Anthropic, the company behind Claude AI, recently made a bold decision. The company has revoked OpenAI’s API access to its models, accusing the company of violating its terms of service.
According to Wired, which broke this news, Anthropic spokesperson Christopher Nulty said: “Claude Code has become the go-to choice for coders everywhere, and so it was no surprise to learn OpenAI's own technical staff were also using our coding tools ahead of the launch of the latest version of ChatGPT in GPT-5. Unfortunately, this is a direct violation of our terms of service.”
Anthropic’s commercial terms of service state that customers can’t use the service to “build a competing product or service, including to train competing AI models or reverse engineer or duplicate services.”
Anthropic’s commercial terms of service states that customers can’t use the service to “build a competing product or service, including to train competing AI models or reverse engineer or duplicate services.”
This could be a big blow for OpenAI as it prepares to launch GPT-5 — the latest version of the company’s technology. While it isn’t clear what OpenAI was accessing Claude for, Anthropic has quickly become known for its coding ability.
However, according to Wired’s sources, OpenAI was plugging Claude directly into its own internal tools instead of using the regular chat interface. This would have allowed the company to run tests to measure Claude’s capabilities against its own model.
This would, in theory, help OpenAI to determine its own model's behaviour and safeguard under similar conditions, giving them a competitive advantage in testing.
“It’s industry standard to evaluate other AI systems to benchmark progress and improve safety. While we respect Anthropic’s decision to cut off our API access, it’s disappointing considering our API remains available to them,” OpenAI’s chief communications officer, Hannah Wong, said in a statement to WIRED.
In response, Nutty stated that Anthropic will “continue to ensure OpenAI has API access for the purposes of benchmarking and safety evaluations as is standard practice across the industry.”
What does this mean for GPT-5?
Reports now suggest that GPT-5 could be here any day. Researchers are already in the early stages of testing the technology, and OpenAI has been hinting at a launch in the next week.
With this in mind, OpenAI has likely now done all of its early comparisons against other tools. While this will be a small blow to OpenAI, it is likely to change GPT-5 at all.
AI companies seem to be getting scrappier in recent months. Staff talent is being stolen from each other and, in cases like this, they are getting more private with their technology.
As two of the main AI companies around right now, Anthropic and OpenAI are likely to keep clashing well into the future.
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