The economic tension here is pretty clear: flat-rate subscriptions are loss leaders designed to hook developers into the ecosystem. Once third parties can piggyback on that flat rate, you get arbitrage - someone builds a wrapper that burns through $200/month worth of inference for $20/month of subscription cost, and Anthropic eats the difference.

What is interesting is that OpenAI and GitHub seem to be taking the opposite approach with Copilot/OpenCode, essentially treating third-party tool access as a feature that increases subscription stickiness. Different bets on whether the LTV of a retained subscriber outweighs the marginal inference cost.

Would not be surprised if this converges eventually. Either Anthropic opens up once their margins improve, or OpenAI tightens once they realize the arbitrage is too expensive at scale.