Anthropic pulls the plug on OpenAI’s access to Claude models
Anthropic has revoked OpenAI’s access to its Claude AI models for violating its terms of service.
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Anthropic has revoked OpenAI’s access to its Claude AI models for violating its terms of service.
Sources familiar with the matter told Wired that OpenAI was connecting Claude to internal tools, enabling the company to compare Claude’s performance with its own models in categories such as writing, coding, and safety.
OpenAI also tested how Claude handled harmful prompts, such as those related to self-harm, defamation, and child sexual abuse material (CSAM). The ChatGPT manufacturer could use these results to improve its own models by making adjustments as needed.
Additionally, OpenAI’s technical staff used Claude’s coding tools ahead of the GPT-5 launch, which constitutes a direct violation of the company’s terms of service.
These terms state that commercial customers may not use the tools “to build a competing product or service, including training competing AI models, or resell the services except as expressly approved by Anthropic,” or “reverse engineer or duplicate” the services.
Hannah Wong, OpenAI’s Chief Communications Officer (CCO), told Wired that evaluating other AI systems to measure their progress and improve safety is the “industry standard.”
“While we respect Anthropic’s decision to cut off our API access, it is disappointing considering our API remains available to them,” she said in a statement to Wired.
Anthropic spokesperson Christopher Nulty says 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.”
This isn’t the first time that tech companies have revoked API access from competitors. Last month, Anthropic restricted the AI coding startup Windsurf’s direct access to its Claude models after it was rumored that OpenAI was set to acquire it.
Jared Kaplan, Anthropic’s Chief Science Officer, spoke to TechCrunch about revoking Windsurf's access to Claude.
“I think it would be odd for us to be selling Claude to OpenAI,” he told the news outlet.