There seem to be a ton of people who don't understand how subscription services work. Every single one of them oversells their capacity. The power users that use the services a lot are subsidized by those who don't use it as much, which tends to be the vast majority of the user base. OpenClaw is an autonomous power user. The growing adoption of this walking attack surface was either going to A) cause the cost of Claude to go up or B) get banned to protect the price of the service for actual users.

I suspect people are misdiagnosing the root cause of why Anthropic is doing this a bit.

I don't think this is particularly about the financial impact of people using OpenClaw - they can adjust the amount of tokens in a subscription quite easily.

I think the root cause is that Anthropic is capacity constrained so is having to make choices about the customers they want to serve and have chosen people who use Claude Code above other segments.

We know Anthropic weren't as aggressive as OpenAI through 2025 in signing huge capacity deals with the hyperscalers and instead signed smaller deals with more neo-clouds, and we know some of the neo-clouds have had trouble delivering capacity as quickly as they promised.

We also know Claude Code usage is growing very fast - almost certainly faster since December 2025 than Anthropic predicted 12 months ago when they were doing 12-month capacity planning.

We know Anthropic has suffered from brown-outs in Claude availability.

Put this all together and a reasonable hypothesis is that Anthropic is choosing which customers to service rather than raising prices.

My answer to this is simply rolling back to the pro plan for interactive usage in the coming month, and forcefully cutting myself over to one of the alternative Chinese models to just get over the hump and normalise API pricing at a sensible rate with sensible semantics.

Dealing with Claude going into stupid mode 15 times a day, constant HTTP errors, etc. just isn't really worth it for all it does. I can't see myself justifying $200/mo. on any replacement tool either, the output just doesn't warrant it.

I think we all jumped on the AI mothership with our eyes closed and it's time to dial some nuance back into things. Most of the time I'm just using Opus as a bulk code autocomplete that really doesn't take much smarts comparatively speaking. But when I do lean on it for actual fiddly bug fixing or ideation, I'm regularly left disappointed and working by hand anyway. I'd prefer to set my expectations (and willingness to pay) a little lower just to get a consistent slightly dumb agent rather than an overpriced one that continually lets me down. I don't think that's a problem fixed by trying to swap in another heavily marketed cure-all like Gemini or Codex, it's solved by adjusting expectations.

In terms of pricing, $200 buys an absolute ton of GLM or Minimax, so much that I'd doubt my own usage is going to get anywhere close to $200 going by ccusage output. Minimax generating a single output stream at its max throughput 24/7 only comes to about $90/mo.

Skimming through the comments, it feels like I am reading the same message over and over. I agree with some comments that are pointing out the issue with Anthropics capacity constraints and when Subscription vs Api is appropriate.

I would like to point out something else. I have Z.ai subscription and they have a dashboard on my usage.

When trying out Openclaw a while ago, I noted something worrying. Its constantly consuming tokens, every single hour during the day, it consumed tokens. I could see over a period of 30 days, token usage would climb and climb and climb and then shrink to bottom again, as if Openclaw did a context window compaction.

Note, this usage was happening even though I wasn’t using it. It were always running and doing something in the background.

I believe its their Heartbeat.md mechanism. By default it’s set to run every half an hour. I changed it to twice a day, that was enough to me.

I can imagine if thousands of users where connecting their Openclaw instance with default config to Claude with the latest and greatest Opus model, that must’ve felt a bit.

This is slightly different from what OpenCode was banned from doing; they were a separate harness grabbing a user’s Claude Code session and pretending to be Claude Code.

OpenClaw was still using Claude Code as the harness (via claude -p)[0]. I understand why Anthropic is doing this (and they’ve made it clear that building products around claude -p is disallowed) but I fear Conductor will be next.

[0]: See “Option B: Claude CLI as the message provider” here https://docs.openclaw.ai/providers/anthropic#option-b-claude...

Last week Z.ai coding plan was unusable due to a lot of people abusing the coding plan with OpenClaw. This can be verified: https://openrouter.ai/z-ai/glm-5-turbo

OpenClaw managed to burn 2.46 trillion tokens just in the last 30 days.

I'm not even gonna judge why someone needs an AI Assistant running 24/7, the core issue is that coding plans are being ruined because they're not paying for ridiculous amount of tokens burned.

Anthropic is actually making the right decision: You want a LOT of tokens for your 24/7 agent? Ok, just use the API and pay for your tokens.

I enjoy paying for a sub that I actually use to code, and what we pay today is not even enough to cover the costs of running AI servers.

People in the comments are, in my opinion, overcomplicating this and making it more philosophical than it needs to be. The reason for their decision is dead simple: there aren’t enough GPUs, so they have to cut access somewhere, and they’re starting with claw.

It’s really that straightforward. If tomorrow they decide GPUs are better allocated to enterprise use, they could start removing the $20 plan just as quickly overnight, the same way they did tonight.

This feels less like a pricing issue and more like a structural mismatch.

Subscriptions assume “human usage” — bursty, limited, mostly interactive. Agent systems are closer to autonomous infrastructure load running continuously.

OpenClaw is a good example of this. Once agents operate freely, they don’t behave like users — they behave like infrastructure.

That’s why this kind of restriction isn’t too surprising.

Long term, it seems likely this pushes things toward: - API-first usage - or local / open models

rather than agents sitting on top of subscription-based UIs.

GitHub Copilot supports Anthropic models with any client but they have a monthly usage cap after which it is pay-per-prompt.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46936105 Billing can be bypassed using a combo of subagents with an agent definition

> "Even without hacks, Copilot is still a cheap way to use Claude models"

20260116 https://github.blog/changelog/2026-01-16-github-copilot-now-...

https://github.com/features/copilot/plans $40/month for 1500 requests; $0.04/request after that

https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/concepts/billing/copilot-... Opus uses 3x requests

There are going to be a lot of tools coming soon that are "agent-agnostic", i.e. can run on CLIs including Claude Code. I am personally experimenting with using a combo of MCP + custom UI layer to provide custom tools with bespoke UX and thus turn Claude Code (or any other CLI agent for that matter) into whatever I want. I wonder how they'll deal with that.

For a good existing example developed by a known company, check Cline Kanban: https://cline.bot/kanban

They don't have the MCP-bundling idea that I'm experimenting with, however.

To give credit where it is due: Boris actually submitted a few PRs this week to OpenClaw to increase prompt cache hits. You can see them here: https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw/pullsq=is%3Apr+author%3...

I think the usage patterns of a lot of harnesses are pushing against their planned capacity. I would say they can certainly explain themselves a lot better.

Big Giant Million Dollar Question: Where does having Openclaw using Claude Code via ACP fall? It's using the Claude Code harness, not the model directly.

If you are not aware, ACP creates a persistent session for steering rather than using the models directly.

"these tools put an outsized strain on our systems"

AKA when you fully use the capacity you paid for, that's too much!

I have 0 problem with this. Everybody who was using a Pro subscription with OpenClaw should of expected to be living on borrowed time. The more Anthropic can do to keep the Pro subscriptions at their current price point, the better. It is the best deal in tech imho.

Reminds me of this:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/14/Bill_Gat...

I am actively using ohmypi harness which is based on pi-mono which I believe is within OpenClaw, I don't personally use OpenClaw but I suspect that I will be affected. The reason that I use ohmypi is because I can extend it and put guardrails specific for our company and myself (those are different from SKILLs and more sophisticated than the hooks) + I like the ability to start "tasks" with faster models like gpt5.4-mini for certain tasks and overall have the multi-model capabilities, now all of this seems impossible. I have the $20 sub from OpenAI and it seems that the usage is similar to the $100 plan by Anthropic, I am extensively using GPT5.4 to review and sometimes code along with Opus, right now it seems to me that OpenAI is winning, I can just go with the $200 unlimited usage by OpenAI and use 5.4/5.4mini for everything. On top of that the Chinese models are really capable at the moment, I've tried StepFun and it's really good. Seems to me that Anthropic is sabotaging themselves with those moves. But it is what it is, the cycle of model switching has begun again, I strongly believe that in 2-3 months they will revert that and we will switch models again. :D

Whenever Anthropic has an opportunity to do what's right, they go the opposite way. For example, their source leaks, and instead of open-sourcing it like people have been asking to happen for years so they can contribute fixes because Anthropic doesn't care to maintain their own software, they tighten the noose further.

If it isn't obvious by now, this problem is only going to get worse. The only reason we have subscriptions still is because they're waiting to pull off the biggest bait and switch in history. Don't get sunk on this ecosystem, or you're in for a world of pain in the future. As has always been the case; competition and open-source are our only hope.

Ok. Someone explain to me why they would f themselves this hard with software engineers when they are absolutely winning. This just seems like a bad move.

Is it infrastructure? Are they unable to control costs?

Everyone else is spending like money is water to try to get adoption. Claude has it and is dialing back utility so that its most passionate users will probably leave.

I don’t understand this move.

Claude is a UNIX command line tool with an SDK. Yes there's an interactive mode, but it can be invoked as a normal utility too, and piped to other tools and so on.

In that context, I don't understand the difference between a "third party harness" and a shell script.

How are they even detecting OpenClaw?

You couldn't make me a happier claw^Hm over this. I am running 3-6 simultaneous agents at once and I have trouble breaking 50% weekly usage with a max plan. What these people are doing is just sloppy engineering. OTOH if you use Claude Code to make code changes, then run that code, the max plan remains more or less free beer for as long as it remains free beer for all the reasons cited elsewhere in this thread.

I don't understand exactly what is being banned. I have a vibe coded context manager + chat thread UI that I use to manage multiple claude code cli sessions simultaneous. Is this allowed? If not how would this get identified vs other cli usage? How is this different than openclaw?

Can they actually realistically do this? Nothing technical can stop a client from masquerading as another, and with the right level of dedication, this wouldn't be very hard to do. And since they're mostly targeting power users, seems like they're barking up the wrong tree. Have I missed something?

It seems unclear if this covers all Claude -p uses or just the ones they can identify as misuse/third party. Did they speak on this anywhere?

I use Claude -p for a lot if not most of my coding workflows

Personally I appreciate the clarity and technical enforcement vs banning accounts.

I switched OpenClaw to MiniMax 2.7. This combined with Claude over telegram does enough for me.

OpenClaw used to burn through all my Claude usage anyway.

Yah well I'll be downgrading my subscription to the $20/month plan for the light chats I have with AI outside of using custom harnesses and will figure out a better provider for the agentic tooling.

May I suggest trying Z.ai coding plan? I've had a good experience, and its 1/3rd of the price.

When I do use AI, I already have a solid plan of what I need. Sometimes I ask it to look something up. I never do both in one prompt.

GLM 5.1 can do both, and its way way cheaper. I also don't hit my limit that fast (Plus I get to use it in OpenCode).

That's why I am using Codex. I slightly prefer Claude in terms of code quality, but it's close, but not being able to use my subscription with other CLIs and apps ruins Claude for me.

This has been coming for weeks ever since Anthropic changed their terms and conditions “just a tidy up” - when that happened I took everything I had done in open claw and migrated into Claude code with /loop and tbh I’m happier because I can see in terminals what is happening rather than the odd slack message here or there and I can also use slack to receive messages.

Thanks openclaw for getting me ahead, I’ve taken that and am in Claude code again.

Marketing geniuses. They had 2 options here:

1. Make a better product/alternative to Openclaw and start eating their userbase. They hold the advantage because the ones "using their servers too much" are already their clients so they could reach out and keep trying to convert. Openclaw literally brought them customers at the door.

2. Do everyone royally and get them off their platform - with a strong feeling of dislike or hatred towards Anthropic.

Let's see how 2 goes for them. This is not the space to be treating your clients this way.

Boris Cherny on this

https://x.com/bcherny/status/2040206440556826908?s=20

Is any code that auto launches Claude Code considered a "harness"?

I'm hoping that they won't bother you unless you specifically max out the subscription limits every time

I don’t understand why they’re catching any flak here lol if you want to use the frontier model more then pay for it?

Graceful handling from Anthropic

OpenClaw has always been a scammy open source project to me. I don't get the hype and I think people need to stop using it.

Where is the official announcement on https://www.anthropic.com/ or https://claude.com/? I haven't gotten an email.

The same reason I would not use a proprietary text editor applies to harnesses. It's enough of a constraint to use a proprietary service, for me the line is at the tooling. Sunk cost and all it's things.

I am genuinely curious about OpenClaw's continuing allure. I understood it way back then, when Claude Cowork did not have channels and scheduled tasks. But now? Has Claude not become a sane replacement for OpenClaw? I can see that it's fun to play with OpenClaw and non-SOTA providers, but why would anyone run OpenClaw on a Claude Code subscription?

Reality is Ant can supply X tokens and they see demand for 10*X tokens. So they’ll charge whatever the top 10% of users are willing to pay, and slowly degrade the value of the subscriptions until everyone has moved to another supplier or migrated to the 10% price point. The draconian ToS that they sometimes enforce is their mechanism to degrade subscription value over time. Expect agent-sdk to be next on the chopping block, moving from oauth supported to api only. When they switch it they will rightly point out the docs never explicitly said it was allowed.

Their whole business model seems built around selling you limits that you will never be able to utilize: limit you to tools that will never run long.

Claude Code seems designed to terminate quickly- mine always finds excuses to declare victory prematurely given a task that should take hours.

Am I still allowed to invoke cc in a bash script, or is that out too? Interactive sessions only.

This is why I'm wary of vendor lock-in with these subscription models. It feels like bait and switch once they have your payment info.

Why couldn’t they allow the creation of API keys under subscriptions and just apply more stringent limits to those?

Like an API key on a subscription that could be used for 3rd party tools would count 2x towards usage when compared to the same model when used through Claude Code.

Or it’d count the same towards weekly or 5 hour limits across all models BUT would have a separate API keys under subscriptions limit that’d be more grounded. A bit like how they already have a separate Sonnet usage counter.

That’d both allow them not to go broke and also not lose so much community goodwill AND give subscription users an alternative to paying for their enterprise-oriented (overpriced) tokens.

Thought this was already something people were getting their accounts banned on? This is new?

I’m feel like the decent AI models are going to become out of reach for normal people soon enough.

Even the $20 subscription is ridiculously limited and they keep adding more and more limits. The $200 a month sub is insane and only going to get worse and yet still limited

Just give me a subscription tier where I’m not being blocked out every afternoon.

Im hitting rate limits within 1:45 during afternoons.

I can’t justify extra usage since it’s a variable cost, but I can justify a higher subscription tier.

This reminds me of crypto in the sense that it’s accessible for normal people to burn incredible amounts of resources trying to accomplish a vague goal.

This is why people are switching over to Codex

OpenAI / Gpt should do the opposite. Let the people use their subscription on openclaw and break down which tasks are efficient vs inefficient. Help openclaw learn to be efficient.

Their ultimate goal is to do everything. Eventually, if people are using their service for a specific use case, it's highly likely they will just step in and do it themselves

I think openAI and Anthropic are getting ready to launch their next generation of models (Claude 5 and GPT 6), which will quickly make us hit our rate-limits and we'll start entering a world where most people will start to have/want to pay for additional tokens.

We're all just getting too used to having great models for a fraction of the the value they give us.

$200 is a lot of money per month. I just bought this much in OAI API credits and I expect them to last me until August or so.

If you started plugging tools into GPT5.4 you may soon discover that you don't need anything beyond a single conversation loop with some light nesting. A lot of the openclaw approach seems to be about error handling, retry, resilience and perspectives on LLM tool use from 4+ months ago. All of these ideas are nice, but it's a hell of a lot easier to just be right the first time if all you need is a source file updated or an email written. You can get done in 100 tokens what others can't seem to get done in millions of tokens. As we become more efficient, the economic urgency around token smuggling begins to dissipate.

The solution as usual is open source.

For example...

We recently moved a very expensive sonnet 4.6 agent to step-3.5-flash and it works surprising well. Obviously step-3.5-flash is nowhere near the raw performance of sonnet but step works perfectly fine for this case.

Another personal observation is that we are most likely going to see a lot of micro coding agent architectures everywhere. We have several such cases. GPT and Claude are not needed if you focus the agent to work on specific parts of the code. I wrote something about this here: https://chatbotkit.com/reflections/the-rise-of-micro-coding-...

Some of the vigorous defending of Claude changing the deal, makes me wonder if Open Claw is banned because they have their own version they are working on deploying.

Skimming the comments it feels like devs are giving Anthropic way too easy of a pass. Killing access to Openclaw is whatever. But Anthropic is proving to be not worth our trust or our data. They actively talk about replacing developers and act in so many ways against their own customers.

> We’ve been working to manage demand across the board, but these tools put an outsized strain on our systems. Capacity is a resource we manage carefully and we need to prioritize our customers using our core products.

but couldn't i use this in off times only?

> for third-party harnesses

What's the exact definition of third-party harnesses? They have an Agent SDK in Claude Code that can be used. Are they trying to say that only Anthropic products can use pro/max plans?

This is the classic car wash subscription scheme. You sign up a bunch of people for $40 a month to wash their car. Most people only go to wash their car once or twice a month (or even less), which offsets those few folks that do it three times a week or more.

The problem Anthropic is running into is that OpenClaw made it easy for everyone to become one of those folks that washes their car three times a week or more.

I’m sure they were losing money on subscriptions in general but now they are really losing money. Shutting off OpenClaw specifically probably helps stem some of the bleeding.

Hoping this means that we'll see a lot of barely used Mac Minis for sale from the people who were bragging about buying them.

What about when you use Claude agent SDK on your laptop?

Extra usage is very sneaky you don't get any notice that you are using extra usage and could end up with unnecessary costs in case you would have preferred to wait an hour or so.

This seems like a reasonable move even putting aside the reasoning about breaking the assumptions that make a subscription model cheaper than a pay-per-use model.

Why would they actively subsidize the ticking timebomb? When OpenClaw has an especially large security incident, Anthropic will probably be affected just for the association.

Like, right alongside this post on the front page, we have a post about a relatively serious privilege escalation vulnerability in OpenClaw.

It's the tragedy of the commons where OpenClaw users abuse the system and everyone has to suffer.

Anthropic is a great showing for startup founders how if you have a great product people will buy it, even if they dislike your pricing, your marketing and the CEO opinions.

Real PMF sells itself. The risk is of course the competition catching up, I bet switching costs are very low on this setup.

Discussion (655 points, 1 month ago, 793 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47069299

Super confusing email. Not sure why I received. Am i to assume my account was flagged? I only use my subscription for Claude Code.

UPDATE:

reply on x Thariq @trq212 only flagged accounts, but you can still claim the credit

I've been running multiple OpenClaw agents 24/7 since January. While I saw this coming, it was still a kick in the teeth. I've been iterating through workarounds and potential solutions. My OpenClaw gateway costs are estimating roughly 7x what I pay for Max today.

https://focusoverfeatures.substack.com/p/claude-max-blocks-o...

The main reason I find myself using Opus is because it's a better communicator. (Yes, I know it's better in some areas like frontend vs. others but this is not significant enough for my purposes.)

So this change has actually forced a reckoning of sorts. Maybe the best option is to outsource the thinking to another model, and then send it back to Opus to package up.

Ironically this is how the non-agent works too to an extent.

Go pay for the API. It's not complicated.

How does Anthropic detect that a person is using OpenClaw vs using Claude Code?

Forgive me if someone asked this already and I can't find it in the comments.

Is this going to nuke all bring your own API 3rd party tools? I've been casually using fewshell https://github.com/few-sh/fewshell with my Claude api key, I really hope it's going to keep working. I've just finally managed to turn myself into a reasonable devops team with it.

Just use codex. A company that has not released any open weights models and goes after banning accounts and suing companies is not really the kind of company I want to give my money too. And gpt5.4 is the best model out there. Some people overthink on personality but I just want good code.

I think its not good idea , they are constraining the usage of other platforms such as openclaw.These restriction methods will not be positive point to anthropic.

I'm honestly completely in favor of this. Anthropic obviously budgets their capacity based on projected human usage patterns coming through their native app suite (Claude Cowork, Claude Code, etc.). They should not be expected to shoulder the burden of community tools like OpenClaw that are effectively designed to strategically max out usage windows on the plan. That has clearly caused issues with uptime in the past couple of months and I've gotten pretty fed up with the degraded service quality while I'm just trying to use Claude Code as it's intended to be used. I'm happy to see they're doing something about this. Seems like a totally fair move to me. I'd rather that Claude Code functions well when I'm using it according to its design.

This is what I mean when I say what LLMs as a technology are not empowering to humans.

They become how you think, then company has you: hook line and sinker

As the demand for GPUs grows and supply cannot match it, the GPUs are going towards the enterprise and it'll be the haves vs the have-nots.

Instead of not driving to work to save fuel, frugal companies are going to have their engineers work on weekends to save tokens.

Anthropic might underestimate how many users got a subscription because of openclaw and the likes. I did; $100 max subscription. Not renewing it. GLM and minimax are viable alternatives for a fraction of the cost.

Based on this and recent product releases, Anthropic seems keen on building a closed ecosystem around their excellent model. That is their business choice, I suspect it will work well. But I cannot say I am particularly excited to have my entire development stack owned by one company.

Anthropic measures your usage based on token consumption

We are paying for a certain amount of token consumption

Why then, is this an outsized strain on your system Anthropic?

It's like buying gasoline from Shell, and then Shell's terms of services forcing you to use that gas in a Hummer that does 5 MPG, while everyone else wants to drive any other vehicle.

Claude usage limits are insane. I love their models but had to cancel my personal plan because I would burn through my weekly limits in 2 days. I use them for work but I spend like $30-50 __per day__. Not something I'd pay for myself.

If OpenClaw is just "claude -p", then how do they know when you're using OpenClaw?

I believe the capacity about 30%. They did just spend the entire last month of feature releases in Clade Code replacing "claw" features.

So, to me its a "we built it into our world use ours"

Edit: FWIW I am an avid hater of all claw things, they're security nightmare.

I got fed up with Claude code limits and have been using a combination of qwen3-coder, gemma4, and qwen3-vl locally. Gets me 90% of the way there and CC is still around for now if I need it.

Btw even at insane markups $200/mo means GPUs break even pretty fast.

It seems like they are suffering from compute problems bcs they are not only allowing OpenClaw but also limiting the chats

Why do this, the subscription has usage limits so its controlled that way, who cares what you use it for?

I guess they're only sending this to people who use tools like OpenClaw. I don't, and haven't gotten an email. And I guess also won't get the free extra usage credit offer. Ah well.

And so it begins...

Claude is a great model. But anthropic’s user hostile practices have forced me to terminate my sub with them. Right now I am all in on GitHub copilot and that’s primarily how I get my opus tokens.

Given the sheer amount of logging that happens in Claude Code based on the leak, I'm not surprised. This isn't about load, this is merely about cost.

Claude Code is subsidized because of data collection.

This email gives out the endgame - eventually, Claude subscription would be ~30% cheaper than API costs.

Our engineering team averages 1.5k per dev per month on credit costs, without busting Max limits today.

Oh that is the crux of it, I was wondering why they are leading with the free credit in their email and what the catch is. I guess for someone that doesn’t use openclaw it doesn’t matter.

I get why they block OpenClaw and it makes sense but I wonder if they can actually detect OpenClaw calling Claude Code CLI using something like acpx.

It's simply identical to how people use Claude Code locally.

I always thought this was the case since they declared war against Opencode and its users.

The lines drawn by their consumer vs commercial TOS was clear and I never subscribed because of it.

I think this is why the LLM era will not produce as much automation as people think.

We have had the ability to automate browser activities for a long time—but, online service providers don’t want to be behind a layer of automation, which is why captchas were invented.

Automating things on the Internet has never been a technology obstacle, it has been a social one.

I don’t see how anything has changed!

In fact I recently received an updated ToS from eBay saying I am not allowed to use an AI agent to buy stuff on their site. Just a matter of time until others follow suit!

Edit: I misunderstood what was happening. Thanks to the comment below for clarifying.

They also forced OpenCode to remove support as well. Thankfully there is always self hosting and a shit ton of competitors that let you use whatever local software you want.

Does this mean I can't use `claude -p` in bash scripts now?

Less than 24hr notice on a Friday: either Anthropic is dropping S tier next week or they massively fumbled over the past 2 months in self owns and outages.

For anyone interested, I’m cleaning up a project I’ve been working on that is a router for arbitrary agents derivative of/forked from ZeroClaw… part of what it does is let you switch between different agents on WhatsApp/Signal/Matrix etc via !switch commands, so that part isn’t an agent itself but just wants to own your channels so you can have any number of agents talking to the same handful of channels without contention.

I do also bundle a default agent with it, also forked from ZeroClaw, with a goal of being more or less prompt injection proof and hopefully able to centralize some configuration and permissions for most or all of the agents it manages, though that part is very rough sketch/plan at the moment I’d love feedback and help on from anyone interested…. Two projects, clash and nono caught my eye in this space, I think both leverage Linux landgrant but I may also use landrun for similar control of other processes like openclaw that it may manage for the user, still figuring out how and where to fit all the pieces together and what’s pragmatic/what’s overkill/what overlaps or duplicates across various strategies and tools. Right now there’s real bash wrappers that evaluate starlark policies, hoping to fully validate better end to end but if you’re interested a few others users testing, validating and/or contributing Claude tokens to the project could be invaluable at this stage. Plan to open source ASAP, maybe tonight or tomorrow if there’s interest and I have time to finish cleanup and rename (I was calling it PolyClaw but that confuses with some weird polymarket Claude skill, so now the router is going to be ZeroClawed and the agent will stay NonZeroClaw in homage to ZeroClaw who it’s forked from… we may also integrate the new Claw Code port which is also rust, just for good measure/as a native coding agent in addition to the native claw agent )

Anyway the main reason I mention is it already has a working ACP integration for any code agent, and working now on using Claude codes native channel integration to make it appear as a full fledged channel of its own, as it now more or less does already to OpenClaw, for anyone wanting to gradually migrate away from their existing OpenClaw installation using this, towards Claude or some other agent. Email me or respond here if interested, or I’ll try and post link here once it’s fully public/open source

I feel like they need to be more blatant and up front about this rule because we hear everyone freaking out about either this or the API limits during core hours. Meanwhile because I know to use it out of peak hours, I havent had any downed hours outside of that first month when they didnt rate limit Claude Code to JUST peak usage hours.

Personally idk why they dont just make Claude Code more open source friendly. Let the community do PRs for Claude Code. Let us change the tooling, if I could use their own client but swap out the tools it calls and how, I would use like 90% less tokens.

OpenClaw also had the ability to run entirely within Claude Code instead of using the oauth token. Would that still be allowed?

So is Codex the only SOTA that welcomes third-party harness?

That’s how ecosystems start: by cutting out third parties.

Haha, I almost expected this.

Say goodbye to my 600$/ month Anthropic.

Why doesn't OpenAI introduce $100/mo plan? Surely many would switch in a heartbeat

I received it too. I wonder if they sent this to all pro/max subscribers or only those who they’ve flagged as having used a third party harness.

Read this earlier as well. A lot of OpemClaw jockets are going to wake up to some very unfriendly news! That said, spot on points re: subscription services biz model.

Oh, it's a billing thing. Not fear that Claude coupled to something that can actually do things is dangerous.

I haven't gotten this notification yet

Disappointing. I built a lovely little Nanoclaw bot that's been surprisingly helpful at raising a puppy. I haven't gotten this email, so I wonder if my usage is too low to catch their first pass. If they shut it down though, the fix is straightforward -- some API based backend with zero stickiness to Anthropic.

It is a pity though. For less than an hour of setup the Nanoclaw bot proved enormously useful at tracking meal times, training progress, etc and the interface was easy enough for the family to get involved. The ease of setup was really remarkable, and Anthropic creating artificial barriers just seems user hostile.

You can basically do what open claw does with native Claude code features now anyway.

We built an open-source orchestrator that routes across providers with direct API keys. If you're looking for alternatives to subscription-locked tools: https://modelreins.com

I wonder if this also applies to tools that interact with the claude code tui through tmux's capabilities.

Running locally or privately (in the cloud) is the future. Anthropic/OAI will need to recoup (astronomical) training costs and I'm not going to be their bailout plan, especially considering training was done on torrented & copyrighted data anyway.

Public model inference quality is almost at SOTA levels, why would anyone pay these VC-subsidized companies even a cent? For a shitty chat interface? Give me a break.

What are people doing with OpenClaw? Are there any places that try to log best uses and new ideas?

Since the OpenClaw creator is posting on HN I’d like to hear some commentary from him directly.

Anthropic are a smart clever research based bunch of people, they probably realised that openclaw is a mess, full of vibe coding get rich quick people, nothing particularly interesting to observe, and don't want to mix this data with the data they have already from real coders.

I still haven't got this email, anyone else?

Does anyone know. How would that relate to simply wrapping claude code as a subprocess?

Makes sense, yes. That’s definitely not sustainable

Just in time for my subscription to expire. Goodbye!

I thought this had already been the case for a while?

This is exactly why building daily workflows on top of proprietary API wrappers is a ticking time bomb. The moment your tooling becomes an outsized strain, they just flip the switch on you.

Maybe after net neutrality we should have AI neutrality too. So you can use it how you see fit without stupid restrictions.

Using Xiaomi’s mimo pro on openrouter via hermes agent

What should we use next for coding in openclaw

I already moved it to chatgpt for a while

I now use Claude's own telegram plugin with channels mode, no reason to use openclaw anymore.

Does anyone have a link to the "read more"?

Could the real reason for this be more centered around generation and control of new training data?

I suspect the same for the forced high AI usage quotas for developers at MS etc. We've had multiple generations of models trained on all of the code that's available and there are diminishing returns on how much that data can do for training now. Newly published publicly available data is also made up of a significant portion of slop.

The best way to get fresh training data from real human brains might be to have real humans use your first party tools where you control all of the telemetry.

Looks like I'm going to be switching to OpenAI. I know the whole "well those are the terms" Stockholm syndrome argument, but no, those weren't the terms when I signed up. If one of the parties decided to unilaterally change terms in any other everyday situation, nobody would think it was acceptable, but we've become so resigned to corporations having enough money to make the law suit them that we think it's moral behavior.

No, Anthropic, just because you added a clause that says "we can change these terms whenever" doesn't make it right. I'm paying you a set amount of money a month for a set amount of tokens (that's what limits are), and I should be able to use these tokens however I want.

Luckily, there are alternatives.

Goodbye customers.

someone else _not_ having the “Claim” button on the banner at the top of the Usage page?

Literally :rofl: here. About all the people panicking that they suddenly can’t work anymore. Come on, how did you work and develop three years ago without AI? If you can’t program or understand code without an LLM you should maybe switch careers and not call yourself engineers. In the meantime, I have never touched Claude, Copilot, or what not, and continue to write my low level code used in real engineering and manufacturing plants as well as science labs. And since most/all of this isn’t really working through/with AI (as some colleagues in the field have tried and miserably failed) I can increase my rates and have started to charge a good amount more from clients. As they can’t find people anymore that are willing to understand the problems and deliver working code. The people are busy trying to get AI work in the my field instead of doing the real work that is asked. Literally :rofl: on how AI makes me more money without having to use and touch it. If this continues as it does, I might be able to retire soon (40s) and go back to study physics as I did and maybe engage in some theoretical physics PHD (self financed).

Doesn't this unfairly impact startups? Why not instead allow issuance of API keys with usage caps? It seems like a money grab.

cant wait till they implement turboquant and make ai cheaper again

Honestly, this is a good thing. OpenClaw as a concept was rather silly to run such a heavy model for. If you want something like OpenClaw to work you really need to figure out how to do it with an economical model.

I like how the best way to protest this is by doing what everyone should have been doing to begin with: running a great open source model on rented hardware

Is anyone even getting anything out of a $20/mo sub for Anthropic?

I'm doing a side-by-side with GPT-5.4 for $20/mo and Sonnet for $20/mo and I can tell you that all my 5 hour tokens are eaten in 30 minutes with Claude. I still haven't used my tokens for OpenAI.

Code quality seems fine on both. Building an app in Go

You can cancel your subscription, there are like 5 competitors you can pick instead and anthropic offers an API plan where you can find out how many tokens circus tools like claws really consume compared to coding tasks.

Anthropic should calm down, I get that they're trying to either build a moat, or simply curb what is essentially subsidized tokens. It is technically true that when you've got a claude code subscription you pay for the product with its terms, and those terms doesn't include you grabbing the token and using it for another application. They're also trying to build a competitor to openclaw so it makes sense they're trying to crush it. But it feels like such a feeble moat, that it looks silly. Claude Code is nice, but it is not that nice.

> To make the transition easier, we’re offering a one-time credit for extra usage equal to your monthly subscription price. Redeem your credit by April 17. We’re also introducing discounts when you pre-purchase bundles of extra usage (up to 30%).

The Anthropic casino wants you to continue gambling tokens at their casino only on their machines (Claude Code) only by giving more promotional offers such as free spins, $20 bets and more free tokens at the roulette wheels and slot machines.

But you cannot repurpose your subscription on other slot machines that are not owned by Anthropic and if you want it badly, they charge you more for those credits.

The house (Anthropic) always wins.

i think i'll no longer be giving my money to anthropic

So now what happens to startups and ADE's orientated around Claude like Conductor.. no more Claude for them I guess back to Codex!

I didn't even realize you could connect a standard subscription to OpenClaw in the first place. It seems like you would run into limits rather quickly, which would degrade the experience quite badly.

Anthropic's current business model is to sell access to their tools to subscribers at a loss. Users maxing out their $200/month plan can realistically cost Anthropic $500-600 in actual compute costs.

Anthropic is okay with this right now because they want to amass as many users as they can, and eventually hope that GPUs will increase in power and efficiency, and their LLMs will become more efficient as well. They can eventually profit off of their current pricing, or with modest price increases, if that comes to fruition.

But letting OpenClaw wake up every 30 minutes and start sending requests is a surefire way to max out your weekly limits, and that certainly isn't something Anthropic planned for.

Has anyone gotten Google's open offline model Gemma 4 (released yesterday) working with OpenClaw? It didn't work for me as an agent with OpenClaw.

sad news

We need Net Neutrality for LLMs.

It looks like the chickens came to roost much earlier than expected, including the fall in RAM prices

economy 101. price is define by demand curve. they know they will have X subscribers ar $200, and X at $400. why on earth wouldn't they raise prices?

AI disallowing use by AI :|

They are running out of things to ban...

Big mistake.

Claude innovation will come from being open, not closed.

Goodbye!

"We dont crash ever" -- the social network.

If you haven't been paying attention anthropic burned a lot of their developer good will in the last 2 weeks, with some combination of bugs and rate limits.

But the writing is on the wall about how bad things are behind the scenes. The circa 2002 sentiment filter regex in their own tool should have been a major clue about where things stand.

The question every one should be asking at this point is this: is there an economic model that makes AI viable. The "bitter lesson" here is in AI's history: expert systems were amazing, but they could not be maintained at cost.

The next race is the scaling problem, and google with their memory savings paper has given a strong signal what the next 2 years of research are going to be focused on: scaling.

Idk why people are complaining when they know subscription are currently heavily subsidized. If they don't like they can always choose alternative service.

mysterious anthropic win???

Wellll, that rug aint gonna pull itself, now is it?

Ive been calling for local LLM as owning the means of production. I aint wrong.

Inefficient token use will have to tighten up.

I really started to like Pi. That's unfortunate that I won't be able to use it with Opus (way too expensive without a subscription). I'm optimistic that open source coding models will be able to keep up. AI is too important, we're shooting ourselves in the foot if we don't adopt open source tools and models. The more adoption the better it will become.

Perhaps they are worried about legal liability if someone uses OpenClaw + Claude Code, and it deletes reams of customer data.

Sorry but it is pathetic to support this decision

Nice

[dead]

I had an idea to use `claude -p` to break apart books and annotate all dialogue with estimated speaker meta-data. The tips displaying in interactive claude sessions keep seeming to advocate for such experimentation with claude -p, but despite this I have deliberately held back because after reading the TOS (weeks ago) I couldn't clearly make out where the line is meant to be. The existence of `claude -p` is confusing to me.

[flagged]

[dead]

[dead]

[dead]

[dead]

[dead]

[dead]

[dead]

[flagged]

[dead]

[dead]

[flagged]

[dead]

[dead]

[dead]

[dead]

[dead]

[dead]

[dead]

[dead]

[dead]

[dead]

[dead]

[dead]

[dead]

[dead]

[dead]

[dead]

Yes, this was made clear a while back and should not be a surprise. (Honestly, I had to double-check the date/time to see if this was actually posted today.

You can use your Claude Code subscription with third-party tools, but you have to use the Claude Code harness. Or, you use the API. OpenClaw could use the Claude Code harness, but they don't.

You never have been able to. It's against ToS.

Why not use datacenter of geniuses to increase capacity? Grug confused.

If you spend $200/month on Anthropic, that's $2400/year. Buy a fast GPU or Strix Halo machine, do the AI locally, after a year you're saving money.

Anthropic and OpenAI are the clearest examples of why, in an organization of specialists, the experts themselves should not be the CEO or the final decision-maker once the company’s challenges extend beyond just the product.

Just look at how Sam Altman has led OpenAI step by step to dominate—and choke out—Anthropic, a company founded by the group of engineers who were once part of the turmoil at OpenAI.

Anthorpic's product thinking is terrible even though it is technically very good.

I disagree with the sentiment here. Anthropic is profiting off everything they do, subscriptions not so much, but they are definitely not losing money in a way most people claim they do. These subscriptions are not only advertisement, but also the reason why trying to load the claude user account on github errors out.

IMO, the goal here is clear: they want them to use their software, have people build an ecosystem around their software, they want to have visibility around their software.

It's never about capacity or usage, they just want to have the claude ecosystem, there is a reason why they don't support AGENTS.MD or other initiatives, they want everything to be theirs and theirs alone. You can argue that 'well fair', but to me this is clear abuse of their position in the market.