Tell HN: Anthropic no longer allowing Claude Code subscriptions to use OpenClaw
3 days ago
Received the following email from Anthropic:
Hi,
Starting April 4 at 12pm PT / 8pm BST, you’ll no longer be able to use your Claude subscription limits for third-party harnesses including OpenClaw. You can still use them with your Claude account, but they will require extra usage, a pay-as-you-go option billed separately from your subscription.
Your subscription still covers all Claude products, including Claude Code and Claude Cowork. To keep using third-party harnesses with your Claude login, turn on extra usage for your account. This will be enforced April 4 starting with OpenClaw, but this policy applies to all third-party harnesses and will be rolled out to more shortly (read more).
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%).
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. You will receive another email from us tomorrow where you’ll have the ability to refund your subscription if you prefer.
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.
What you're saying is conceptually true for subscription services in general, but thats not why they are making this change. There's a 5 hour limit and a weekly limit. Those are hard token limits. Everyone on a plan pays for the max set of tokens in that plan. The limits manage capacity. The solution to that isn't a change of ToS, it's adjusting the limits.
In other words this is about Anthropic subsidizing their own tools to keep people on their platform. OpenClaw is just a good cover story for that. You can maximize plans just as easily w/ /loop. I do it all the time on max 20x. The agent consuming those tokens is irrelevant.
For what it's worth I don't use OpenClaw and don't intend to, but I do use claude -p all the time.
You aren't paying to be using that limit all of the time.
You are paying to be using that limit some of the time. There are 5 hour windows when you are sleeping and can't use it. There are weekend limits.
Theoretically you can max out every 5 hour window, but they lose money on that.
It's structured so users can have bursts of unlimited usage, and spend ~15% of the theoretical max cap, and that's still cheaper than a subscription for that user.
An OpenClaw user can use 6, 7, 8 times what a human subscriber is using.
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You guys are arguing on the reality of a subscription, but Anthropic still resides in the coocoo make-up world of growth at all costs backed up by unfathomable investments. They're not acting rationally by trying to present a good product with reasonable backend fundamentals. They're just trying to maintain the money loss to what they have set aside for the quarter. OpenClaw was not planned for, and thus must be fought.
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> Everyone on a plan pays for the max set of tokens in that plan.
From Anthropic's perspective, everyone pays to be in bins with a given max.
And to everyone's benefit, there is a wide distribution of actual use. Most people pay for the convenience of knowing they have a max if they need it, not so they always use it.
So Anthropic does something nice, and drops the price for everyone. They kick back some of the (actual/potential) savings to their customers.
But if everyone automates the use of all their tokens Anthropic must either raise prices for everyone (which is terribly unfair for most users, who are not banging the ceiling every single time), or separate the continuous ceiling thumpers into another bin.
That's economics. Service/cost assumptions change, something has to give.
And of the two choices, they chose the one that is fair to everyone. As apposed to the one that is unfair (in different directions) to everyone.
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The trade-off is that if you set your usage limits so that you can handle the case where everyone is saturating their limit at all times, then (1) the usage limits would be too small and (2) you're optimizing for a usage pattern that doesn't exist and (3) you're severely underprovisioning, which is worse for everyone.
Instead, you can prioritize people "earnestly" bursting to the usage limits, like the users who are actually sitting at their computer using the service over someone's server saturating the limit 24/7.
The goal is to have different tiers for manual users vs automated/programmatic tools. Not just Anthropic, this is how we design systems in general.
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I don’t really follow what you’re saying. You mention the 5 hour limit. Is your expectation that they have enough capacity so that everyone can hit their 5 hour limit all the time? Or you are proposing that’s how they limit capacity for a subscription?
Do you have an example of how this is how they have advertised or sold the plan? I don’t recall ever seeing any advertisement that their plan is simply pre paying for tokens.
There are multiple reasons why this makes sense for Anthropic
- The intention of subscriptions, as anywhere, is a combination of trying to promote brand loyalty, and the gym membership model of getting people to pay for oversubscribed resources that many will never use. As the parent noted, people maxxing out their allowed usage, for whatever reason, are not the most profitable customers, and in this case probably not profitable at all
- OpenClaw is now owned by a competitor, OpenAI, and Anthropic are trying to compete in this space
https://www.semafor.com/article/04/03/2026/anthropic-eyes-it...
- Anthropic are capacity constrained, having sensibly chosen to err on the side of safety (not going bankrupt), and are now trying to do the best they can to manage that.
Presumably they might be acting differently if they had capacity to spare, but even then helping a competitor to build market share in a potentially lucrative segment doesn't make strategic sense.
I do wonder about the wisdom of Anthropic promoting usage-maxxing development patterns such as running a dozen agents in parallel ... maybe not the wisest thing to do when capacity constrained! It would make more sense to promote usage at night with low priority "batch jobs" rather than encourage people to increase usage during periods of maximum demand.
This is what I've been wondering about for a while now. I have the 20x plan as well, which I thought would allow me to try some API coding - but you get zero API usage.
As you said, I would imagine where the token usage comes from is irrelevant - you are generating the same load whether you do it from claude code or some other agent. So it seems like the rules are more to do with encouraging claude code usage, rather then claude model usage.
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How many tokens does the $20/month buy me? I want to know what those hard token limits are but they refuse to tell me. I'm pretty sure they've reduced those limits the last week but they won't admit it. It feels like a scammy pricing model.
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You are still misunderstanding.
If you max out your token limits, you are costing Anthropic more than you are paying them. They only expect a small percentage of their users to do this, but OpenClaw changed the dynamic.
Anthropic knows that they will lose more users by lowering limits than they will by blocking OpenClaw, because OpenClaw users will overwhelmingly switch to API pricing, while chatbot users will leave for competitors with higher limits.
They are a business. They hope to become profitable. This was the correct move.
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You’re missing something. I’m pretty sure it’s not only about the cost. Anthropic literally doesn’t have enough compute. They have to balance the load between enterprise customers and end users with subscription. If you consider they don’t have infinite compute (ie at their scale there is a limit to how much is available in a given region) and something is causing subscription users to increase usage significantly they do have to find a way to balance.
At least that’s my read. I don’t believe it is nefarious
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If they bundled together these two radically different usage patterns, either the service would become more expensive or the limits would become a lot tighter, in both cases making Claude Code far less attractive to professional users.
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Exactly your point. Anthropic is subsidizing their own tools to keep people on their platform. What's wrong with that?
Tokens and these agents(Claude Code/cowork/claude.ai) are separate from model tokens, and they want to discount for their own product usage.
The subscription they sell is a package of these products, not tokens. They never sell token subscriptions, so why do we need to relate tokens with the subscription? Fundamentally, they never meant to sell token usage in that subscription, similar to any other SaaS company trying to sell API usage.
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Exactly.
Subscriptions are crazy subsidized.
So you can’t use OpenClaw, OpenCode, etc. because they take you outside their applications/lock in and their ability to easily monetize in the future.
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> The agent consuming those tokens is irrelevant.
This is so wrong.
The subscription is to Claude (the app, Claude code, etc) not the API.
Anthropic subsidizes Claude code because they collect a ton of super useful telemetry and logs so they can improve… Claude code.
Wanting to pay for a subscription to Claude and treat it like an API discount is like going to an all you can eat buffet and asking them to bring unlimited quantities of raw ingredients to you so you can cook at home. Ok, not a perfect analogy, but you get the idea.
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OpenClaw is a mass project and doing something in the background 24/7.
I haven't even heard of claude -p before your comment.
OpenClaw is for sure not just a good cover story. Or its the cover face of the issue of automated tool workflows.
I don't think they are bothered too much about other frontends who do the same as claude code.
Well this is what happens when everyone hires an actuary to handle their pricing and every business earns its revenue through psuedo-insurance policy subscription products.
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I am happy they are banning openclaw users instead of lowering my limits to compensate for these automated agents though.
Are we now banned from using `claude -p` now?
Look guys I use AI to help me re-write shit but for HN comments?
(Maybe I'm just being paranoid here).
Can’t you just use Anthropic models through bedrock?
yes and then still subsidise subscriptions by an order of magnitude
its obvious they will tighten everything and raise prices for years to come
thanks! I never thought of using -p for using claude and gemini for one-shots and in shell scripts before. Nice.
> There's a 5 hour limit and a weekly limit. Those are hard token limits
I mean, humans sleep and do other things than work, so they likely don’t hit their weekly limits or their 5 hour limits every single 5 hour chunk :)
-p gets penalized is not worth using it.
It’s shame they do all this sketchy stuff, I switched to Codex I have enough of their bs.
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It's one thing to pay $5 or $20 per month, which although it's a substantial difference, people pay that much for the convenience of having stuff ready and available - and it's a completely different thing to pay $200 per month. People don't pay that much for occasional usage and many/most people will organise themselves to use all or most of their weekly allowance when the expense is in that ballpark.
If Anthropic miscalculated the amount of tokens, or simply pushed too hard to capture market share, that is a costly mistake because people in this market are very sensitive to price hikes.
They have to be honest about what they can offer for $200. Sure, people don't max their subscriptions but when they're large they make the best of it, or they will likely cancel it. The typical subscription works well below capacity because it's cheap enough that the optionality may be worth it. $200 is not the typical subscription.
>They have to be honest about what they can offer for $200
Their expectation must have been a human using the service at a human capacity.
This is different from an automated agent orchestrating a ton of different agents at the same time doing a lot of things.
There is a difference.
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> They have to be honest about what they can offer for $200.
Isn't that exactly what they just did?
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> People don't pay that much for occasional usage and many/most people will organise themselves to use all or most of their weekly allowance when the expense is in that ballpark.
I don't think that's accurate for professional users. Personal users, especially those for whom $200/m is a significant cost, will definitely try to get the most out of it.
I know several $200/m user (I'm on the $100 personally), and they've all had the same experience I had when first upgrading to the max package: initially you try to use it as much as you can and feel like you need to keep it busy. But that goes away after a few days and you use it when you have need. The primary point of the max tiers for my peers is to not hit limits during their work if they occasionally use it intensively because it's disrupting to have to wait for X hours to continue.
If you get a benefit from using it, and you bill at $200 an hour, and you work 160+ hours a month, the $200 monthly cost doesn't register as a significant cost and you won't make it determine your usage patterns. I'm sure that'd be different if VC money goes away and it turns out the true price would need to be closer to $5k, but at this point it's similar to your ISP for fiber costing $80 a month. You enjoy the speed for a few days, but then it becomes the new normal.
Anthropic didn't miscalculate anything. They calculated what they could charge/subsidize for humans, not automatons. Banning OpenClaw brings usage levels under control.
If you had to pay for APIs yourself for any provider then you'd know that SOTA tokens are not cheap, and Claude Code for $100 is almost a too good to be true bargain for what you can get out of it.
The entire point of AI is for it to do shit autonomously?
The whole point is that the users can have it doing shit for them instead of them having to babysit the computer.
The fact that users still have to sit there and argue with it erodes their value proposition. The proposition you can pay fewer salaries.
I would argue that „doing shit” should be done by dummy automations. AI should be used to help build that automations or step in when dummy automation breaks.
For now too many people will use AI for stuff that deterministic stupid code would be much more efficient.
They could probably offer enough tokens for that but it would be at a higher price than the sub, I think. You could still pay fewer salaries at 3k a year or per token enterprise prices or whatever.
They want you to do your shit through their own desktop apps.
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My impression is that at the moment the value you get out of Claude is simply incredible.
As a senior engineer, you get an assistant that never gets tired and can do quite a lot on its own. For me, it’s been an eye-opening experience. I used to have a collaborator called M that had a good general culture, but was not too smart. The calculation going into my mind every time I ask Claude for something is: how much would that cost, in terms of time and effort, to get M to do that? M was a resource that costed many thousand dollars per month, plus the time I spent correcting and directing, while Claude is actually smarter and does what it is asked with a degree of autonomy and common sense that M could never dream of.
The flipside of the coin is obvious: Anthropic will find a way to claw back - no pun intended - some of this value by raising the cost of subscription. They would be crazy not to.
value is high but what about the competitors?
is claude that good? the last time i tried claude it was sonnet 4.5. it was ok, not worth the api money clearly. but i only use api tokens for llms.
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I just discovered Pi Coding Agent and found that it's lean System Prompt + a tuned CLAUDE.md brought back a lot of the intelligence that Opus seemed to lose over the last month.
Sucks to be pushed back to Claude Code with opaque system behavior and inconsistency. I bet many would rather pay more for stability than less for gambling on the model intelligence.
We use Pi at work (where we pay per token) and I’d love to use it personally too. From what I’ve read, nobody has been banned for using Pi yet… I wonder if Anthropic minds this much as long as it’s still human usage, or if they’re mostly focused on stamping out the autonomous harnesses. Unfortunately Pi is also what OpenClaw uses so it could easily get swept up in the enforcement attention.
Or maybe I’ll just get a Codex subscription instead. OpenAI has semi-officially blessed usage of third party harnesses, right?
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I wonder if there's a way to bring some of what Pi Coding Agent has to claude code itself.
It seems that installing claude code directly from npm shields from some of the current issues.
You can still use it with an OpenAI subscription (for now at least), and the models aren't substantially worse.
Err, yeah, you should neither do any web scraping without respecting robots.txt, nor use ad blockers when using Google. When working with a business, never use Google Docs without paying them. Nah, that's not how the world works and at least not in the software industry.
> Every single one of them oversells their capacity
That sounds like their problem, not ours
In theory yes, but the overselling does also keep the price low (at least a bit), but also boosts revenue. So when power users use the service too much, the seller will either raise prices, cut features or ban some usage patterns.
You can vote with your wallet though. So don’t throw money at them or just deal with it. Plain and simple.
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Well, yes, it is. That's why you're seeing them take proactive steps to address the problem, like this new policy.
It's not your problem anymore once you switch from Claude :)
Doesn't look like it
It's not a problem at all, you get subsidised to use it
I run a small third-party harness myself (not OpenClaw, something much smaller). Checked my API key today after this announcement - turns out I was already on a regular API key so it doesnt affect me directly.
But the interesting thing is, my actual token usage running agents is way less than people here seem to assume. Most of the time the agent is waiting for tools, reading files, thinking. The bursts are intense but short. I probably use less tokens per hour than someone doing a long manual coding session with lots of back and forth.
The real issue for me isnt cost, its that they can just change the rules whenever. I had to drop everything today to verify my setup still works. Thats the tax of building on someone elses platform I guess.
"subsidised" is in wrong context. They charge how much they thought it would make sense then people found a way of maximizing the usage under the rules and now they change the rules. I am sure they will put out a product which is exactly OpenClaw/openclaw-like with Claude code soon, and my guess goes even to say that's the reason why they went after the naming... They totally wanted to steal the idea from the moment they saw. As they, and all other ai companies always do. They just steal and contribute nothing back.
> Every single one of them oversells their capacity
Indeed. And this model breaks in several cases that overlaps with the current AI business model:
- marginal cost of incremental usage is too high (Movie Pass)
- adverse selection (all you can eat monthly steak subscriptions)
- demand is synchronized (WeWork)
Good point. I agree with that. The key point is that heavy users benefit from this model while light users are basically subsidizing them. But it's a distribution when everyone shifts toward heavy usage, prices inevitably go up. The $17/mo pro price is already set to compete with other providers. Raising it would lose customers. Other tiers are also carefully priced to match competitors. So the only move left is to prevent the whole distribution from drifting toward heavier usage. That's exatly what this ban does.
So basically their move is an admission that they can't scale up their capacity accordingly to shifting demand while keeping the current pricing.
Customers have their own value calculations. If they can't use Claude for autonomous agent at reasonable price they will move to providers that are cheaper and more flexible. Autonomous agent adds way more utility than a marginally better LLM (assuming that's even true).
> Every single one of them oversells their capacity
This is (almost) universally true of flat rate subscriptions; but there are usage-billed ones, too (and even those often have an aspect of subsidies).
A great example of the shakeup is when dial-up went from "connect, do the thing, disconnect" to "leave the computer online all the time" - they had to change the billing model because it wasn't built for continuous connections.
That's a good analogy. Maybe soon we'll see Claude Code CDs with 700 free hours.
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No, people want transparency. If it was "x tokens per time interval, then you pay extra", the problem wouldn't exist.
The API offers that. Pay X per month, get Y tokens. Then you can look at all the graphs of money being deleted by OpenClaw, for transparency.
People want a free lunch. If the API was cheaper than the subscription then everyone would use the API. Instead people flock to an, apparently, unsustainable pice at a fixed monthly rate; presumably subsidized by others who don't use their full capacity every month.
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They have multiple tiers of service. The whole point of this was to allow "power users" to access more tokens. If someone upgraded to a $200/month Max subscription it's because they're a power user.
The thing is that a power user still sleeps.
It seems Anthropic thinks they have a much greater moat then they actually do. OpenClaw on a local model is better than any Claude offering, since it can just spin til the task is complete.
I'm pretty sure in this case it's anthropic doing the subsidizing because the api and extra usage rates are extremely expensive compared to the usage you get for the lowest subscription level. I pay $28 CAD per month and I'm pretty sure I'd burn through that in a day or two, and I'm not really a power user, I'm just using it to write code like it says on the tin. I seriously doubt there's a large portion of subscribers with low enough monthly usage that they'd save money by switching to the API.
And why aren’t OpenCode and others allowed anymore?
You don’t use more tokens than with Claude Code
> Every single one of them oversells their capacity.
My meal kit delivery service doesn't.
Still very interesting timing to ban third party harnesses, given the proximity to the Claude Code leak …
well that largely depends, lots of saas are running 90% operating profit margins
That is not the correct generalization. Most modern subscriptions have no capacity constraint. Usage based pricing makes more sense for a supply constrained business.
They do not advertise a capacity constraint. There is definitely one there, because it's the only way they can offer a reasonable price. Why do you think streaming services suddenly get plagued with technical issues when they host a live event? They are so chronically under-provisioned that they can only guess at the actual amount of compute they need to serve even a fraction of their subscriber base suddenly deciding to watch something at the same time. And their best guess is usually wrong, because even then — even when they know they need to deliver on a live event — they STILL under-provision their compute, or constrain their autoscaling thresholds, in an effort to save money.
Is your unlimited 5G plan actually unlimited, or does your download rate drop to dialup speeds after your crest a certain amount of bandwidth usage?
Have you ever had an ISP in a populated area? What's the reliability like? Is it worse during certain times of the day?
Come on, someone on a Max account has a reason why they are paying $200. I bet many are at least often near the weekly limit, or they‘ll downgrade. If anything, OpenClaw usage is more spread out instead of ingesting whole codebases during office hours.
The Anthropic subs are likely priced at marginal cost (Amp‘s CEO recently said that in a podcast). It just doesn’t serve Anthropic to be operating as the service layer for OpenClaw.
So it's like Sliceline from Silicon Valley (the show)
It's fine, their moat is thin. Frontier models as a service isn't really in the best interest of anyone anyways. Only a matter of time.
Are you arguing that eventually a competitor will emerge that does support OpenClaw with a subscription model? Wouldn’t that just be more expensive for the exact same reason Anthropic is banning it?
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I agree, eventually the open models will be good enough and we can pay for our own infra and cut out the middle man. Also, the smaller frontier are nearly as good today and I expect the mega models will be used primarily for distillation
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.
I'm at large company and pretty much everyone has settled on opus or sonnet 4.6. We would absolutely not allow something like OpenClaw on our network so your point kinda fits here where, if capacity is constrained, then by setting focus away from OpenClaw you're essentially prioritising the enterprise clients. Just spitballing of course
Yes exactly.
I doubt they actually want to do this.
They clearly see having a wide set of paying customers as valuable (otherwise they'd just raise prices) but if you are stuck having to make hard choice then I can see the attraction of this approach.
> not allow something like OpenClaw on our network
And where’s the difference between the Claude Desktop app and OpenClaw at this point? Anthropic have been hard at work porting the most important features. You can easily shoot yourself in the foot with both now.
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>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.
It's pretty clear that they do continually adjust the amount of tokens in a subscription, per se (and at best they offer sort-of estimates of quotas). The same activity exhausts my session quota on one day, yet it's a minor contributor on another. They make this very explicit with the "2x" event for the past two weeks, but anyone who uses it knows this is basically an ongoing reality: If you stick to using it off hours, you generally enjoy a more liberal usage grant.
But if they just "adjust the amount of tokens in a subscription", they would be punishing everyone for the outliers. The average normal user has spurts of usage where occasionally they need more and then there are gaps where they use little.
Subscription services rely upon this behaviour, and the economics only work if they "oversell". That's why OpenClaw users want to sneak in under a subscription, because the tokens come at a discounted rate over using the API based upon that assumption, but they are breaking the model because those users aren't conforming to expectations. It's basically the tragedy of the commons and a small number of users want to piss in the well.
> 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.
I think that's part of it, the other part is that OpenClaw is OpenAI IP now, and Anthropic want to allow users to ensloppify the internet through their own features now instead.
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.
I put in probably thousands of Claude session hours a month, aggregated across work + personal.
I must be missing something or supremely lucky because I feel like I’ve never hit these “stupid” moments.
If I do, it’s probably because I forgot to switch off of haiku for some tiny side thing I was doing before going back to planning.
There are 720 hours in a month. You'd have to be running 3 sessions in parallel continuously to be doing thousands of session-hours in a month. Are individual people really doing this?!
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Similar usage here. But I encountered this moments, and I chalk it up to the random nature of LLMs. Back in Sonnet 3.5 days, it would happen every other day. I even build an 'you are absolutely right' tracker back then to measure it. Opus 4.6, maybe once or twice a month.
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It's possible that it's simply paranoia, but moments where Opus starts acting like Haiku seem to correlate with periods of higher latency and HTTP errors. Don't like reporting this because it's so hand-wavy and conspiratorial, but it's difficult not to think they're internally using extraordinary measures of some sort to manage capacity.
But even when Opus is running healthy, it still doesn't address the underlying issue that these models can only do so much. I have had Opus build out a bunch of apps but I'm still finding my time absorbed as soon as it comes to anything genuinely exceeding "CRUD level difficulty". Ask it to fix a subtle visual alignment issue, make a small change to a completely novel algorithm, or just fix a tiny bug without having to watch for "Oh, this means I should rewrite module <X>" is something that simply isn't possible while still being able to stand over the work.
It's not to say I don't get a massive benefit from these tools, I just think it's possible to be asking too much of them, and that's maybe the real problem to solve.
Most people hate reading. Therefore they don't know how to write. Therefore they can't prompt properly. Not to mention so many "enemies of logic" cults being so strong nowadays.
I literally hit my 5 hour window limit in 1.5 hours every single day now.
2 weeks ago, I had only hit my limit a single time and that was when I had multiple agents doing codebase audits.
Anthropic had a special extra usage promotion going on during non-peak hours that ended recently.
They didn’t do a great job of explaining it. I wonder how many people got used to the 2X limits and now think Anthropic has done something bad by going back to normal
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Are you monitoring the size of your context windows? As they grow, so does the cost of every operation performed in that state.
We hit that problem 3 or 4 weeks ago and then we rolled back to version 2.1.44 and that apparently solved the fast consumption issue.
Our problems started when we moved to the claude code installer (it only affected the people who had updated) instead of using the npm version. Last week someone tried the installer version again and problems seem to have gone away. This is somewhat very anecdotal, so take it with a grain of salt.
They've been running a "double credits" promo for several weeks, which expired on the first of this month.
I've been using Codex extensively, 5.4 at "Extra High" and yet to hit a limit. The $20 plan
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I think my next steps are: 1) try out openai $20/month. I've heard they're much more generous. 2) try out open router free models. I don't need geniuses, so long as I can see the thinking (something that Claude code obfuscates by default) I should be good. I've heard good things about the CLIO harness and want to try openrouter+clio
I'm taking a bet on local models to do the non genius work. Gemma 4 (released yesterday) has been designed to run on laptops / edge devices....and so far is running pretty well for me.
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Word on the street is that Opus is much much larger of a model than GPT-5.4 and that’s why the rate limits on Codex are so much more generous. But I guess you could also just switch to Sonnet or Haiku in Claude Code?
Openrouter free models have 50 requests per day limit + data collection. As per their doc.
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i tried out gpt 5.4 xhigh and it did meaningfully worse with the same prompt as opus 4.6. like, obvious mistakes
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OpenAI has the better coding model anyways. You will be pleasantly surprised by Codex. The TUI tool is less buggy and runs faster and it's a more careful and less error-prone model. It's not as "creative" but it's more intelligent.
On top of that their $20 plan has much higher usage limits than Anthropic's $20 plan and they allow its use in e.g. opencode. So you can set up opencode to use both OpenAI's codex plan plus one of the more intelligent Chinese models so you can maximize your usage. Have it fully plan things out using GPT 5.4, write code using e.g. Qwen 3.6, then switch back to GPT 5.4 for review
Every service is being sold at a deep discount chasing market share, but it's not lasting forever.
Speaking only personally of course, I'm completely over the chat idiom in almost every way. Where is all this future demand coming from? By the time Android lands a God mode ultimate voice assistant it's pretty much guaranteed I will be well beyond the point where I'd want to use it. The whole thing is starting to remind me of 3G video calling where the networks thought it'd change everything, and by the end of it with all the infrastructure in place, the average user has made something like 0.001 3G-native video calls over the lifetime of their usage.
Would really love some path forward where the AI parts only poke out as single fields in traditional user interfaces and we can forget this whole episode
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Please don't use grossly offensive terms in this forum. That sort of language is not welcome here.
Oops, fixed
Since when are you a moderator?
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> I think we all jumped on the AI mothership with our eyes closed
Oh no, there's plenty of us willing to say we told you so.
What's more interesting to me is what it's going to look like if big companies start removing "AI usage" from their performance metrics and cease compelling us to use it. More than anything else, that's been the dumbest thing to happen with this whole craze.
Are you using the Chinese models through their individual services or via an intermediary layer?
I am not the person you are responding to but I have tried both: using OpenRouter and also giving a Chinese company $5 on my credit card to buy tokens. If I know what model I want to experiment with, I much prefer to just pay $5 and have plenty of tokens to experiment. On a yearly basis, this is a very tiny expense for the benefits of getting plenty of tokens to experiment with.
This is what I did, downgraded to pro and pay for opencode zen for the open models. I like the combo of the two
Oh, https://opencode.ai/zen looks good. I like pay as you go plans since I usually don’t use many tokens compared to vibe coders.
I regret paying Google for a one year AI subscription last spring (although it was a deep discount over the regular $20/month cost) because it has kept me from experimenting with many venders (but it was a fantastic deal financially).
I just put a reminder on my calendar to try OpenCode zen when my subscription ends.
> I think we all jumped on the AI mothership with our eyes closed and it's time to dial some nuance back into things.
I’m kind of confused by these takes from HN readers. I could see LinkedIn bros getting reality checked when they finally discover that LLMs aren’t magic, but I’m confused about how a developer could go all-in on AI and not immediately realize the limitations of the output.
It has indeed been baffling. Ad I dig deeper into what developers are doing with AI, it's basically like what I did customizing and tweaking emacs when I was younger (and fine, I'll admit I still do it sometimes). They are having so much fun playing with these new tools that they aren't really noticing how little the new tools are actually helping them
> immediately realize the limitations of the output.
I'm "all-in" on AI code generation. I very much realise their limitations, it's like any tool really. I do think they're magic, you just need to learn how to weld the power.
constant HTTP errors
Dealing with these right now with ChatGPT. Bricked a thread which I didn’t even know was possible.
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...
and they’ve made it clear that building products around claude -p is disallowed
Imagine not being able to connect services together or compose building-blocks to do what you want. This is absolute insanity that runs counter to decades of computing progress and interoperability (including Unix philosophy); and I'm saying this as someone who doesn't even care for using AI.
But you can still integrate this (claude -p) into your local workflows when you basically want to pipe pipe stuff to Claude for inference
it's trivial to use tmux. But it does feels like openclaw is used (and increasingly developed) by people who never heard of it.
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Even better, running something like 'claude -p' at the command line is exactly the kind of thing a model would do. Mine loves to run python, node, and a dozen other applications.
They aren’t stopping anyone from using claude -p, they are just charging for that usage.
Except it's not counter to history for SaaS services. Many will ban unauthentic usage from non-human clients. Getting banned from a SaaS service for boting is nothing new
You absolutely can, just pay for their API usage. The subscriptions are deeply discounted if you use your full quota compared to the API.
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> building products around claude -p
But OpenClaw is not a product. It's just a pile of open source code that the user happens to choose to run. It's the user electing to use the functionality provided to them in the manner they want to. There's nothing fundamental to distinguish the user from running claude -p inside OpenClaw from them running it inside their own script.
I've mostly defended Anthropic's position on people using the session ids or hidden OAuth tokens etc. But this is directly externally exposed functionality and they are telling the user certain types of uses are banned arbitrarily because they interfere with Anthropic's business.
This really harms the concept of it as a platform - how can I build anything on Claude if Anthropic can turn around and say they don't like it and ban me arbitrarily.
Claude Code is not a platform and you’re not meant to be building on it. Netflix is also not a platform and you shouldn’t be running code (open source or not) to mass download Netflix movies either.
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Ah thank you, this is very helpful distinction to know.
When they shut down open code, I thought it was a lame move and was critical of them, but I could understand at least where they're coming from. With this though, it's ridiculous. Claude core tools are still being used in this case. Shelling out to it to use it there's no different than a normal user would do themselves.
If this continues, I'll be taking my $200 subscription over to open AI.
Im still using opencode with claude pro so im confused.
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No a normal user is not shelling out to Claude Code 24/7, but OpenClaw certainly is.
OpenAI will soon do the same thing, don't be delusional.
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I’m also terrified of this.
When this happens I will have to look at other providers and downgrade my subscription. Conductor is just too powerful to give up. It’s the whole reason why I’m on a max plan.
I assume this means we can no longer use Claude code sessions in editors like zed because it also wraps claude cli via ACP?
ACP was a good idea but I feel it has not lived up to its potential.
Has there been an actual change to their ToS? As of the last change which I saw reach HN, a week or so ago, `claude -p` was still in compliance with the Claude Code ToS. Has that language changed?
Came here to say the same. I remember the discussion on HN back then where we discovered that an official from Anthropic made clear that claude -p was still okay.
I keep hearing OpenClaw runs on pi?
EDIT: confused by downvotes. In this thread people are saying it runs on top of `claude -p` and others saying it's on pi.
The `claude -p` option is allowed per https://x.com/i/status/2040207998807908432 so I really don't understand how they're enforcing this.
It runs on pi, not claude -p
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Why are they doing that? Opus is the only good way to run Claw. Do they regret making it cheaper or what?
Also what's the point of Claude -p if not integration with 3rd party code? (They have a whole agents SDK which does the same thing.. but I think that one requires per token pricing.) I guess they regret supporting subscription auth on the -p flag
> Opus is the only good way to run Claw
that's a ridiculous position to take - gemini and others work just great with claw...
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exactly. They probably have unsustainable margins on accident.
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.
Yeah, its heartbeat. If you keep HEARTBEAT.md empty, it won't be consuming tokens every half an hour. Use cron for periodic tasks if possible, but if you need LLM to process something periodically, that's what heartbeat is for. Z burned 166mio tokens in last 30 days, majority was the heartbeat. Definitely wouldn't pay for that if it wouldn't be the subscription. It uses 1-4% of every 5h quotas. Definitely not sustainable, but I take the opportunity to learn things while it lasts.
Have you tried switching to smaller models like GLM-4.5-air for Openclaw? I’m thinking you’d consume way less of the hourly quota. Often times, the smaller models are decent enough when the task is not complex.
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... checks openclaw setup.
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.
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.
Every SaaS company has to deal with resource whales
Either they pay up or get off
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.
I am pretty sure Claude Code limits were being hit so fast recently because there was an increasing amount of OpenClaw style usage on the subscription. From tweets from the people in charge it sounded like they were having more usage than they expected which was causing them to have to be more aggressive on the rate limits. They said they were working to address it soon. I have a feeling this is what they were working on changing. I bet OpenClaw was the reason for the rate limiting being so bad lately.
I'm hoping with this change we see the rate limits start to not be as rough.
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.
Link is broken.
missing a ? character. https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw/pulls?q=is%3Apr+author%...
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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.
Some editor integrations are a bit like this already, where during use you don't actually touch the built-in TUI even for prompting or viewing the output and approving permissions requests.
I imagine how they treat these things will be contextual and maybe inconsistent. There aren't really hard lines between what they probably want editors that integrate with them to do and generic tools that try to sit a layer above the vendors' agent TUIs.
GitHub Copilot supports Anthropic models with any client but they have a monthly usage cap after which it is pay-per-prompt.
> "Even without hacks, Copilot is still a cheap way to use Claude models"briHass
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59nadir
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hooch
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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
GHCP also has magical rate limits that hit users that slam multi-agent workflows or other crazy request burners.
Mind you, I think GHCP is a great service at an excellent price, but the hardcore vibe coders complain about the rate limits that I've never personally experienced using the CLI.
That's weird, because every time I see someone even talking positively about Claude Code they always seem to mention they're hitting their 5 hour limits in 2-3 hours all the time, they're hitting their overall limits all the time, and so on.
Meanwhile I can't even seem to spend my $20 Cursor Composer 2 tokens using their agent. I've been doing useless shit just to see how much usage I can cram in there and it'd probably take 10 hours of vibecoding like a loser every day to hit the limits at this point.
With that said I'm not going to pay for something that doesn't allow me to use whatever I want to use (in terms of harness, etc.), so both Anthropic (who were already disqualified because of their ridiculous limits) and Cursor is out (AFAIK you can't an agent other than their `agent` binary without some ridiculous hack like proxying all of the calls through `agent`.
I can't imagine all of the providers pretending their agents are real value going forward, but even if they do there's still stuff like OpenRouter which doesn't give a shit, may as well use something like that.
Last time I looked Copilot's context window for Anthropic models was something like 150,000 tokens only.
Both Sonnet and Opus 4.6 under GHCP support a 1M context window.
Don't jinx it!
"these tools put an outsized strain on our systems"
AKA when you fully use the capacity you paid for, that's too much!
You don't pay for capacity, you pay for an interface. Paying for capacity is what API keys are for.
Similarly, on a home internet connection you might pay for a given size of pipe, but most residential ISPs don't allow running publicly accessible servers on your connection because you'll typically use way more of the bandwidth.
This is probably one of the worst analogies you could have brought up in this context.
The business model of an ISP involves fixed capital investments into infrastructure with constant opex and very little variable costs.
The marginal cost of sending a gigabyte is basically zero. The limited resource here is bandwidth and ISPs split their tiers based on bandwidth.
The problem is that some users may consume the local bandwidth that is shared with other users. More bandwidth requires more investment into infrastructure. This means that bandwidth in itself doesn't produce costs for the ISP either, it is the maximum bandwidth capacity that costs money.
Hence, oversubscription is a viable business as long as neighbors aren't impacted by power users.
This doesn't apply to LLMs. Token economics has the same economics as steel. There is high capex to get started, but the real killer is the variable cost per unit of steel.
You can't sell steel on a oversubscribed subscription model. It's nonsensical.
If the subscription is more expensive than buying what you need, nobody is going to pay for the subscription unless they consume all of it.
Hence the subscription must contain a subsidy to make it competitive.
However, the people who consume the full subscription are still there and each token they request adds up on your electricity bill.
Ergo, the subscription must be more expensive than the API, but with a smart billing limit that removes the cognitive burden of using your service with pay as you go billing.
If that same internet provider has caps on how much bandwidth I can use every 5 hours and total on a weekly basis, then yes, I pay for capacity.
That argument would have been valid when the 5 hours blocks were unlimited in the beginning.
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I’m not sure why people expect Anthropic to subsidize tokens through Open Claw when it’s specifically forbidden in the ToS.
^ This. I get that We Are On The Internet And People Will Be Wrong Sometimes -- but I'm really confused by the amount of people insisting that a subscription is just a slosh bucket of token capacity to be used however they feel like using it; are these people who genuinely misunderstand how subscriptions work or what Anthropic's terms were, and genuinely weren't aware that 3rd-party harnesses violate them? The vibe I get is more "how dare you constrain me from doing whatever I want", angry rebellious teenager vibe, willful oversimplifications of the situation... it doesn't feel particularly honest or reality-seeking.
Didn’t know I’m paying for capacity. Learnt something new today!
Meh this argument does not hold up. If you don’t like it pay for the API. We all know these services are priced for human use, as in your not using it 24/7.
Except no, you aren't paying the full capacity of using all of your limits every time. The subscription cost is less than it would take to actually pay for the capacity of the limits. That is how these sorts of subscriptions work.
You can pay for the capacity, using the per token price.
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.
The Zed ACP client for example is still controlled by the human prompt, and they will probably not be banned
I have no idea what ACP offers that are superior to a tmux session. With tmux, you can attach to it at any time, send keys at any time, and capture pane without bothering any running process inside.
And you don't have to get anyone's permission to use tmux.
> And you don't have to get anyone's permission to use tmux.
I'm not so sure about that. I have my own local multi agent orchestration setup with tmux and native claude code, codex, and gemini. They can talk between each other using tmux.
I'm not sure precisely when does a wrapper around Claude Code become a "third party harness". If OpenCode is a third party harness, why is tmux not?
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This is my big question too. It seems by intent it's to kill it, including ACP, but I don't know.
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.
Openclaw users are a small percentage of their user base but take up a lot of their compute. Given the cost is subsidized it’s not surprising they would target it. Getting these users to leave is probably the point. These aren’t profitable users.
"Adoption" like 2000's internet companies losing money on every sale to get market share?
For SaaS, use the SaaS API. For product, use the product.
They subsidize the product with "don't care how much" pricing so they have users to build out features without users worrying about cost. If it's not actual users using the product, then features will be built in OpenClaw instead of Claude.
The earlier they draw this line, the better.
However, announcing it the day before it is effective is a huge unforced error, even if it were just a consequence of the TOS. They gain nothing by making people scramble.
Also better to announce at the same new ways to support plugging in to Claude Code - something to encourage integration/cooperation. No fences unless the field inside is flowering.
They have so much mindshare right now that they can’t lose, and the number of users that use opencode and would be affected is miniscule—-on the level of complaining about your online bank not supporting Konqueror.
Honestly I suspect they're just getting ready to release a new feature for autonomous usage. I mean it was one of the leaked feature toggles. If I'm right it'll likely mean we'll get an announcement within the next 2 weeks for "long running prompts/agents"
I mean, it is easy to understand once you realise that there is no spoon.
Despite their power, frontier models are threatened by open-source equivalents. If AGI is not on the horizon and model performance is likely not going to be enough of a differentiator to keep the momentum going, the only other way is to go horizontal - enterprise solutions, proprietary coding agent harnesses, market capture, etc.
If AGI is in sight, none of these short-term games really matter. You just need to race ahead.
They have plenty of high paying users that will soak up what the claws are consuming in capacity. They are thinking about those customers and delivering them a better experience
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?
Im wondering this too. If I have my own local platform similar in nature to openclaw, and am leveraging claude -p through my subscription, is this now against ToS? Or is this just a ban specific to certain services? In which case they're saying 'use -p until you scale and then we'll hammer you'. Either way what a pita.
They have terms to not allow `claude -p` used like that. However, people can hide this with the leaked source code. What a funny cat-and-mouse game!
> They have terms to not allow `claude -p` used like that.
Like what? I legitimately don't understand what is prohibited. Using claude as part of a shell script? Am I only allowed to use claude if a physically type the commands into a terminal via my keyboard? Why even ship `claude -p` at all?
Can you please point me to those terms?
I guess Anthropic will scrutinize big open source projects for that purpose. The direct official integrations will be removed.
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?
openclaw is too easy to set up and way too messy and context heavy, they don't have to catch you they just have to catch the guy on the market giving out free modified V8 F150s while Anthropic are selling gas subscriptions in town.
Sure but if the mechanism that bans openclaw also bans me, I still get banned
Check into the CC source leaks, they're doing some relatively sophisticated attestation
it’s not banned it will just charge to extra usage instead of going towards the sub when using setup token, you can allocate money to extra usage or make an anthropic api key and use that
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.
how do you use Claude over telegram ?
> how do you use Claude over telegram ?
Here are the docs. https://code.claude.com/docs/en/channels - actually I couldn’t even get this going myself so I asked Claude to do it (meta) and it did, I also had it set this up with a launcher and it all starts up automatically just like openclaw.
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.
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
I built a harness where my plans and code are reviewed with 'claude -p' but most work is interactive, now it has been wrecked. I relied and integrated with Anthropic to get burned. I'm not even maxing out my plan, never surpassed 60%. But now I have to pay API pricing on top? This tells me how trustworthy Anthropic is. If you depend on any specific feature you are at their mercy.
Prior to Anthropic I have had bad experiences with Windsurf and Cursor, same shit - I pay the plan, they shrink my usage quota after a short time, couple of months or weeks. I never returned to Windsurf after they abused me, and never used Cursor after I got my Claude sub, I have no idea where I'll end up next. Too bad Anthropic is pushing my $200/mo away.
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?
Realistically, they can likely prevent the majority of this sort of use. You're right that's it's impossible to prevent 100%, but they can likely stop most of it. Particularly because each user is linked with an account which has an extra high cost to the user if penalized. Abuse prevention is harder when you permit anonymous users. (Like OAI's battle against people turning the free logged out chatgpt.com into an API)
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.
couldn’t you just do that and put the other $80 towards extra usage and OpenClaw can use that?
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.
Indeed, this is the outcome they are going to create. It seems like their goal is to get people using their core tools, and they want that bad enough to subsidize it for some users. The net effect on users like me however, will be the exact opposite. I'll be switching to a different tool.
Yeah and it doesn't help that the claude CLI itself IMO isn't that great. It feels a bit like a sloppy vibe coded app. So they are forcing me to use an inferior product.
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.
Such a small minority of the customers they want use openclaw and in aggregate a lot of compute use is coming from the total group. Better to stop customers you don’t want. This has zero impact on top line revenue
From you can tell from they long-term strategy they are not marketing geniuses, but rather they try to signal are "moral geniuses". That's the game they are playing, I don't really know if it is going to work or not.
marketing geniuses was never a real alternative if inference is heavily subsidized, because open models scale in performance just as well, albeit 12-18 months late
Well, I don't use openclaw and I don't think it would be fair if everyone had to pay more to subscribe them.
Why hatred btw? They're not even banning accounts left and right like Google?
>Make a better product/alternative to Openclaw and start eating their userbase.
There's a good chance they do not have the infrastructure to do that.
Not the software is the product, you know? The tokens are the product. Selling cheap subscriptions to power users costs them money. That are the customers you don't want, so why hesitate to get rid of them when they don't want to pay more?
but are they really doing that? I mean it says you can keep using OpenClaw you just have to allocate money to the extra usage or an api token, I have no plan on not using it because Opus makes the claw so smart, I’ll just put more money towards the extra usage rather than the beefier sub
I'm fine with it. I don't want my subscription subsidizing the claw people.
How about the people that don't use OpenClaw, but alternative agent harnesses that are vastly better than Claude Code?
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I think you value yourself too much over other people. What does it even mean "claw people"?
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I'm a new Max 5x subscriber ($100/mo) and my account was banned today within hours of upgrading. I was exclusively using the official @anthropic-ai/claude-code CLI to research usage policies for a personal project.
It seems the April 4th automated sweep for third-party harnesses (OpenClaw/OpenCode) has a high false-positive rate for users on the official CLI. I don't use my Anthropic token with any unofficial tools. Has anyone else on the Max tier been flagged while using the official tools?
The decision makes sense, but the developer experience around it is terrible. I assumed OAuth would work for third-party integrations — turns out you need a separate API key with separate billing, and there was zero documentation pointing you in that direction before the cutoff. Anthropic ships fast and the product is great, but they could really learn from Stripe: when your users are engineers, clear docs aren't a nice-to-have — they're your entire sales funnel.
Boris Cherny on this
https://x.com/bcherny/status/2040206440556826908?s=20
May I suggest trying Z.ai coding plan? I've had a good experience, and its 1/3rd of the price.
When I do use AI, I already have a solid plan of what I need. Sometimes I ask it to look something up. I never do both in one prompt.
GLM 5.1 can do both, and its way way cheaper. I also don't hit my limit that fast (Plus I get to use it in OpenCode).
Now is also a good time because they have a discount offer this month for using GLM-5-Turbo. During off-peak hours, only 1x multiplier will be deducted (otherwise it is 2x). I’m am on the Lite plan and have never maxed my usage quota (their Christmas deal offered 3 month for 7$).
They also do not allow non-coding usage of their coding plan in their ToS.
I have been very disappointed in the Lite plan over the last few months. It started great, but they are obviously quantizing and cutting costs on the low end plans. The agents go into bad loops and contradict themselves, inject chinese characters, etc. There is obvious compression happening which makes it unreliable and unsuitable for serious work.
which plan do you suggest ? 80$/m ?
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
>Graceful handling from Anthropic
Less than 24 hours notice and on a holiday weekend
The flak is basically variations of "but I want it cheaper!" whining. The hysterics, the whiny "I'm taking my ball and going home!" nonsense, and so on, is just a wrapper around that entitlement.
The API is there. It's straightforward and easy to use. But these users want to piss in the well, tragedy of the commons style.
exactly! they actually chose the better approach rather than just locking us out
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 see where they are going to draw the line. If I run 4 sessions in tmux, all connected to claude code, is that OK?
This is a useful forcing function for distinguishing two architectural categories of Claude Code adjacent tooling. Tools that route your API traffic through a third-party harness are definitionally dependent on Anthropic's policy toward that harness. Tools that run locally and integrate via MCP, without touching the API subscription path at all, are outside this restriction entirely because they are just another tool in your local environment. The local-first architecture was always the right one for teams with compliance or privacy requirements. This week is a good illustration of why it is also the right one for teams that just want to avoid dependency on a vendor-intermediary relationship they cannot control.
I use both. claude -p in a loop still has me kicking off runs, so there are natural breaks. OpenClaw is different — my provider on a Mac Mini ran 14 hours straight last week serving skill requests with zero human in the loop. /loop abuse exists sure, but it's still wrapped around a session someone started. OpenClaw's "user" is another agent. Token consumption looks flatter and way higher. You're probably right about the platform lock-in angle too. Both can be true. Anthropic is protecting capacity AND pushing people to Claude Code. But the capacity pressure from autonomous harnesses isn't imaginary.
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.
I spent today testing every alternative I could find. GLM-5 Turbo (Z.ai (http://z.ai/)) was the only one optimized for agentic OpenClaw workflows. I wrote up the full comparison with benchmarks here: https://ai-master.dev/en/article/glm-5-turbo-alternative-cla...
Am I still allowed to invoke cc in a bash script, or is that out too? Interactive sessions only.
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.
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.
are you running opus? Iam able to burn trough 40% of my weekly 20x max plan in one day :(
What... Are... You... Actually doing???
I am running opus to make changes to my code then running the code. I am genuinely curious how we are having such disparate experiences here. And at this point, IMO you're in too deep not to share...
Genuinely wondering if you're running gastown or some other crazy mixture of agents pretending they're an AI startup. I get by with a developer agent and a reviewer agent ping ponging off each other encouraged to be rude, crude, and socially unacceptable about it.
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How?! That must be like 10 parallel Opus 4.6 with all cranking lots of in and out respectively very long sessions?
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> 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.
Plenty to hate on anthropic for right now, but Ill never understand the references to output as a slot machine. It is massively a skill based tool, you CAN use it like a slot machine with "please make it work" style prompts. The variance is the difference, if you feed it great context and/or relevant sources to utilize, your odds of success increase dramatically. Slot machines, it doesn't matter how much thought you put into your pull, you will have the same odds as literally any other person pulling the lever.
Except you put $200 into the CC casino and you can (if you choose) extract thousands in token value.
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.
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.
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.
even higher than $200? gosh, what are you doing to hit limits every day?
For me it's surprising that they expected anything other than heavy utilisation at that price point. People don't subscribe at those prices and forget about it.
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Consulting fees from Claude & Ralph.
Professional software development. I literally have 2 to 5 terminals running all day.
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Based on the way subscriptions work for every other business, if you’re hitting the limits, you are not profitable for them.
My guess is a plan with double the limits would need to be 5-10x as expensive.
This is only an issue between 12pm and ~4pm ET. If I work at any other time of day, I never hit my usage limit.
Extra usage seems like the right thing for you. It's pre-paid so if you only ever fill in $100 more per-month it works as a higher subscription tier.
You can set the monthly extra usage cap to $1000 or something to cap how much it can cost per month.
https://support.claude.com/en/articles/12429409-manage-extra...
That's a had sell to a finance team.
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Maybe start actually working and PROGRAMMING instead of simply cheating and ruining the job market at the same time?
Usage of such tools should be forbidden in companies - its cheating and using code you didn't even wrote. thsts literally a crime
"Should be forbidden in companies"? I think you need to see some fresh headlines and read a few articles.
I presume that if you're such a vocal opponent of CC, you're also fighting using IDEs and other tools useful in software engineering, like CI pipelines?
Emacs/vim and make should be the maximum a person is permitted!
With all the credit, my extra usage is now a pretty large amount!
During a recent subscription upgrade, the system started burning through my extra usage at an enormous visible clip.
So -ironically perhaps- I've turned off extra usage completely, turned off auto-reload, and -should current trends persist- will probably end up with the extra credit still on balance by the time I delete the account.
That said, I currently don't see a viable alternative to Anthropic for me - yet. I'm actively looking, and other options are improving rapidly.
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?
This is why people are switching over to Codex
Codex just ended their double-usage offer and OpenAI just had an exec shakeup, so it'll be interesting to see how Codex reacts, or if people have usage issues with Codex.
OpenAI mentioned already that it's ok to use Codex with Openclaw.
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So the VC gravy is drying. We should see the enshitification of LLM providers in the rest of 2026 and 2027. The bubble has to burst at some point.
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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.
I don't get it - in what way is this bait-and-switch? Anthropic's terms have made it amply clear that your claude subscription can only be used with Anthropic-provided tools, not with 3rd-party harnesses. I imagine anyone who uses OpenClaw is AI-savvy enough to be aware of that, and happily flouted those terms anyway. If anything Anthropic seems overly accommodating here by giving all flouters a month of free credit, rather than simply saying "sorry yall but we're gonna start enforcing that thing our TOS has said from the start".
The premise of the subscription isn't "giant bucket of ultra-cheap tokens that you can use however you want", it's "giant bucket of ultra-cheap tokens that you can use with OUR tools, within reasonable limits". Even if their TOS didn't prohibit OpenClaw-oids, I wouldn't consider this bait-and-switch, I'd consider it a reasonable and needed move.
There ToS didn’t use to say that. It does now, that is the bait and switch. FYI, openai says their sub IS a giant bucket of tokens you can use however you want.
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.
Where is the official announcement on https://www.anthropic.com/ or https://claude.com/? I haven't gotten an email.
same question here
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.
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
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.
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
Yes, 20/mo is worth the price for me. Just don't run Opus by default for everything
Yeah, the $20 Claude plan is almost worthless. Unless you're just using it to write scripts and not working in a real world application code base, it just runs out way too fast to get much done.
I think using it to write small documentation or small scripts would be a good use case for it, but serious development work you Hit the usage limits way too fast.
I used to, but not anymore. Now I can somehow burn my _entire_ limit with a single prompt, maybe two. It's ridiculous, I've changed nothing about how I do things.
Only thing now is that the cheaper (worse) chinese model coding plans have huge limits, so I lean on those now. Requires a lot more hand-holding though.
$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.
"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.
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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-...
Yeah this is similar to my approach, although with slightly more powerful models. I’m just not having a good time letting the sota models loose on a code base to implement entire features. Spending too much time cleaning up the mess. It’s my fault, I needed to guide it more, but it would take the same amount of time to use a faster model to generate smaller chunks and also cost less. And I’m not even doing anything particularly complex!
inb4 skill issue I could probably beat you coding by hand with you using Claude code
> The solution as usual is open source.
> Obviously step-3.5-flash is nowhere near the raw performance of sonnet
I feel like these two statements conflict with each other.
Those two statements completely check out about a lot of open source projects/products tho... macOS upsetting you today? The solution is linux!
Google releasing Gemma 4 yesterday was prescient. Toying around with Zed + Gemma 4 on my laptop is 95% as good as using a cloud provider.
> 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?
I never got OpenClaw and I'm unsure what this means exactly. Would it be just that you can't put your Anthropic API Key/credentials in OpenClaw and use it? Sounds like something easy to bypass, if it's just that.
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...
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.
I think there was a clarification posted on Reddit that said Claude Agents SDK didn't apply for now.
> 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?
Great question. I've read that the agent sdk is ok as long as it's not for external use - meaning you aren't selling access to it. Unclear now though!
When another program is doing direct tool calling instead of delegating it to Claude.
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.
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.
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.
People were getting credits worth $15k+ on a 200$ subscription, this had to happen now or later, but my concern stays on them reducing usage in claude code as well!? Like atleast allow us claude code, limits exhaust in minutes nowdays
Discussion (655 points, 1 month ago, 793 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47069299
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.
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 got the email and I've only ever run the legit claude client.
Any idea what caused your account to be flagged, then?
I mustve tried openclaw with it. Though ive been running it on codex primarily since I was serious about setting it up.
Thats why i found this website bayofassets.com they are providing claude api and 11 other models in single api key start from 10$
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.
As a CC power user, an OpenClaw, and ZeroClaw user, I am completely fine with this. My CC usage has suffered lately, and however cool and fun the Claws are, I use Claude Desktop probably more than OpenClaw and it works just fine, and has a lot of integrations. I would rather have Anthropic continue to support its own products working well, and have all of these things move to another service, or pay Anthropic for their use.
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.
Reminds me of this:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/14/Bill_Gat...
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
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.
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.
It's probably just the header.
headers['X-Title']
You can change that
The other simple method is to only accept certain system prompts
I've been meaning to do some dumb little proxy system where all your i/o can pass through any specified system such as a web page, harness, whatever...
Essentially a local model toolcalls to an "Oracle" which is just something like a wrapper around Claude code or anything you've figured out how to scrape and then you talk to the small model that mostly uses the Oracle and.... There you go.
There's certainly i/o shuffling and latency but given model speeds and throughput it'll be relatively very small
Now people probably care
Doesn't mean I know how to market it, I'll certainly fail at that, but at least I can build it
The bun executable attests the code by sending a signature along. I'm not sure what why we can't simply clone that signature, though.
Continuous requests at a constant rate for days with interruptions?
That's just a ralph loop: https://ghuntley.com/ralph/
I can do that now with claude code and a "while true" bash loop.
Or with the built-in "/schedule" in claude code to set an agent to run say once every few minutes.
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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.
This does not affect anyone who uses an API key.
Oh thank you! I'm using these tools but occasionally I feel like a medieval horse rider trying to drive a sedan. Glad to know, I haven't used OpenClaw, I prefer the meat computer for autonomous compute.
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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.
The copilot plans work with pi and are stupidly cheap for what you get.
Thought this was already something people were getting their accounts banned on? This is new?
Go pay for the API. It's not complicated.
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.
It's the tragedy of the commons where OpenClaw users abuse the system and everyone has to suffer.
Oh, it's a billing thing. Not fear that Claude coupled to something that can actually do things is dangerous.
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
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.
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.
Just use opus. A company that has not rejected agreements with a “Department of War” and sanctions reasoning models to enable mass citizen surveillance and autonomous weapons deployment with no human intervention is not really the kind of company I want to give my money too. And opus4.6 is the best model out there. Some people overthink on personality but I just want good code.
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.
If you're on a subscription plan, you're paying for a certain amount of maximum token consumption. Mass market consumers generally prefer this model to one where they're billed for actual usage. But making it work requires statistical estimates of how much people will consume, which often requires excluding third party tools that circumvent those estimates.
To use your analogy, if Shell sold you a subscription to fill up your Hummer up to 30 times a month, they wouldn't let you use that subscription to fill gas cans with a GMC logo taped to the side. They couldn't, without overcharging the people who just want to average out their cost of driving.
I think that just as with ISPs people become irate when they feel there's been a bait-and-switch. Had they very loudly advertised the subscription as limited to their harness up front with a note about maximum token use people presumably wouldn't feel cheated. Whereas they seem to be pulling a "pray I don't alter it further" for the second time now.
You don't get to sell a subscription described primarily as being for some quantity of X and then change the terms every time people find creative ways to use the stream of X they believe themselves to have purchased from you. People thought they were purchasing in bulk.
You are making the false assumption that all token consumption costs the same when it doesn't. Yes in the limit the price to serve the model and generate a response is O(tokens), but when tokens is smaller it can be cheaper to generate a new token than when tokens is bigger. If other harnesses prompt with more tokens than Claude Code it can be more expensive to serve.
They have limits. I don't care how expensive it is to serve, I'm paying them for a given amount of tokens (a limit which THEY SET) and they want to also dictate where I spend those tokens.
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I feel icky replying in favor of a for-profit entity, but here goes ..
> We are paying for a certain amount of token consumption
I dont think you are. The specific arrangement you have is you pay for a subscription to be used with Claude Code. It isnt access to tokens, so you can do whatever you please.
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An analogy would be a refillable cup for a soda at a restuarnt. They will allow you to refill how many ever times you want, but only using the store provided cup - and you cant bring your own 2L hydroflask or whatever. You're paying not just for the liquid, but for the entire setup.
The analogy is bad. Anthropic does not let you "refill however many times you want", they have limits. That's what "limits" in your account is.
It would be like the restaurant saying "you can buy the 2-liter soda pack" and then getting all uppity when you bring your own 2L hydroflask in.
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.
As a non-American, I love what Chinese companies are doing. The progress they are showing and the fact they are sharing the weights of the models is great. I can't wait for the day when companies that "have no moat" like A. , Cursor or even OpenAI are left with a bunch of float matrices and hardware.
I understand people from the US will have an anti-Chinese reaction, but for us in the "third world" that can use both techs, the openess is always good.
they could have locked OpenClaw out but instead they took the time to adjust the way it works so people can still use it
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.
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
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.
If OpenClaw is just "claude -p", then how do they know when you're using OpenClaw?
They look for pincer marks
It's a pair of ragged claws.
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 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.
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.
You don't make $50 per day? From where you are?
I do and my company is willing to pay that. I am not :)
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.
Which harness and how which GPU?
Opencode + 4090
the hardware ROI is insane right now tbh. a $200/mo sub is literally paying off a second gpu in less than a year.
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.
And so it begins...
Drug dealer got them hooked, now time to charge by the ounce.
Was successful in getting a prorated yearly subscription refund from their follow-up email.
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.
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.
I never used OpenClaw and I did get the email about free credits.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
I doubt it means that. How would they ever know? Honest question..
if (process.argv.includes('-p')) and then setting a different http header?
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.
While I agree with you, thats not what this announcement is about. Anthropic wants to disallow programmatic use of their subscription plans for business reasons as a way to manage demand. They’re having outages, at least weekly, since March.
Thanks for the clarification! I added an edit to my comment.
Idk why people are complaining when they know subscription are currently heavily subsidized. If they don't like they can always choose alternative service.
So is Codex the only SOTA that welcomes third-party harness?
Any model besides Claude. AFAIK anthropics the only corp to say no to other harnesses.
via oauth, yes.
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.
The 5 hour limit is total bs because I end up hitting the limit in just 20 minutes. One single invocation of superpowers on fixing a single GitHub issue that's not super complex eats up all my context. It's barely usable at this point.
Haha, I almost expected this.
Say goodbye to my 600$/ month Anthropic.
The people who have enough Opus usage such that they were using multiple Max accounts are the exact users Anthropic want to kick out.
So you were using API tokens already, this doesn’t affect you. Why are you quitting in protest?
Three Max subscriptions.
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Three Claude Max subs maxed out? I think that's exactly what they do want to say goodbye to. This might be the most unregretted "unregretted attrition" they have.
The worst thing is that someone with three Max accounts is definitely not going to leave due to this. They already clearly have a dependence on Claude.
There's no way in hell this amount of tokens is reasonable for anything or worth it
I have 2 max 20x subscriptions. So not API tokens.
I do a lotta stuff don’t need to get into it here.
You have a tiny imagination
You have no idea how much slop people push out on daily basis.
It seems like they are suffering from compute problems bcs they are not only allowing OpenClaw but also limiting the chats
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 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.
I have a few accounts but have been avoiding OpenCode with my Pro/Max accounts because I had heard some were being banned. Have only been using Anthropic models through OpenRouter, but it ends up being cost prohibitive for anything reasonably complex. But, I haven't received emails in either account around the change. Anthropic probably figures that it's less ideal to draw attention to it if a user isn't using it in that way. Personally I'm not a fan of what they're doing and will likely drop them and go out of my way to find a different option and move away from their lock-in strategy. They're really no different than OpenAI at this point (for the worst).
FWIW: I did not receive it, and have never used my subscription outside of first party Claude tools. I was, however, able to claim the extra usage credit.
Interestingly, it looks like I haven't received a non-receipt email from them since August 2025.
How/where were you able to do that?
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I'm a pro subscriber and didn't get this so I wager its accounts they detect because i only use it in the browser and haven't seen this.
OpenClaw also had the ability to run entirely within Claude Code instead of using the oauth token. Would that still be allowed?
Why do this, the subscription has usage limits so its controlled that way, who cares what you use it for?
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.
Not as simple as that. Everyone would happily use local, but the issue is local sucks.
https://github.com/brontoguana/krasis
On my desktop RTX 5060 TI (16GB) and 96GB ram, I routinely get 25-30 tokens/sec using an 80B model quantized to int8. Uses 65GB system ram and 15GB gfx ram.
And its plenty fast for many of my purposes.
I could easily run a 30B model bf16 (full) and do like 50tok/s
It looks like the chickens came to roost much earlier than expected, including the fall in RAM prices
I wonder if this also applies to tools that interact with the claude code tui through tmux's capabilities.
Why doesn't OpenAI introduce $100/mo plan? Surely many would switch in a heartbeat
Maybe because they don't want to lose money even faster than Anthropic is?
Is that also why they allow to use their subscriptions in OpenClaw and 3rd party harnesses?
What are people doing with OpenClaw? Are there any places that try to log best uses and new ideas?
You can basically do what open claw does with native Claude code features now anyway.
Since the OpenClaw creator is posting on HN I’d like to hear some commentary from him directly.
Does anyone know. How would that relate to simply wrapping claude code as a subprocess?
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.
“What I’m doing is real coding. What you’re doing is a mess full of vibe coding.”
I do enjoy these gatekeepers getting sideswept, their comments being little raindrops in a hurricane. It's a vile mindset.
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?
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.
Exactly! It's insane we are so willing to be so dependent on these companies. Imagine AWS having the same downtime and service issues. You would immediately switch providers.
Good call.
That’s how ecosystems start: by cutting out third parties.
What should we use next for coding in openclaw
You shouldn't be doing that. Run OpenCode Kimaki for coding and use a cheap LLM for whatever you need Claw for.
I already moved it to chatgpt for a while
I thought this had already been the case for a while?
Just in time for my subscription to expire. Goodbye!
Makes sense, yes. That’s definitely not sustainable
I still haven't got this email, anyone else?
I haven't gotten this notification yet
Using Xiaomi’s mimo pro on openrouter via hermes agent
Big mistake.
Claude innovation will come from being open, not closed.
Does anyone have a link to the "read more"?
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.
Nanoclaw uses the official claude agent sdk, so it should be unaffected.
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.
Inefficient token use will have to tighten up.
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.
They changed the terms going forward so you’re changing your behavior going forward? Nobody but the psychos you’re making up would think you’re out of line here. They’re not required to offer the same product forever and you’re not required to pay forever.
Anthropic changing their terms is fine. You taking your money elsewhere is also fine. What's the issue here?
This actually seems rather generous of them? Not only are they offering credits equal the cost you paid, but they're offering refunds if you disagree.
Anthropic not allowing Claiude Code subscriptions to be used with other projects isn't "pulling the rug out"; you paid for an API subscription to use Claude Code, and now you're using it for a different purpose and a different product.
If Tesla offered $10/month charging for your Tesla, and then a bunch of people turned around and use their Tesla Charge subscription to charge all different electric vehicles, and battery packs, and also hooked up a crypto mining rig to it, would you be surprised if they said "Nope, we're cutting this off. You can only use your Tesla Charge subscription for your Tesla vehicle"?
Nope, I paid for an Anthropic subscription that I could use with the Agents SDK. Then they decided I shouldn't be able to use that, just because.
> If Tesla offered $10/month charging for your Tesla
No, "if Tesla offered $10/month for 100 kWh of charging", and yes, I expect to use those 100 kWh with any vehicle I want, because there's a limit on the resource I'm paying for.
I can understand caps on unlimited, I can't understand caps when there are strict limits.
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One interesting observation I had between ChatGPT and Claude before I was familiar with openclaw came when I asked if about the difference between ChatGPT and Claude for coding and if I can get to a setup that can use both. At that time I had both subscriptions, felt it was better to build with Claude but was frequently reaching limits.
ChatGPT found it was a great idea and that I can use Claude for planning and gave me instructions on how to best hand off the building part. Claude told me it’s a horrible idea.
Claude also burns much more liberally through tokens, eg reading through entire irrelevant docs.
Openclaw is great for resolving this since I much more control which work goes where and also gives a much better user experience without all the back and forth to understand what context it has (my use case is to build things from my phone while I’m in senseless meetings in my day job).
Fully agree on the alternatives. In the end Claude’s experience is worse, while it still makes bad decisions if you let it. Better to get a good workflow on a less capable model.
I don’t want to ever commit to anyone that I will never change my prices or the conditions I’ll work under so I think it’s fine if they won’t commit to that either.
This one passes the Golden Rule test for me. I treat them as I would have them treat me which is that we both will work with whatever makes economic sense.
lol, you aren't buying tokens. you're renting subsidized compute predicated entirely on your biological inefficiency.
the $200 tier math only works because humans have to type, read, and eventually go to sleep. OpenClaw replaced that human latency with a non-blocking while true loop. tbh they aren't really defending an ecosystem here, they are just desperately patching a hole in their unit economics that collapsed the second the meat bottleneck was removed.
My problem isn't that they're banning OpenClaw, it's that they're banning OpenCode.
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I mean that's the thing, you're paying per month. And they're changing things going forward and offering to refund the current month.
It's like if I buy a hot dog every month and they tell me they're raising the price next month, or discontinuing honey mustard. Inconvenient but they're not doing anything wrong.
Especially since, given my back of the napkin math, they're giving us a pretty decent discount on the subscription plans.
Perhaps they are worried about legal liability if someone uses OpenClaw + Claude Code, and it deletes reams of customer data.
They are running out of things to ban...
Maybe after net neutrality we should have AI neutrality too. So you can use it how you see fit without stupid restrictions.
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.
someone else _not_ having the “Claim” button on the banner at the top of the Usage page?
Ok, it showed up eventually
Doesn't this unfairly impact startups? Why not instead allow issuance of API keys with usage caps? It seems like a money grab.
> you’ll no longer be able to use your Claude subscription limits for third-party harnesses including OpenClaw. You can still use them with your Claude account, but they will require extra usage, a pay-as-you-go option billed separately from your subscription.
How is what you are asking for different from what they are saying?
The West spent decades throwing money at software and services
Now they can't keep up because they never built the infrastructure to actually power any of it
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.
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.
AI disallowing use by AI :|
cant wait till they implement turboquant and make ai cheaper again
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.
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).
Goodbye customers.
So now what happens to startups and ADE's orientated around Claude like Conductor.. no more Claude for them I guess back to Codex!
Nothing. They aren't using third party harnesses, which is the issue here as spelled out in the post.
> you’ll no longer be able to use your Claude subscription limits for third-party harnesses including OpenClaw.
My understanding is that Conductor and others aren't using it.
I'm not sure. The docs on claude -p are sort of ambiguous on third party usage
i think i'll no longer be giving my money to anthropic
Goodbye!
We need Net Neutrality for LLMs.
mysterious anthropic win???
I now use Claude's own telegram plugin with channels mode, no reason to use openclaw anymore.
sad news
Sorry but it is pathetic to support this decision
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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.
The open models are still far behind GPT 5.4 and Claude if you're using them for building software.
I don't think people realize how irrational that argument is (that SOTA is better, so you have to use SOTA).
Open weights will always trail SOTA. Forever. So let's say they continue to get better every year. In 100 years, the open weight model will be 100x better than today. But the SOTA model will be 101x better. And still, people will make this argument that you should pay a premium for SOTA. Despite the open weights being 100x better than what we have today.
The open weights today are better than the SOTA models from a year ago. Yet people were using the SOTA models for coding a year ago. If people used SOTA models a year ago, then it was good enough, right? So why isn't the same (or better) good enough now?
The answer is: it is good enough. But people are irrationally afraid of missing out (FOMO). They're not really using their brains. They're letting fear lead their decisions. They're afraid "something bad" will happen if they don't use the absolute latest model. Despite the repeatable, objective benchmarks telling us all that open weights are perfectly capable of doing real work today, the fear is that we're missing out on something better. So people throw away their money and struggle with rate-limits because of their fear.
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About a year behind , TBQH. Newer Mixture-of-Experts models are comparable to a slightly older Claude Sonnet; if you don't mind the (lack of) speed. Some benchmarks say they're competitive with the frontier models right now for certain tasks.
I'm not sure how much I trust those benchmarks; I have a feeling everyone is playing up to them in some way. Still, if you're willing to accept the latency, they're definitely usable.
Of course everyone has realized this, so the hardware you need to run them is a little bit on the expensive side right this minute.
CPU manufacturers are working on improvements so that you can more practically run models on regular CPU+RAM (it's already possible with llama.cpp, just even slower).
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If you want to run better models, you need one of the more expensive GPUs, like an H100 or such ($40k). I don't think any of the smaller models are remotely comparable to anthropic.
The GPU also takes around $500-$1000 in electricity, and even then you won't be able to run a model of as good quality as anthropic.
It's also hard to justify since who knows how quickly it will be outdated, like maybe soon you'll need a blackwell chip (like a $100k PC, check out the NVIDIA DGX Station) to run a decent model.
... It'll take a lot more than a year to pay back a model capable of running openclaw with any sort of reasonable performance.
Or can you report that you've had good luck with a Strix Halo or local GPU for less than $40k up-front costs?
You never have been able to. It's against ToS.
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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.
FWIW I am sympathetic to Anthropic here, but OpenClaw _is_ using the Claude Code harness (via claude -p). But yes, Anthropic has made it clear they don’t like this.
So they changed it? Last I heard they hadn't. Where did they announce they were switching to the Claude harness? I can't find anything.
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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.
An interesting... weird(?), take. I see Anthropic as being mostly a much more compelling option. They've avoided most negative backlash, they have a much higher percentage of paying users, plenty of enterprise contracts, etc. They avoided money pits like Sora.
OpenAI seems to mostly be chasing the consumer market, but not doing great at it.
I'm a very happy Anthropic customer. They could charge me 3X the current rate and it'd still be a great deal.
They're more compelling to the HN echo chamber. I have never heard a normal person say "I was asking Claude the other day...", but they do use ChatGPT.
Based on the limited public information out there, the AI chat tools with the most users are ChatGPT, Meta, Gemini, Alibaba, Baidu, Copilot, and Grok. Anthropic is nowhere near the top.
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.