I’ve been running a Claude Code Max subscription through a third-party harness for 12 months straight, draining it to zero every single week. I don’t even have Claude Code installed. And I haven’t been banned. Everywhere on this sub, people panic-post: “No, you can’t do it. They’ll ban you, it’s blocked, it’s against ToS,” etc. But here’s my actual experience: I’ve been about as blatant as possible about this, and nothing. No warnings, no throttling, no account flags. Here’s my setup, to be specific: Third-party harness (not openclaw/hermes) It authenticates via OAuth — I sign into my actual Claude account, no token scraping or credential theft The harness points at a local CLI API proxy that just forwards my own authenticated requests to that harness — it’s not a deployed service, not serving other users, just running locally on my machine for my own coding Zero Anthropic SDK packages installed Zero Claude-P, zero agent SDK Max plan, full weekly drain, for 12 consecutive months I want to be clear about what this isn’t : I’m not standing up a deployed product that resells inference to other people using my subscription. It’s a one-to-one, local-only proxy — my account, my machine, my usage. The only thing that’s “unofficial” is the harness. The actual question: Has anyone here actually gotten banned for this kind of setup — a legit OAuth login through a third-party harness, routed through a local (non-deployed) proxy? Not asking about Hermes Agent or Open Claw, and not asking about people reselling API access on deployed products. Just: local harness swap, same account, has anyone eaten a ban for that? Because the consensus on this sub treats this as an instant bannable offense, and my experience over a full year says otherwise. Curious if I’m an outlier or if enforcement here is mostly theoretical. For what it’s worth, I’ve also been doing the same exact thing with a Google AI Pro subscription - though not draining to zero (but definitely using a good amount). I also had a friend tell me that you can literally run claude setup-token to mint what essentially is an API key that deducts from your subscription usage? submitted by /u/waxyslave
Originally posted by u/waxyslave on r/ClaudeCode