Why is Anthropic offering such favorable pricing to subscribers? I dunno. But they really want you to use the Claude Code™ CLI with that subscription, not the open-source OpenCode CLI. They want OpenCode users to pay API prices, which could be 5x or more.
So, of course, OpenCode has implemented a workaround, so that folks paying "only" $200/month can use their preferred OpenCode CLI at Anthropic's all-you-can-eat token buffet.
https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/issues/7410#issuecomme...
Everything about this is ridiculous, and it's all Anthropic's fault. Anthropic shouldn't have an all-you-can-eat plan for $200 when their pay-as-you-go plan would cost more than $1,000+ for comparable usage. Their subscription plans should just sell you API credits at, like, 20% off.
More importantly, Anthropic should have open sourced their Claude Code CLI a year ago. (They can and should just open source it now.)
The opencode team[^1][^2] built an entire custom TUI backend that supports a good subset of HTML/CSS and the TypeScript ecosystem (i.e. not tied to Opencode, a generic TUI renderer). Then, they built the product as a client/server, so you can use the agent part of it for whatever you want, separate from the TUI. And THEN, since they implemented the TUI as a generic client, they could also build a web view and desktop view over the same server.
It also doesn't flicker at 30 FPS whenever it spawns a subagent.
That's just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many QoL features in opencode that put CC to shame. Again, CC is a magical tool, but the actual nuts and bolts engineering of it is pretty damning for "LLMs will write all of our code soon". I'm sorry, but I'm a decent-systems-programmer-but-terminal-moron and I cranked out a raymarched 3D renderer in the terminal for a Claude Wrapped[^] in a weekend that...doesn't flicker. I don't mean that in a look-at-me way. I mean that in a "a mid-tier systems programmer isn't making these mistakes" kind of way.
Anyway, this is embarrassing for Anthropic. I get that opencode shouldn't have been authenticating this way. I'm not saying what they are doing is a rug pull, or immoral. But there's a reason people use this tool instead of your first party one. Maybe let those world class systems designers who created the runtime that powers opencode get their hands on your TUI before nicking something that is an objectively better product.
[^1] https://github.com/anomalyco/opentui
[^2] From my loose following of the development, not a monolith, and the person mostly responsible for the TUI framework is https://x.com/kmdrfx
Here's a good benchmark from the brokk team showing the performance per dollar, GPT-5.1 is around half the price of Opus 4.5 for the same performance, it just takes twice as long.
https://brokk.ai/power-ranking?dataset=openround&models=flas...
So as of today, my money is going to OpenAI instead of Anthropic. They probably don't care though, I suspect that not many users are sufficiently keen on alternative harnesses to make a difference to their finances. But by the same token (ha ha), why enforce this? I don't understand why it's so important to them that I'm using Claude Code instead of something else.
You can still bring your own Anthropic API key and use Claude in OpenCode.
What you can no longer do is reverse engineer undocumented Anthropic APIs and spoof being a Claude Code client to use an OAuth token from a subscription-based Anthropic account.
This really sucks for people who want a thriving competitive market of open source harnesses since BYOK API tokens mean paying a substantial premium to use anything but Anthropic's official clients.
But it's hard to say it's surprising or a scandal, or anything terribly different from what tons of other companies have done in the past. I'd personally advise people to expect everything about using frontier coding models becoming much more pay-to-play.
I actually tried this several months back to do a regular API request using the CC subscription token and it gave the same error message
So this software must have been pretending to be Claude Code in order to get around that
A Claude Code subscription should not work with other software, I think this is totally fair
I'm very surprised that it took them this long to crack down on it. It's been against the terms of service from the start. When I asked them back in March last year whether individuals can use the higher rate limits that come with the Claude Code subscription in other applications, that was also a no.
Question is: what changed? New founding round coming up, end of fiscal year, planning for IPO? Do they have to cut losses?
Because the other surprise here is that apparently most people don't know the true cost of tokens and how much money Anthropic is losing with power users of Claude Code.
Models are pretty much democratized. I use Claude Code and opencode and I get more work done these days with GLM or Grok Code (using opencode). Z.ai (GLM) subscription is so worth it.
Also, mixing models, small and large ones, is the way to go. Different models from different providers. This is not like cloud infra where you need to plan the infra use. Models are pretty much text in, text out (let's say for text only models). The minor differences in API are easy to work with.
This is exactly why (when OpenCode and Charm/Crush started diverging) Charm chose not to support “use your Claude subscription” auth and went in a different direction (BYOK / multi-provider / etc). They didn’t want to build a product on top of a fragile, unofficial auth path.
And I think there’s a privacy/policy reason tightening this now too: the recent Claude Code update (2.1-ish) pops a “Help improve Claude” prompt in the terminal. If you turn that ON, retention jumps from 30 days to up to 5 years for new/resumed chats/coding sessions (and data can be used for model improvement). If you keep it OFF, you stay on the default 30-day retention. You can also delete data anytime in settings. That consent + retention toggle is hard to enforce cleanly if you’re not in an official client flow, so it makes sense they’re drawing a harder line.
Until it's released, here's a workaround:
1. git clone https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode-anthropic-auth.git
2. Add to ~/.config/opencode/opencode.json: "plugin": ["file:///path/to/opencode-anthropic-auth/index.mjs"]
3. Run: OPENCODE_DISABLE_DEFAULT_PLUGINS=true opencode
Google will probably close off their Antigravity models to 3P tools as well.
Claude Code, as a coding assistant, isn't even mediocre, it's kind of crap. The reason it's at all good is because of the model underneath - there's tons of free and open agent tools that are far better than Claude Code. Regardless of what they say you're paying the subscription for, the truth is the only thing of value to developers is the underlying AI and API.
I can only think of few reasons why they'd do this: 1. Their Claude Code tool is not simply an agent assistant - perhaps it's feeding data for model training purposes, or something of the sorts where they gain value from it. 2. They don't want developers to use competitor models in any capacity. 3. They're offloading processing or doing local context work to drive down the API usage locally, making the usage minimal. This is very unlikely.
I currently use Opus 4.5 for architecting, which then feeds into Gemini 3 Flash with medium reasoning for coding. It's only a matter of time before Google competes with Opus 4.5, and when they do, I won't have any loyalty to Anthropic.
I really don't understand why they thought this is a good idea. I mean I know why they wish to do this, but it's obviously not going to last.
1. Profile Icon -> Get Help
2. Send us a Message
3. Click 'Refund'
Big corpos only talk money, so it's the best you could do in this situation.
If you can't refund, and need to wait till sub runs out after cancelling, go to the OpenCode repo and rename your tools so they start with capital letters. That'll work around it. They just match on lowercase tool names of standard tools.
OpenCode makes me feel a lot better knowing that my workflow isn't completely dependent on single vendor lock-in, and I generally prefer the UX to Claude Code anyway.
Improve your client so people prefer it? Nah.
Try to force people to use your client by subsidizing it? Now that's what I'm talking about.
As others said, why not just run a bunch of agents on Claude Code to surpass Opencode? I'm sure that's easy with their unlimited tokens!
If that is indeed so welcome, imagine what else you could script via their website to get around Codex rate limits or other such things.
After all what coud be so different about this than what browsers like Atlas do already
Not surprising as this type of credential reuse is always a gray area, but weird Anthropic deployed it on a Thursday night without any warning as the inevitable shitstorm would be very predictable.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPTCoding/comments/1l2y2kh/anth...
I don't think I will renew Anthropic, the open models have reached an inflection point.
The Agent SDK can piggyback on your existing Claude Code authentication
https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/issues/7410#issuecomme...
That is, if that's not pulled in to latest OC by the time I post this. Not sure what the release cycle is for builtin plugins like that, but by force specifying it it definitely pulls master which has a fix.
In ACP, you auth directly to the underlying agent (eg Claude Code SDK) rather than a third-party tool (eg OpenCode) that then calls an inference endpoint on your behalf. If you're logged into Claude Code, you're already logged into Claude Code through any ACP client.
Of course, they are banning for financial economic interests, not nominal alleged contractual violations, so Anthropic is not sympathetic.
// NOT LEGAL ADVICE
Obviously, I think it can make sense to Anthropic since opencode users likely disproportionately cost them money with little lock-in - you can switch the moment a comparable model is available elsewhere. It does not (necessarily) mean there are any legal or ethical issues barring us from continuously using the built-in opencode OAuth though.
> When you use Claude Code, we collect feedback, which includes usage data (such as code acceptance or rejections), associated conversation data, and user feedback submitted via the /bug command.
They subsidize Claude Code because it gives them your codebase and chat history
but of course they have to pay for training too.
this looks like short sighted money grab (do they need it?), that trade short term profit for trust and customer base (again) as people will cancel their unusable subscriptions.
changing model family when you have instructions tuned for for one of them is tricky and takes long time so people will stick to one of them for some time, but with API pricing you quickly start looking for alternatives and openai gpt-5 family is also fine for coding when you spend some time tuning it.
another pain is switching your agent software, moving from CC to codex is more painful than just picking different model in things like OC, this is plausible argument why they are doing this.
I was thinking to try Claude Code later and may reconsider doing so.
And Claude Code Pro is also similar to ChatGPT Pro, being used in a TUI does not mean it is equivalent to an API.
https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/commit/5e0125b78c8da09...
[1]: https://github.com/Vibecodelicious/opencode/tree/surgical_co...
The thing I most fear is them banning multiple accounts. That would be very expensive for a lot of folks.
I believe this is because I am using claude code as a CLI for SDK purposes vs using it as a typescript library. Quite a fortunate choice at the time!
They can’t apply these changes or update parts of the flow for the non-Claude CLI, which explains their latest move.
[0] https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode-anthropic-auth/pull/11
The battle is for the harness layer. And it's quickly going the commodity way as well.
What's left for boutique-style AI companies?
Similar to a gym membership where only a small part of the paying users actually show up.
There seems to be a lot of FUD on how anthropic prices it. but i think many devs and harness builders are intentionally misrespresenting things to build pressure.
API capacity has specific SLAs and the infra is for peak capacity expectation. API demand is notoriously spiky, especially when you don't know who is going to be using it via the third party. At any given time you would have 20%-30% utilization, given the api is mostly used by tools like Cursor who have a system of routing by themselves. For subs, they can use the unused capacity (with high priority to API requests). The marginal cost of a query is not as high especially given kv cache and continuous batching (and with new parallelism techniques). With subs, the number is expected, the concurrency can be modelled, and hence the price per token is lower.
With third party APIs reverse engineering that, it breaks the whole thing in two ways - one more pressure via subs. Claude code rarely parallelizes requests while Cline does it every time (for example). It also cancels out the peak capacity estimation. In a way you could argue that same users doing it via subs woudl have been doing it via api too, but given the pricing differences, not the same. This ends up affecting people legitimately using the subscription.
Like Reddit, they realized they can't show ads (or control the user journey) if everyone is using a third-party client. The $200 subscription isn't a pricing tier. It's a customer acquisition cost for their proprietary platform. Third-party clients defeat that purpose.
Well let me tell you
https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/blob/dev/packages/open...
You literally send your first message “you are Claude code”
The fact that this ever worked was insane.
Headline is more like anthropic vibes a bug and finally catches it.
When iPhones receive negative reviews it's not like only Apple screwed up; others did too, but they sell so much less than Apple that no one hears about them:
"Apple violated my privacy a tiny bit" makes the news;
"Xiaomi sold my fingerprint info to 3rd party vendors" doesn't.
Similarly, Anthropic is under heavy fire recently because frankly, Claude Code is the best coding agent out there, and it's not even close.