Kind of. Yes, they want you to use their tools.

I doubt Anthropic ever thought they would have a big moat just based on the models. The platform is just as important.

Claude code and Cowork would still be extremely valuable to Anthropic even if they didn't release them to the public.

Owning the harness gives them a ton of data they can use to tune the models.

This is a perfectly sane strategy even if it's a bit unsavoury to some technical folk.