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Comment by cedws | Hacker News Reader

Under what law can Anthropic force OpenCode to do this? Surely it's not illegal to publish code that interacts with an API that's open for everyone to see?

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The API has a very clear ToS prohibiting third-party client usage with the heavily subsidized Claude.ai subscription plans. Anthropic's right to reject or block that traffic, as well as to ban users who attempt this, is well-protected by the ToS those users neglected to read.

Regarding the legal demands here, anyone can issue anyone else a cease and desist order at any time, for anything, in the USA. The demands do not need to have merit.

"Illegal" generally refers to criminal law, not civil suits, this was essentially Anthropic threatening to file a lawsuit. Opencode was under no legal obligation to comply and was not breaking any laws, they simply decided it was easier and cheaper to comply than to fight.

I thought TOS grants Anthropic the right to stop providing the service to a user, not go after them legally.

My understanding is that, if you directly assist someone violate a ToS, you can be held liable.

Bad analogy but the getaway driver doesn’t need to enter the bank to be guilty in the robbery.

Surely there's no way that's true. The logical conclusion of that would be that every random ToS is a law that everyone must abide by, regardless of whether or not they've agreed to it.

By definition, it is exactly a law. It's known as business law. The ToS is a business contract which you must agree to if you wish to use the service. Violating terms of service is literally a breach of contract.

How can you breach a contract if you are not a party to a contract? OpenCode is not using any Anthropic services, they are just publishing some source code that seems (obligatory IANAL) to be protected speech under the First Amendment [0], if this legal argument is happening in American jurisdiction.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_as_speech

Interesting point. I've been looking into a similar issue recently, and for example LinkedIn won a lawsuit against the analytics company hiQ because they violated their ToS for scraping their website. And I think they also never technically had a direct contract they'd breach.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn

Yes, but I think that there is a big difference. In the case you linked, hiQ were actually doing the scraping themselves.

People (or company? not sure) don't make any requests to Anthropic themselves. They just publish code that can make such requests.

I don't think that there is a legal precedent that would make publishing code that can do scraping illegal.

Yeah good point. I think if the scraping code is written specifically for a site / system that prohibits scraping through it's ToS, the company has an edge for a lawsuit. It's a bit of a gray area I think. It depends how much of a threat you form to the company you're scraping, and how big the company is.

I think you may be confused here. Anthropic isn't going after users here at all, they essentially told another company that is interfacing with Anthropic's service in a way that violates Anthropic's TOS to "please stop or else we might have to take legal action in the future".

More broadly, you do not need to establish any kind of contractual right to "go after" anyone legally, that's not how civil law works. A cease and desist letter isn't even really legal action, it's a threat of legal action, but even then, Anthropic doesn't need your permission to sue you, just like you don't need Anthropic's permission to sue them.

If you think that inside the U.S., you have some kind of legal immunity to or protection from cease and desist letters or lawsuits from any company, for any reason¹, you would largely be mistaken. If this is important to you, you might want to talk to a lawyer.

¹ Some states have anti-SLAPP statutes that offer limited protections in certain context, but this isn't applicable in the context of this example between Anthropic and AnomalyCo.

That being said it's maybe a valid claim under "tortuous interference" theory, i.e. OpenCode damaged Anthropic by interfering with the contractual ToS agreement between Anthropic and its users

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortious_interference

but plan is linked to api key which the user provides…

> The API has a very clear ToS prohibiting ...

What is the relevance?

If I understand correctly, OpenCode, i.e. the creator of the tool, does not use Anthropic's API. Their users do.

I am unsure where the connection can be made between the users violating some terms of service and a maker of a tool.

... A tool that had code which explicitly enables and advertises the ability to violate those terms of service.

They specifically built the tools to do it easily.

But they provide Claude specific code that helps their users violate their ToS, and that can be an argument in a lawsuit..

Presumably there's binding legal terms in the license agreement that users agree to in order to access the API.

And what makes Opencode beholden to that, and not the actual customer (you and I)?

tortious interference

They don't need any actual written law behind their actions, all they need is money. What are you gonna do, fight them in court? Good luck with that, especially against a company directly associated with the US government and Palantir.

well i guess the next github will be based out of China on Alibaba cloud

Terms or Service

Cleary they need to get AI which has not accepted those to rewrite it. That is the easy and fast solution these days. Or at most find a person who has not accepted tos do that.

Just re-train your own model on your own collected data. No problem there.

Do you need to accept ToS to vibe code anthropic plugin?

Code is one thing. Using API key is entirely different thing.

using API key also has Terms of Service :)

Yes, which is user’s responsibility!

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