Anthropic revokes OpenAI's access to Claude
71 comments
·August 1, 2025luke-stanley
dylan604
> Seriously though, why phrase API use of Claude as "special developer access"?
Isn't that precisely what an API is? Normal users do not use the API. Other programs written by developers use it to access Claude from their app. That's like asking why is an SDK phrased as a special kit for developers to build software that works with something they wish to integrate into their app
stavros
If I'm an OpenAI employee, and I use Claude Code via the API, I'm not doing some hacker-fu, I'm just using a tool a company released for the purpose they released it.
I understand that they were technically "using it to train models", which, given OpenAI's stance, I don't have much sympathy for, but it's not some "special developer hackery" that this is making it sound like.
viraptor
Because it's not "special developer access". It's just "normal developer access". The phrasing gives an impression they accessed something other users cannot.
CPLX
It would be normal standard English to assume that special modifies the word access. That would make the sentence semantically be the same as “special access, specifically the type of access used by developers”
Compare with a sentence like “the elevator has special firefighter buttons” which does not mean that only some special type of firefighter uses the button.
slacktivism123
>That's like asking why is an SDK phrased as a special kit
It's Software Developer Kit, not Special Developer Kit ;-)
dgfitz
Normal users use the API constantly, they just don’t realize it.
Isn’t half the schtick of LLMs making software development available for the layman?
chowells
> According to Anthropic’s commercial terms of service, customers are barred from using the service to “build a competing product or service, including to train competing AI models”
That's... quite a license term. I'm a big fan of tools that come with no restrictions on their use in their licenses. I think I'll stick with them.
ethan_smith
These anti-competitive clauses are becoming standard across all major AI providers - Google, Microsoft, and Meta have similar terms. The industry is converging on a licensing model that essentially creates walled gardens for model development.
werrett
You guys are tripping. EULAs have had anti-competition, anti-benchmarking, anti-reverse engineering and anti-disparagement clauses since the late 90s.
These unknown companies called Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, Apple, Adobe, … et al have all had these controversies at various points.
heavyset_go
I am not a fan of Apple or Oracle, but you are not contractually prevented from competing with them if you use Macs or Oracle Cloud to build software.
I wouldn't suggest building on Oracle's property as you drink its milkshake, but the ToS and EULAs don't restrict competition.
thayne
"Everyone else is doing it" doesn't make it right.
It also makes it dangerous to become dependent on these services. What if at some point in the future, your provider decides that something you make competes with something they make, and they cut off your access?
dougSF70
Also Twitter TOS when accessing firehose was that you could not recreate a Twitter client.
bitwize
For years it was a license violation to use Microsoft development tools to build a word processor or spreadsheet. It was also a violation of your Oracle license to publish benchmark results comparing Oracle to other databases.
If you compete with a vendor, or give aid and comfort to their competitors, do not expect the vendor to play nice with you, or even keep you on as a customer.
gruez
>For years it was a license violation to use Microsoft development tools to build a word processor or spreadsheet.
source?
ack_complete
You have to go pretty far back, it was in the Visual C++ 6.0 EULA, for instance (for lack of a better link):
https://proact.eu/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Visual-Basic-En...
It wasn't a blanket prohibition, but a restriction on some parts of the documentation and redistributable components. Definitely was weird to see that in the EULA for a toolchain. This was removed later on, though I forget if it's because they changed their mind or removed the components.
sroussey
Doesn’t the ban on benchmarking Oracle still stand today?
mdaniel
Given the law firm in question which just happens to develop an RDBMS, I wouldn't want to find out
Besides, lol, who cares how fast a model-T can go when there are much nicer forms of transportation that don't actively hate you
DaSHacka
Hmm so "because you split spending between us and a competitor, we'll force you to give the competitor the whole share instead!"
Certainly a mindset befitting microsoft and Oracle, if I ever saw one.
david38
I can understand the benchmark issue. It often happens when someone benchmarks something, it’s biased or wrong in some way.
I don’t believe it should be legal, but I see why they would be butt-hurt
dude250711
Well, Open AI had been whining about DeepSeek back in the day, so it is fair in a way.
palata
Can't we say it's "fair use"? They do whatever they want saying it's "fair use", I don't see why I couldn't.
valtism
Would something like that hold up in court?
compootr
they can choose who they do & don't want to do business with
manquer
Law does not work like that.
- Contracts can have unenforceable terms that can be declared null and void by a court, any decision not to renew the contract in future would have no bearing on the current one.
- there are plenty of restrictions on when/ whether you can turn down business for example FRAND contracts or patents don’t allow you choose to not work with a competitor and so on.
beefnugs
Dumbest thing they could do, why would you cut off insight into what your competitors are doing?
ramoz
Because they don't blatantly read people's prompts. They have a confidential inference architecture.
They don't target and analyze specific user or organizations - that would be fairly nefarious.
The only exception would be if there are flags for trust and safety. https://support.anthropic.com/en/articles/8325621-i-would-li...
v5v3
>Nulty says that Anthropic will “continue to ensure OpenAI has API access for the purposes of benchmarking and safety evaluations as is standard practice across the industry.”
This is, ultimately, a great PR move by Anthropic. 'We are so good Open Ai uses us over their own'
They know full well OpenAI can just sign up again, but not under an official OpenAi account.
navigate8310
It's not easy for a multi-billon dollar company to hide and evade ban. If they are found doing so, they can be easily dragged in courts.
ankit219
The article does not say anything substantial, but just some opposite viewpoints.
1/ Openai's technical staff were using Claude Code (API and not the max plans).
2/ Anthropic's spokesperson says API access for benchmarking and evals will be available to Openai.
3/ Openai said it's using the APIs for benchmarking.
I guess model benchmarking is fine, but tool benchmarking is not. Either openai were trying to see their product works better than Claude code (each with their own proprietary models) on certain benchmarks and that is something Anthropic revoked. How they caught it is far more remarkable. It's one thing to use sonnet 4 to solve a problem on Livebench, its slightly different to do it via the harness where Anthropic never published any results themselves. Not saying this is a right stance, but this seems to be the stance.
hinkley
Feels like something a Jepsen or such should be doing instead of competitors trying to clock each other directly. I can see why they would feel uncomfortable about this situation.
null
null
modeless
OpenAI Services Agreement: "Customer will not [...] use Output to develop artificial intelligence models that compete with OpenAI’s products and services"
Live by the sword, die by the sword.
spwa4
Didn't a whole bunch of AI companies make the news that they refuse to respect X law in AI training. So far, X has been:
* copyright law
* trademark law
* defamation law (ChatGTP often reports wrong facts about specific people, products, companies, ... most seriously claiming someone was guilty of murder. Getting ChatGPT to say obviously wrong things about products is trivial)
* contract law (bypassing scraping restrictions they had agreed as a compay beforehand)
* harassment (ChatGPT made pictures depicting specific individuals doing ... well you can guess where this is going. Everything you can imagine. Women, of course. Minors. Politics. Company politics ...)
So far, they seem to have gotten away with everything.
mhh__
Most of these things are extremely valuable for humanity and therefore I think it's a very good thing that we have had a light touch approach to it so far in the west.
e.g. ignoring that I find that openai, Google, and anthropic in particular do take harassment and defamation extremely seriously (it takes serious effort to get chatgpt to write a bob saget joke let alone something seriously illegal), if they were bound by "normal" law it would be a sepulchral dalliance with safety-ism that would probably kill the industry OR just enthrone (probably) Google and Microsoft as the winners forever.
visarga
> trademark law
Presumably an AI should know about the trademarks, they are part of the world too. There is no point shielding LLMs from trademarks in the wild. A text editor can also infringe trademarks, depending how you use it. AI is taking its direction from prompts, humans are driving it.
raincole
> defamation law
Not sure if you're serious... you think OpenAI should be held responsible for everything their LLM ever said? You can't make a token generator unless the tokens generated always happen to represent factual sentences?
spwa4
Given that they publish everything their AI says? That that's in fact the business model? (in other words, they publish everything their AI says for money) Quite frankly, yes.
If I told people you are a murderer, for money, I'd expect to be sued and I'd expect to be convicted.
brokegrammer
Wow, that's why Copilot has been acting funny on Vscode. Code quality dropped and requests keep failing. But I'm still seeing Claude models in the selector. Can't read this article because of paywall. Are they exaggerating?
Buttons840
Who will pay me for my AI chat histories?
Seriously, make a browser extension that people can turn on and off (no need to be dishonest here), and pay people to upload their AI chats, and possibly all the other content they view.
If Reddit wont let you scrape, pay people to automatically upload the Reddit comments they view normally.
If Claude cuts you off, pay people to automatically upload their Claude conversations.
Am I crazy, am I hastening dystopia?
bmacho
> Who will pay me for my AI chat histories?
All the chatbots with free access do that, they pay you by running your arbitrary computations on their servers.
bit1993
Than I would simply use AI to generate chat histories and get paid (:
mhh__
They could probably pay you based on loss / some similar metric during training.
IAmGraydon
Two things. First, no one wants your AI chat histories. They want to interact with the LLM themselves. Second, their business models break down when they can't steal content to train on. Paying for training data on a large scale is out of the question.
BoorishBears
I've done a lot of post training and data collection for post-training
I think if you're not OpenAI/Anthropic sized (in which case you can do better) you're not going to get much value out of it
It's hard to usefully post-train on wildly varied inputs, and post-training is all most people can afford.
There's too much noise to improve things unless you do a bunch of cleaning and filtering that's also somewhat expensive.
If you constrain the task (for example, use past generations from your own product) you get much further along though.
I've thought about building a Chrome plugin to do something useful for ChatGPT web users doing a task relevant to what my product does, then letting them opt into sharing their logs.
That's probably a bit more tenable for most users since they're getting value, and if your extension can do something like produce prompts for ChatGPT, you'll get data that actually overlaps with what you're doing.
dougflass
[dead]
trilogix
[flagged]
bethekidyouwant
This article says absolutely nothing and appears to be an ad for anthropic
rs186
Do you have adblocker on?
"OpenAI was plugging Claude into its own internal tools using special developer access (APIs)"
Unless it's actually some internal Claude API which OpenAI were using with an OpenAI benchmarking tool, this sounds like a hyped-up way for Wired to phrase it.
Almost like: `Woah man, OpenAI HACKED Claude's own AI mainframe until Sonnet slammed down the firewall man!` ;D Seriously though, why phrase API use of Claude as "special developer access"?
I suppose that it's reasonable to disagree on what is reasonable for safety benchmarking, e.g: where you draw a line and say, "hey, that's stealing" vs "they were able to find safety weak spots in their model". I wonder what the best labs are like at efficiently hunting for weak areas!
Funnily enough I think Anthropic have banned a lot of people from their API, myself included - and all I did was see if it could read a letter I got, and they never responded to my query to sort it out! But what does it matter if people can just use OpenRouter?