> Why would Anthropic get to dictate how someone uses a "tool" (that's literally what Claude Code is... a tool in a workflow)

Seriously?

It's their tool. And their service.

If this were a standalone tool that didn't rely on their service (like grep), I'd see your point. But it isn't - it's an extension of their service.

In reality, you can use the tool however you want. But they don't have to grant you access to their hosted service for every use case you can think of with the tool.