Comment by bethekind
14 hours ago
This is draconian.
> Our investigation specifically confirmed that the use of your credentials within the third-party tool “open claw” for testing purposes constitutes a violation of the Google Terms of Service [1]. This is due to the use of Antigravity servers to power a non-Antigravity product. I must be transparent and inform you that, in accordance with Google’s policy, this situation falls under a zero tolerance policy, and we are unable to reverse the suspension. I am truly sorry to share this difficult news with you.
Isn't the reason companies are doing this because they're offering tokens at a discount, provided they're spent through their tooling?
Considering the tremendous amount of tokens OpenClaw can burn for something that has nothing to do with sofware development, I think it's reasonable for Google to not allow using tokens reserved for Antigravity. I don't think there's such a restriction if you pay for the API out of pocket.
> Isn't the reason companies are doing this because they're offering tokens at a discount, provided they're spent through their tooling?
Then maybe they should charge for that instead of banning accounts?
Google decided on their own business plan without any guns to their backs. If they decide to create a plan that is subsidized that's entirely on them.
So the issue is the same as Anthropic. They do charge for it though their API. The users, however, want to use the discounted "unlimited" flat rate through the first-party app instead, then get mad when they are told they have to use the same API every other third-party app does.
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> Then maybe they should charge for that instead of banning accounts?
They do, though - you're free to buy tokens and use Google's AI/LLM via the API?
What OpenClaw was doing was pretending to be a different product (Anti gravity) in order to use the cheaper tier.
Google wants usage that earns them street cred, not usage from bots who will never evaluate the output. They're all fighting tooth and nail to acquire customers, both free and paid... they didn't want their giveaways to be burned.
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If I say “you can use my car for $250/month if you don’t smoke in it” and then you pay me that money and you drive around until one day you smoke in it, I’m not going to let you smoke in my car. I told you not to smoke in it and you smoked in it. That’s the deal. All seems fine to me tbh.
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Yep it sounds like Google is charging too little, and taking losses that would be unsustainable for other companies, to try and win the market on AI coding products. Which is a violation of anti trust law, I think. Now that people are using their pricing in an unexpected way where their product isn’t the one winning from their anti competitive practices, they’re punishing the users. Classic monopolistic behavior. And why we need to tax mega corp more and break them up.
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I agree. As others have mentioned here, the authenticate with AntiGravity web popup clearly says that this authentication is only to be used with Google products.
How can Claws users miss this?
What Google could have done better: obviously implement rate throttling on API calls authenticated through the Gemini AI Pro $20/month accounts. (I thought they did this, buy apparently not?) Google tries hard to get people to get API keys, which is what I do, and there seems to be a very large free tier on API calls before my credit card gets hit every month.
Can I at least log in one last time and download my gmail messages from 2004?
Given how popular OpenClaw is (and that OpenClaw itself supports antigravity), I think it's shortsighted to not publicly state that it's not allowed and to warn users. Permanently banning people from Antigravity (much like any Google product) feels really harsh.
Then it should be “This is your first and final warning. The next time we catch you, it’s a ban.”. People are building their lives around this stuff and kneejerk bans erode good faith in your platform.
> Then it should be “This is your first and final warning. The next time we catch you, it’s a ban.”. People are building their lives around this stuff and kneejerk bans erode good faith in your platform.
This is actually the soft-touch approach: the users of these vibe-coded products need to understand that they are delegating their authority to the tool to work on their behalf.
In this case, they delegated to a tool that broke the ToS. The result could have been a lot worse, and in return they learned that the tool is acting with their full authority.
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EDIT:
One of the users got this response from google support:
> Our product engineering team has confirmed that your account was suspended from using our Antigravity service. This suspension affects your access to the Gemini CLI and any other service that uses the Cloud Code Private API.
Their decision? To break ToS on some other provider:
> I guess it is time to move on to Codex or Claude Code.
So, yeah, perhaps the users really are too stupid to understand what's going on, and even this soft-touch approach has done nothing to clue them in.
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Oh man.
What a wonderful way to stop people from using your LLM.
All these AI companies trying to get everyone to be locked into their toolchains is just hilariously short sighted. Particularly for dev tools. It's the sure path to get devs to hate your product.
And for what? The devs are already paying a pretty penny to use your LLM. Why do you also need to force them to using your toolkit?
There is a reality that when they control the client it can be significantly cheaper for them to run: the Claude code creator has mentioned that the client was carefully designed to maximise prompt caching. If you use a different client, your usage patterns can be different and it may cost them significantly more to serve you.
This isn't a sudden change, either: they were always up-front that subscriptions are for their own clients/apps, and API is for external clients. They don't document the internal client API/auth (people extracted it).
I think a more valid complaint might be "The API costs too much" if you prefer alternative clients. But all providers are quite short on compute at the moment from what I hear, and they're likely prioritising what they subsidise.
It reminds me of the net neutrality debate from a decade ago. I'm not American but I remember the discord and online hate towards Ajit Pai when they were repealing it.
On one side you had the argument that repealing net neutrality would mean you can save money on your internet bill by only paying for access to what you use. On the other, you had the argument that it would just enable companies to milk you for even more profit and throttle your connection as they see fit.
IMO we need 'net neutrality' for LLM clients. I feel like AI companies are hypocrites for talking about safety all the time, but want us to only use their LLMs in the way they intend. They're saying we're all going to be replaced by AI in 12 months, and we have to use their tools to survive, right?
Yann LeCun recently warned that the AI coming out of China is trending towards being more open than the American alternative. If it continues like this, I can see programmers being pushed towards Chinese models. Is that what the US government wants?
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I imagine its a case of the providers not wanting to admit its costing them a fortune because suddenly all these low-medium usage accounts are now their highest use ones.
Not saying it's right. But it's also not exactly a secret that they are all taking VERY heavy losses even with pricey subscriptions.
> But it's also not exactly a secret that they are all taking VERY heavy losses even with pricey subscriptions.
It's absurd, there's people out there paying $200 for the equivalent of $1600 in API credits. Of course there's a catch! What did you expect!
https://bsky.app/profile/borum.dev/post/3meynioealc2x
That tool is "ccusage" if you're a Claude subscriber and want to see what the damage will be if/when Anthropic decides to pull the rug.
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Google has been particularly pernicious in the corporate exercise of zero-tolerance.
Because of their large footprint in so many areas, it is wise to greatly (re)consider expansion in the ways that you rely on them.
Antigravity is useless anyway. I tried it last week and it needs approval for every file read and tool call. There's an option in the app to auto-approve, except it doesn't work. Plenty of complaints online about this. Clearly they don't actually care about the product, some exec just felt that they need to get into the editor game.
Next I tried using the Antigravity Gemini plan through OpenCode (I guess also a bannable offense?) and the first request used up my limit for the week.
Hopefully this gets people to stop using Google for more than just LLMs.
The devs are paying to use the UIs provided by the company. The usage-based API is a separate offering, and everyone knows that.
It's okay to be annoyed at being caught, but honestly the deer in the headlights bit is a bit ridiculous.
If you want to use an API, pay for the API option. Or run your own models.
The tool thing is kind of infuriating at the moment. I've been using Claude on the command line so I can use my subscription. It's fine, but it also feels kind of silly, like I'm looking at ccusage and it seems like I'm using way more $ in tokens than I'm paying for with the subscription. Which is a win for me, but, I don't really feel like Claude Code is such a compelling product that it's going to keep me locked in to their model, so I don't know why they're creating such a steep discount to get me to use it. I'm perfectly fine using Codex's tools, or whatever. I dunno, it seems like way more cost effective to use the first party tools but I'm not sure why they really want that. Are the third party tools just really inefficient with API usage or something?
> I dunno, it seems like way more cost effective to use the first party tools but I'm not sure why they really want that. Are the third party tools just really inefficient with API usage or something?
No, the first party tools, even if they used the same number of tokens, gives them valuable data for their training.
Essentially, the first party tools are subsidised because it saves them money on gathering even more training data. When you use a 3rd party tool, you are expected to pay the actual cost of each token.
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You are being subsidised to the tune of 50 to 99.9 cents on the dollar compared to the API.
What the hell do you expect? To get paid for using other people's tools on Google's servers?
Businesses do not have an entitlement to profit. Suspending customers for using a fairly expensive subscription plan -- especially forfeiting an annual prepayment for a day or two of coloring outside the lines -- sure does make Google appear entitled to profit without ever risking its own pricing model.
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No, this is hilarious: company that rams their AI down your throat at every opportunity then turns around and shuts down your account because you actually use their AI... there is no limit to the idiocy around Google's AI roll-out. I wished I could donate the AI credits that I'm paying for (thanks Google for that price increase for a product I never chose to buy) to the people that need them more.
This kind of reputational damage is just adding fuel to the fire. If my business depended in any way on google--GCP, GSuite, whatever--it would right now be a very urgent task to fire them and find replacements. They've been pretty sketchy for a while, but this kind of thing is over the top.
Terminating accounts that tried to cheat on pricing by having a third party application pretend to be Antigravity is entirely expected and does not damage Google's reputation in my view.
Yikes!! This is really unfortunate, because Google's models seem very good but there's no way I'm using a google service for this kind of thing with those policies. I don't even want to run OpenClaw, but that's scary! Plus, I have my google account tied to authenticating so many things that if my account were to be suspended or something that would be a nightmare.
I haven't tried Antigravity but I remember on release it had huge UX issues. Is this product just not ready for primetime?
Excuse me giving you advice, unasked for: as part of your ‘digital life spring cleaning’ spend some time converting auth with Google/Apple/GitHub for services to logging in with your email (on your own domain) and some other second auth.
BTW, I tend to only use Google for services I pay for (YouTube+, APIs, Gemini Plus, sometimes GCP).
There is nothing stopping you from using google models just get the correct product, you can pay for tokens then they do not care what you use it for.
The issue for me is the customer support here, not necessarily that they don't have good offerings. (I know they've always been bad at customer support, but this all seems egregious)
Just create another Google account. I don't remember there being any restrictions for this. Every time the service required a Google account to log in or it was easier than registering and going through the checks, I just created a new Google account and registered.
Maybe the ban is overstepping but I still continue to not understand the issue. Rarely in the history of APIs has a commercial company wanted folks to use the private APIs.
How about giving the user a big warning to not do that and then block the account if the user continues. This total blocks are crazy. Especially for people who use their Google account for 20+ years or something.
Time and time again it is shown to *not* use your main account for everything. This goes for Apple and having a separate account for development work, for the App Store and your main iCloud account but this also goes for all other SaaS providers.
You are doing groundbreaking new and untested stuff with Claw? Do not use your main account. You want to access your main account's data? Sure, allow it via OAUTH/whatever possible way.
Have separate accounts, people. You don't want one product groups decision in those large SaaS corps to impact everything else.
> Time and time again it is shown to not use your main account for everything.
Good luck opening new google accounts for separation of concern. The new account is banned before the eula page finishes loading.
Google sends code via text msg to my main account phone number to unban, without me ever even filling a phone number.
After a day the account was banned again and pending automatic deletion. The appeal then took an artificial 5 days wait. I had to plead to what I presume is an AI. I had just paid $100 so it's not like I didn't show I was serious.
I am fairly certain that if they ban one account they will also ban the other anyways.
Nothing new. 10 years ago my (now 20+ year) google account was compromised for a whole 5 minutes. It was used by shady bots, and instantly banned. No warnings, no nothing. Trying to figure out what had happened was a challenge in itself.
Getting through to customer support was impossible.
5 years later I tried to get my account opened up, filled out some forms, and by some miracle it was.
My biggest takeaway from this (other than enabling 2FA) was that it is probably easier to get ahold of the scammers that control your account, than to get ahold of actual human customer support at google / alphabet.
It seems like a temp ban here would be totally reasonable, like, "we disabled your account for a day here's why, don't do it again". Permanent though, eek!
Google's bundling of so many services into one account is becoming a gargantuan liability for them & their users.
This "zero tolerance" policy is just absurdly mega-goliath out of touch with the world. The sort of soulless brain dead corporatism that absolutely does not think for even a single millisecond about its decisions, that doesn't care about anything other than reducing customer support or complexity, no matter what the cost.
Kicking people off their accounts for this is Google being willing to cause enormous untoward damage. With basically not even the faintest willingness to try to correct. Gobsmacking vicious indifference, ok with suffering.
Maybe European DMA or DSA should act against google kicking people off their accounts without recourse?
Can you help me understand which of these happened?
1) Open Claw has a Google OAuth client id that users are signing in with. (This seems unlikely because why would Google have approved the client or not banned it)
2) Users are creating their own OAuth client id for signing themselves into Open Claw. (Again, why would these clients be able to use APIs Google doesn't want them to?)
3) Users are taking a token minted with the Antigravity client and using it in Open Claw to call "private" APIs.
Assuming it's #3, how is that physically accomplished? And then how does Google figure out it happened?
"how does Google figure out it happened" - no insider knowledge, but the calls Claw makes are very different than the regular IDE, so the calls and volume alone would be an indicator. Maybe Google has even updated their Antigravity IDEs to just include some other User Agent, that Claw auth does not have.
Everything just guesswork, but I don't think it is too hard to figure out whether it is Antigravity calling the APIs or any Claw.
its 3, openclaw author admitted it, you just point codex at an antigravity installation and ask it "figure out how to login like this thing"
and it starts decompiling javascript and extracting ids/secrets
I cannot de-Google fast enough.
So if I ask Google's AI studio the wrong question, I might get my G-drive, Gmail, API access, Play store, YouTube channel, "login with Google" tokens, and more all ripped away instantly with no recourse?
No thanks
It’s an extremely strong incentive to not use Gemini for anything serious
Google is a company well down the path of enshittification, they even got rid of their motto "Don't be evil".
As a consumer, you're better served by using services from companies earlier in that lifecycle, where value accrues to you, and that's not Google, and likely not many other big providers.
When those newer companies turn, you switch. Do not allow yourself to get locked into an ecosystem. It's hard work, but it will pay dividends in the long run.
I [ctrl+f]'d for this comment in the thread linked above, and couldn't find it. May I ask where you saw that?
It’s there. User Jun_Meng.
Thank you. I wonder if partial loading or something was keeping me from finding it. Oh well.
Either way, for everyone else: https://discuss.ai.google.dev/t/account-restricted-without-w...
There's the direct link to the specific post.
Same. Cannot find it in that thread and I would like to know the source too.
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What's "tfa"?
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Google is a copycat in AI products.
Gemini Chat: ChatGPT
Gemini CLI: Claude Code
Antigravity: Cursor
Nano banana: Midjourney
Subscription API ban: copied Anthropic
NotebookLM seems to be the only exception, or it could be an acquisition.
Subscription API ban could be part of a larger strategy because of OpenClaw’s association with OpenAI and Google will not be able to copy OpenClaw Personal Assistant model due to the security implications.
Pay as you go through API pricing is one of the easiest ways to drastically reduce mass adoption of a product. Pay per month works on consumption patterns where 80% of the users will barely use the product to compensate for the other 10 or 20% power users.
I'd assume API usage through tokens vs. OAuth are rate limited differently? I don't actually see hard numbers for Antigravity model rate limits on their website so guessing this is the case.
It's not about the rate limit, it's about the price, raw API calls are far more expensive then subsidised Antigravity calls.
Basically Google is saying: You can't use Gemini with OAuth on other products than Google products (Anti Gravity).
I mean it's fair, just should have been documented properly and the possibility to use Gemini through OAuth restricted with proper scope instead of saying you broke the ToS we ban your 350$/ month account.
Can openclaw go through gemini-cli? Because they can and nobody would notice anything has changed. It would use the same OAuth down the line and consume the same quotas.
cant you just wrap it though?
swap out the direct api call with a call to gemini cli?
That’s my question too. Presumably one could even build an API that just runs things in cli? How would they plan to restrict that? Based on usage patterns?
It’s protectionism. These corporations are staying big because of anti competitive practices and capital. They don’t want to let go.
That’s called protecting a monopoly not protectionism
Using Google for anything other than search and email has been a poor choice for a long time.
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Terms of Service that span multiple pages of legalese and require an attorney to parse, for something that is either 'free' or a few $ per month, and can result in loss of service across multiple product lines, AND has binding lopsided arbitration requirements, is not only draconian, it is unconscionable.
Look at how messed up this is: Google Attorneys, paid hundreds of $/hour, spending hours and hours putting together these "Terms of Service" on one side; and a simple consumer on the other side, making a few $ per hour, not trained in legalese, expected to make a decision on a service that is supposed to cost a few $ a month, and if you make an honest mistake, can cause you a lot of trouble in your life.
> Terms of Service that span multiple pages of legalese and require an attorney to parse, for something that is either 'free' or a few $ per month, and can result in loss of service across multiple product lines, AND has binding lopsided arbitration requirements, is not only draconian, it is unconscionable.
In the general case, I broadly agree, but in this specific case:
1. This wasn't a term buried 2/3rds in a 200 page document. It was a term that was so upfront and clear that everyone knew you weren't supposed to do it.
2. Even for the people who claim they didn't know, when doing the auth, the message specifically asks the user to authorise the antigravity application, not the OpenClaw application.
The argument that users did not know they were violating ToS, in this specific case, is pure BS.
This is how I feel when reading my 100 page home owners insurance policy.
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You can call the ToS draconian, yes.
Just because something is in the ToS doesn't mean it's reasonable.
Why is it unreasonable?
It’s a subsidized price; conditional to using their tooling. Don’t want to use their tooling? Pay the API rates. The API is sitting right there, ready to use for a broader range of purposes.
It’s only unreasonable if you think the customer has a right to have their cake and eat it too.
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"It's against the Boot's TOS to remain unlicked"
I am ordering a tshirt with this
You think everyone is silly for finding this policy dumb?
Yes; because they have no obligation to provide this service tier at all.
It could be API prices for anyone, everywhere. They offer a discounted plan, $200/mo., for a restricted set of use cases. Abuse that at your peril.
It’s like complaining your phone’s unlimited data plan is insufficient to run an apartment building with all units. I was told it was Unlimited! That means I can totally run 500 units through it if I want to, Verizon!
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