Anthropic thinks they're Apple. They're actually hypocrites.

TL;DR

Anthropic sent legal threats to rivals over subscription API misuse while simultaneously promoting a plugin that violates Apple's own terms of service.

Key Points

• 1.Anthropic forced OpenCode to remove its Claude Code subscription plugin via legal threats. The plugin let users route Claude Code's subscription endpoint through a third-party harness, which Anthropic prohibits — their docs explicitly state OAuth tokens are exclusively for Claude Code and Claude.AI.
• 2.Anthropic then publicly promoted an iMessage plugin for Claude Code that violates Apple's ToS. An Anthropic employee advertised the plugin on social media; Community Notes flagged multiple policy violations, including reverse-engineering Apple's protocols and automated server access.
• 3.The hypocrisy is direct: Anthropic legally punished others for the same behavior it then committed. The same week they forced OpenCode's plugin removal, they promoted a product doing the equivalent thing against Apple's terms — a symmetry Theo says required zero effort to draw.
• 4.Anthropic's Claude Code subscription endpoint is intentionally walled off to lock users into their UI. Unlike OpenAI, GitHub Copilot, and Kilo — which all allow subscription inference through third-party harnesses — Anthropic restricts the $200/month sub exclusively to its own closed-source CLI.
• 5.Anthropic's ToS enforcement is deliberately vague, giving them arbitrary ban power. Theo notes even Anthropic employees don't know where the line is, and developer Matt PCO spent nearly a month getting only non-answers trying to clarify whether his open-source wrapper was permitted.
• 6.Theo draws a direct structural parallel between Anthropic and Apple's walled-garden approach. Both restrict their subscription/API endpoints to first-party apps, but Theo argues Anthropic is worse — Apple makes it easy to switch to SMS or another app, while Anthropic charges 50x more if you want to use a different harness.
• 7.Anthropic's Claude Code source leak revealed they referenced OpenCode's codebase for features like autoscroll and window sizing. This adds another layer of hypocrisy: legally threatening a competitor while copying their implementation details internally.