The topic Anthropic’s Claude subscriptions no longer include Agent SDK and claude -p usage is currently the subject of lively discussion — readers and analysts are keeping a close eye on developments.
This is taking place in a dynamic environment: companies’ decisions and competitors’ reactions can quickly change the picture.
Over on the ClaudeDevs account, the company has announced that Claude plans will get a “dedicated monthly credit for programmatic usage” starting June 15th. The idea is that you claim the monthly credit once, and Claude will draw from it when you use it for programmatic tasks.
Anthropic says that, once this pool of credits dries up, you can continue with usage credits. If you don’t have them enabled, your usage will pause until the next credit reset. Your subscription’s rate limits are now reserved strictly for “interactive use.”
The change is the newest development in Anthropic’s attempts to separate programmatic from interactive usage. We previously saw Anthropic block third-party tools like OpenClaw from using subscription rate limits and asked its users to move to API billing instead. This caused someone to rack up $200.98 in API usage fees while 86% of their quota went untouched, simply because the string “HERMES.md” appeared in a git commit message. It wasn’t actually being used, but Anthropic’s detection logic flagged it as proof of third-party usage and billed it as such.
Anthropic originally did not intend to refund the $200.98, but after the case went viral, the company gave the user their money back. Now, it seems this new separate credit pool for programmatic usage is Anthropic’s new method of properly billing users for third-party tool usage without the sudden shock of a huge bill landing in people’s inboxes.
However, not everyone sees Anthropic as the good guy here. Theo, the person who managed to reproduce the billing bug on a test repository, replied to the @ClaudeDevs X post stating that Anthropic’s framing of giving people free credit was “wild” and that he now “[has] to make the Claude Code experience on T3 Code significantly worse” to continue using it now that the 25x subsidization has been removed. Because this new pool of credits does not use the subscription plan’s subsidization, Theo’s old code would burn through his new credit plan a lot faster, meaning he now has to pull it back just to stop it from devouring his credits.
Whether this was Anthropic doing the right thing, or it was a tactic to get people paying for their extra programmatic use, one thing’s for certain: in this new world of agentic use and how to bill it, what we get for free now may be an additional fee later.