On June 15, Claude's claude -p (headless mode) and the Agent SDK stop drawing from your subscription and move to a separate metered credit. If you've built a pile of claude -p scripts, the news probably landed with a small jolt — I've written plenty of them myself, and "wait, all of that is metered now?" was my first reaction too.
But step back and it's not really one company's pricing decision. The whole industry is converging on the same shape:
GitHub Copilot moved to AI Credits on June 1 (completions stay free; Chat, CLI, and agents consume credits)
OpenAI Codex pairs seat pricing with credits + API usage
And Claude, on June 15, splits headless and the SDK onto a separate credit
