performance -- they don't order you to perform some specific act -- instead, the award cash damages for the harm you caused the other party.
In the ninth circuit where I reside, the standing, unchallenged, and unambiguous law that the publication of source code is speech protected by the first amending as was established in Bernstein v. US.
This is also recognized by the long line of modern decisions with respect to defamation law-- it cannot be so overpowered that it abridges the publics free speech rights, even though defamation is always a civil matter.
If you adopt an interpretation that the remedies available to the courts aren't constrained by the constitution, then any imaginable abrogation of the civil rights of the public could be lawfully imposed by simply creating a civil cause of action with the otherwise unconstitutional action as a remedy, then the state can induce some private actor to take action under the law. (The idea that Wright is acting on behalf of some state actor out to undermine Bitcoin is a common conspiracy theory, but a less parsimonious explanation than him being a simple con-artist.)
You're absolutely right that Wright's demand would also require that everyone adopt the alternative version and regard it as Bitcoin--- which is akin to expecting everyone to start believing he's a good guy, something no conceivable court could order because no court can never have power over the hearts of mankind (short of someone inventing a mind control gun :P ). It also has the practical problem that many of the defendants, such as myself, haven't been Bitcoin developers for years. And defendants, even the active ones, have no more ability to take action here that Wright himself does-- it's open source software, after all--, except for the fact that the defendants have a good reputation and Wright has a reputation as a fraud.
But to even get that far wright would also need to overcome the civil rights problems with his request-- at least for the US defendants: Wright is asking the government to compel labor to author the backdoored itself, compel speech by making the defendants publish it, and restrain their speech by prohibiting them from publishing non-backdoored code. He also would have to overcome the fact that the license they offered the software under expressly requires the recipient wave liability for any cause in connection with the software. (and the fact that his claimed loss is pretty obviously nonsense)
He also has to overcome a number of procedural issues, including the fact that the lawsuit was brought in the UK by an insolvent foreign shell corporation itself owned by a web of other insolvent shell companies in different jurisdictions -- none of whom operate in the UK against developers none of whom do business in the UK. Wright prefers the UK because of its motion-by-motion loser-pays default that lets Wright extract enormous legal fees by defeating summary judgement motions by offering forgeries (summary judgements are decided by assuming the facts are in the favor of the non-movant), as well as the weak protection for people's free speech rights. Wright's hail mary to try to keep in in the jurisdiction of the UK courts is to include one of his own entities as a defendant, and of course they immediately agreed to the jurisdiction.
As far as I'm aware, the arbitrage mechanism works both ways. Continuing your analogy, authorized participants are able to trade the underlying turkeys for new tokens, or redeem the tokens for turkeys. When the price of a token is bidded up, its price becomes attractive relative to the turkeys. Authorized participants buy the underlying turkeys, create new tokens and then sell those tokens to take a risk free profit. This continues as long as there is a price mismatch, and ensures that ETF prices are in sync with the underlying assets.
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