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).

I dont understand this, what is the difference, technically!

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.

- OR - it's about lock-in.

Build the single pane of glass everyone uses. Offer it under cost. Salt the earth and kill everything else that moves.

Nobody can afford to run alternative interfaces, so they die. This game is as old as time. Remember Reddit apps? Alternative Twitter clients?

In a few years, CC will be the only survivor and viable option.

It also kneecaps attempts to distill Opus.

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.

They can try add as much as friction they want. A simple rename in the files and directories like .claude makes the thing work to move out of CC.

It’s not like moving from android to iOS.

You'd be surprised how effective small bits of friction are.

If it was lock in they wouldn't make it absolutely trivial to change inference providers in Claude Code.

The goal is to use Anthropic subscriptions outside of Claude Code!! That is the lock in.

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.

Subscription = token that requires refreshing 1-2x/day, and you get the freedom to use your subscription-level usage amount any way you want.

API = way more expensive, allowed to use on your terms without anthropic hindering you.

Also, Subscription: against the TOS of Claude Code, need to spoof a token and possibly get banned due to it.

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.

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 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.

about 30 times more cost

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.

Was it not obvious what the OP meant by blacklisted?

Blacklisted usually means something is banned. OpenCode is not banned from using Anthropic's API.

No, it was not? For those whose native language is English, "blacklisted" implies Claude API will not allow OpenCode.

API will, they just can spoof Claude Code OAUTH credentials

Has it occurred to anyone that Anthropic highest in the industry API pricing is a play to drive you into their subscription? For the lock-in?

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)

I have my own harness I wrap Claude CLI in, I wonder if I'm breaking the rules...

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.

No, they specifically said it’s only if you’re trying to build a whole other product for public consumption on top of it

If you’re just essentially calling claude -p you’re fine

So it's less 'blacklist' and more a licensing gotcha designed to crush price arbitrage, basically rent-seeking by toggling where the tollbooth sits.

You can still use OpenCode with the Anthropic API.

Yep. That's what I do. Just API keys and you can switch from Opus to GPT especially this week when Opus has been kind of wonky.

I pay $100/mo to Anthropic. Yesterday I coded one small feature via an API key by accident and it cost $6. At this rate, it will cost me $1000/mo to develop with Opus. I might as well code by hand, or switch to the $20 Codex plan, which will probably be more than enough.

I'd rather switch to OpenAI than give up my favorite harness.

Yeah I had a similar experience one time. Which is why I laugh when people suggest Anthropic is profitable. Sure, maybe if everyone does API pricing. Which they won’t because it’s so damn expensive. Another way to think about it is API pricing is a glimpse into the future when everyone is dependent on these services and the subscription model price increases start.

I don't get why people talk about ChatGPT as some great saviour though, they're in the same boat but just have more money to burn.

This is the intention. They do not want folks that can’t pay to use their service.

SOTA models cost SOTA prices. Nothing new there

Out of curiosity, what's your next monthly subscription in terms of price?

Electricity, $95/mo.

Now you got me thinking my electric company should start offering subscription tiers in these uncertain energy times...

Ours never will, they're a cartel, sadly. If you mean fixed subscription, next one is Netflix, I think, or my server provider at $40 or so.

My monthly "connection fee" is more than that (no solar, just EV). Your cartel needs to step it up!

For me it's $0.8/kWh during peak, $0.47 off peak, and super off peak of $0.15. I accidentally left a little mini 500W heater on all day, while I was out, costing > 5% of your whole month!

Wow, what the hell.

The trouble with openai is that by using them, you're supporting fascism.

Yes, you are doing it too with antropic an xAI. I don't get your point. xAI and OpenAI are a little worst? Maybe, still very well fascism.

IMO, OpenAI have either implicitly committed to becoming the IT service for Trump's secret police, or they've willingly signed up for the harsh retaliation Anthropic's getting, knowing that the Trump administration will inevitably try to push OpenAI around in the same way, if they meaningfully refuse to assist in domestic mass surveillance efforts.

Anthropic was fine doing the same, they just didn't want it done to Americans.

OpenAI agreeing to operate as Trump's secret police materially impacts your security as a European, though, because it cements Trump's power.

Again, though, both of them agreed to that. Anthropic just didn't want to spy on Americans.

You can argue a moral equivalence, I guess, but on a practical level, OpenAI's decision is more dangerous for everyone, because it will help to secure Trump as a dictator.

Quite a lot worse. Both OpenAI and xAI were among the largest donors of Trump's campaign

Musk was the largest individual political donor of the 2024 election [1] and Greg Brockman was the largest donor to Trump's "MAGA Inc" super PAC [2]

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/12/06/elon-mu...

[2] https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/867947/o...

You’re right, Anthropic is quite a bit worse https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/03/04/anthrop...

Wait - are you missing all the context on this? Anthropic pushed back against this hard, there was a whole back and forth. I'm on mobile and can't look it up for you atm but if you google about this scenario, Anthropic definitely come out of this looking a lot better than OpenAI and xAI

Did you read the article? Or are you just replying?

Anthropic has literally been working with the DoD and Plantair for 2 years now. They were key to the Iran invasion.

If thats “looking better”, keep it.

Key being “worked”, past tense

Now they’re blacklisted from government work (appeal pending) and OpenAI practically jumped to replace them immediately

You’re right it completely doesn’t matter they’ve been instrumental to ICE and the war in Iran. It’s fine now, their previous actions are excused.

Edit: the word you’re also looking for is “working” not “worked”. I have many friends on government contracts still using Claude.

If you evaluate fascism in terms of donation, yes.

But it is more about the political opinions, IMHO, and Anthropic doesn't sound more attractive than the competitors. Anthropic is very much to the right of the transhumanism spectrum (even if xAI and OpenAI are even farther).

Or have Claude write the code and Gemini review it. (Was using GPT for review until the recent Pentagon thing.)

You can also review the code you ship yourself.

I certainly do -- but having Gemini review it first saves a lot of time.

'just API key' lol. just hundreds of dollars at a minimum

This is the problem with this bollocks. Outsourcing our brains at a per token rate. It'd be exciting if I didn't hand to pay Americans for it.

I'm testing glm5 on Claude code and opencode just to stop consuming American... Soo good so far!

Qwen works fine and requires paying no-one except a hardware vendor.

Yes. And many companies pay that.

a $3000 AMD395+ will get you pretty close to a open development environment.

There are boards starting in the $1500-$2000 range, and complete systems in the $2500-$2700 range. I actually don't know of any Strix Halo mini PCs that cost $3000, do you?

EDIT: The system I bought last summer for $1980 and just took delivery of in October, Beelink GTR 9 Pro, is now $2999.... wow...

the boards now are pricier, at least the framework one. I got it for 1700, and now its ~$2400.

not mini PCs, no, but there are laptops that do

I bought mine, a mini PC, for $1400 just six months ago. This bubble will pass.

RAM has gone up a lot since last summer.

More what to come?

probably more agents to be blocked by anthropic. i've seen theo from t3.gg go through a bunch of loopholes to support claude in his t3code app just so anthropic doesn't sue their asses.