I think this is kind of a nothingburger. This reads like a standard clause in any services contract. I also cannot (without a license):
1. Pay for a stock photo library and train an image model with it that I then sell.
2. Use a spam detection service, train a model on its output, then sell that model as a competitor.
3. Hire a voice actor to read some copy, train a text to speech model on their voice, then sell that model.
This doesn't mean you can't tell Claude "hey, build me a Claude Code competitor". I don't even think they care about the CLI. It means I can't ask Claude to build things, then train a new LLM based on what Claude built. Claude can't be your training data.
There's an argument to be made that Anthropic didn't obtain their training material in an ethical way so why should you respect their intellectual property? The difference, in my opinion, is that Anthropic didn't agree to a terms of use on their training data. I don't think that makes it right, necessarily, but there's a big difference between "I bought a book, scanned it, learned its facts, then shredded the book" and "I agreed to your ToS then violated it by paying for output that I then used to clone the exact behavior of the service."
When you buy a book you’re entering into a well-trodden ToS which is absolutely broken by scanning and/or training.
That's empirically false. If it was true, there wouldn't be any ongoing litigation about whether it's allowed or not. It's a legal gray area because there specifically isn't a law that says whether you're allowed or not allowed to legally purchase a text and sell information about the text or facts from the text as a service.
In fact, there's exactly nothing illegal about me replacing what Anthropic is doing with books by me personally reading the books and doing the job of the AI with my meat body (unless I'm quoting the text in a way that's not fair use).
But that's not even what's at issue here. Anthropic is essentially banning the equivalent of people buying all the Stephen King books and using them to start a service that specifically makes books designed to replicate Stephen King writing. Claude being about to talk about Pet Sematary doesn't compete with the sale of Pet Sematary. An LLM trained on Stephen King books with the purpose of creating rip-off Stephen King books arguably does.
> I don't even think they care about the CLI
No they actually do, basically they provide claude code subscription model for 200$ which is a loss making leader and you can realistically get value of even around 300-400$ per month or even more (close to 1000$) if you were using API
So why do they bear the loss, I hear you ask?
Because it acts as a marketing expensive for them. They get so much free advertising in sense from claude code and claude code is still closed source and they enforce a lot of restrictions which other mention (sometimes even downstream) and I have seen efforts of running other models on top of claude but its not first class citizen and there is still some lock-in
On the other hand, something like opencode is really perfect and has no lock-in and is absolutely goated. Now those guys and others had created a way that they could also use the claude subscription itself via some methods and I think you were able to just use OAuth sign up and that's about it.
Now it all goes great except for anthropic because the only reason Anthropic did this was because they wanted to get marketing campaign/lock-in which OpenCode and others just stopped, thus they came and did this. opencode also prevented any lockins and it has the ability to swap models really easily which many really like and thus removing dependence on claude as a lock-in as well
I really hate this behaviour and I think this is really really monopolistic behaviour from Anthropic when one comes to think about it.
Theo's video might help in this context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gh6aFBnwQj4 (Anthropic just burned so much trust...)
That's not at all what they're saying, though. It's just nonsense to say "you can't recreate our CLI with Claude Code" because you can get literally any other competent AI to do it with a roughly comparable result. You don't need to add this clause to the TOS to protect a CLI that doesn't do anything other than calling some back-end—there's no moat here.