Not really. Anthropic for example sells both the harness and the models as a unified kit via Claude Code, it is in their best interest to make sure both parts work as well as possible, via reinforcement learning of previous usage as well for new model performance increases.
but harness are not a moat. They wouldnt have to subsidize their own harness massively if that was the case. Anyone can write a good harness .
That's not true that anyone can write a good harness because the LLM providers have information like prompts that they can RL train off of that someone writing their own harness would not have. Therefore a good and proprietary harness is a moat.
that doesnt answer why claude subsidizes their own harness and bans ppl from using subsidized inference on openclaw ect
Yes it does? They want people to be locked into the Claude Code product.
why do they have "lock" them if its clearly superior to alternatives that merely u se their api.
Because it's a way to make more money in the future. I feel like you're not really getting the difference between what a business does for profit and its technical decisions.
well internet is rife with theories about why anthropic does it. I dont buy that you have it all figured out.