Anthropic may have just committed the biggest business blunder of 2026 -- and we're less than two weeks in. To understand why, let's briefly rewind to 2025, the year when agentic AI went mainstream.
On 3 February 2025, Andrej Karpathy coined the term "vibe coding" to describe the new paradigm.
Less than three weeks later, Anthropic released the first research preview of Claude Code, bringing large language models directly into developers' native habitat: the terminal.
OpenAI followed with Codex CLI in April, and Google released Gemini CLI in June.
All of these terminal-based coding agents follow the same principle:
you type a prompt the agent sends it to a large language model the LLM responds and may instruct the agent to carry out actions like editing files or running commands the agent carries out the actions and appends the results to the prompt
These steps are repeated in a loop, but with a twist: the agent can continue working through the loop until the LLM decides that it requires user input.
The principle is so simple that it immediately gave rise to a bunch of alternative coding agents, including OpenCode, Roo, and Amp Code (to name but a few). Each brought its own unique philosophy and approach to the table, but what they all have in common is that they ultimately rely on large language models for intelligence. Their job is purely to collect user input, execute tool calls, and pass those to the model, over and over again. Therefore, they tend to provide a way to select from a predefined set of models and a means of authenticating with the relevant providers (such as Anthropic or OpenAI), generally using an API key.
When Claude Code launched for real in June 2025, usage of the Anthropic models was included in the Pro and Max plans, for a flat monthly or annual subscription. These plans quickly became very popular when users realised that the effective cost per token was much lower compared to Anthropic's API pricing. So popular, in fact, that it reached $1 billion in annualised revenue after only six months.
Meanwhile, OpenCode rapidly gained popularity, amassing over 50,000 GitHub stars and more than 650,000 monthly active users in the same short timeframe. One of its key selling points was the ability to "Log in with Anthropic to use your Claude Pro or Max account", thus enabling developers to benefit from the attractive Claude subscription pricing. In contrast, other coding agents such as Amp only provided the ability to connect to Claude models via the much more expensive pay-per-token API.
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