[bluegatty]

If you buy a 'Season's Pass' for Disneyland, you cant 'sublet' it to another kid to use on the days you don't; It's not really buying a 'daily access rate'.

Anthropic subs are not 'bulk tokens'.

It's not an unreasonable policy and it's entirely inevitable that they have to restrict.

[scwoodal]

I’m not subletting my sub to anyone. I’m the only one using the third party harness.

I’m using their own SDK in my own CLI tool.

[Unearned5161]

It’s not a literal sublet to someone else, it’s subletting your tokens to another tool.

At its core it’s a tragedy of commons situation. Using a third party tool like OpenClaw is augmenting your usage far beyond what was anticipated when the subscription plan was made.

Same deal for unlimited storage on drive until people started abusing it.

[scwoodal]

My Claude sub isn’t unlimited.

I didn’t set the limits on the plan; change those if it’s a problem, not irritate your customer base.

[Unearned5161]

You have strong dedication towards taking things literally.

The issue is not that it's limited or unlimited, but rather about expected token usage across a user cohort. When you set a usage limit on something like Claude, or a gym, or a tutoring center, you need to do two things at once; set the limit high enough to attract the aspirations of your intended client base ("oh good this gym lets me go every day of the month if I want to"), but priced accurately enough so that you actually turn a profit on the average usage across most users (you ended up going 20 times the first month, but settled into 15 times a month after).

If there was suddenly a drug that you could take that would, while you slept, make your body walk to the gym and workout, so that you could max out that usage, the gym would be entitled to adjust either the pricing, the limit, or prohibit going to the gym while on the drug, given that they can't actually sustain all their members going every day.

As a correction, I've done some reading and when I said tragedy of the commons, what would fit better is a "congestion externality in a club good".

[paradox460]

Running with the Disney analogy, it's like if Disney didn't let you wear a shirt with a universal or Warner property on it in their parks

Absurd, and not beyond the realm of possibility

[croes]

It’s still me going to Disneyland, I just take a different route

[JimmaDaRustla]

Disingenuous analogy.

It's more buying a season pass for Disneyland, then getting told you can't park for free if you're entering the park even though free parking is included with the pass. Still not unreasonable, but brings to light the intention of the tool is to force the user into an ecosystem rather.

[bluegatty]

It's not a disingenuous analogy ... whatever it is.

But 'you can't park even though the ticket includes parking' is not an appropriate analogy because 3rd party use is definitely not intended. They did not 'state one thing' and the 'disallow it'.

This is a pretty straight forward case of people using their subscription for 'adjacent' use, and Anthropic being more explicit about it.

There's nothing fancy going on here.

[JimmaDaRustla]

Disingenuous or not, it was a bad analogy because it inferred that it was intentionally being abused which is completely false. The proof of that is this original post - Anthropic did not clearly (or even at all) identify how you could use your tokens with the subscription regardless of their intentions.

You're now misinterpreting my argument and misrepresenting it. I did not, in any way, suggest that Anthropic was "pulling the rug" to its users nor that they were entitled to use their tokens using the API with third parties. Full stop.

Of course, third-party API usage wasn't intended to be allowed for consuming subscription tokens. This is exactly what my analogy was structured to explain; a Disneyland season pass isn't intended to be used solely for parking. Anthropic did not intend for subscription tokens to be consumed by third-parties the same way users did not intend to abuse the subscription to derive more value than what was allotted to them. Your analogy missed that last part, which is absolutely crucial to understand.

I don't understand how you're making the exact arguments I'm making, then somehow completely misunderstanding what's being said.