> Anthropic spends a lot of effort to keep you from churning through those tokens with any binary other than their own.

Because that's what the API is for.

This isn't hard to understand. The cost you pay for subsidized tokens is lock-in. If you don't want lock-in, there's the API.

This isn't egregious or wrong or anything. It's exactly what you'd expect out of a heavily subsidized product option.