Re:Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Claude Code
by ipsum2 on Monday February 24, 2025 @02:40PM
(#43163957)
Why gatekeep Claude Code, instead of releasing the code for it? It seems like a direct increase in revenue/API sales for your company.
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I'm not affiliated with Anthropic, but it seems like doing this will commoditize Claude (the AIaaS). Hosted AI providers are doing all they can to move away from being interchangeable commodities; it's not good for Anthropic's revenue for users to be able to easily swap-out the backend of Cloud Code to a local Olama backend, or a cheaper hosted DeepSeek. Open sourcing Claude Code would make this option 1 or 2 forks/PRs away.
It's not hard to make, its a relatively simple CLI tool so there's no moat. Also, the minified source code is available.
> It's not hard to make, its a relatively simple CLI tool so there's no moat
There are similar open source CLI tools that predate Claude Coder. Its reasonable to assume Anthropic chose not to contribute to those projects for reasons other than complexity, and charitably Anthropic likely plans for differentiating features.
> Also, the minified source code is available
The redistribution license - or lack thereof - will be the stumbling block to directly reusing code authored by Anthropic without authorization.