[jltsiren]

It's basically the difference between pro-market capitalism and pro-business capitalism. The value to the society comes from competition in the market and from the businesses' ability to choose freely how they do business. When those two goals are in conflict, which one should be prioritized?

Anthropic provides an API third-party clients can use. The pro-market position is that the API must be available at every pricing tier, as the benefits from increased competition outweigh the imposed restrictions to business practices. The pro-business position is that Anthropic must be allowed to choose which tiers can use the API, as the benefits from increased freedom outweigh the reduced competition in the market.

[wasfgwp]

So if Claude code didn’t communicate with Anthropic’s server using a well defined public api but some obscure undocumented binary format it would be fine?

Or should every app/service be required to expose documented APIs?

[jltsiren]

This is not a technical question.

The immediate pro-market position is that if third-party clients are allowed / possible, Anthropic should be allowed to favor its own clients with lower prices.

But the position can go further if the service in question can be considered infrastructure. For example, a company that owns a mobile network may be required to let virtual operators use their infrastructure for a reasonable price. And a company owning a power grid may be required to become a neutral infrastructure provider that is not allowed to generate/sell power.

[wasfgwp]

Anthropic is neither a monopoly nor has a dominant market position. Generally standards applied to companies like that are very different due to good reason.

[jltsiren]

EDIT: Anthropic should not be allowed to favor its own clients with lower prices.

[nerdjon]

Like I mentioned somewhere else I can see why some people think they are entitled to do this and I also fully understand wanting to do it from a cost standpoint.

While I do personally disagree with thinking that you should be able to do this when it was never sold in that way, at the end of the day as a customer you can choose if you want to use the product in the way that they are saying or use something else if you don’t want to support that model.

However the person I was responding too brought up legality which is a very different discussion.