The AI startup said that as of April 4, subscribers will “no longer be able to use your Claude subscription limits for third-party harnesses including OpenClaw,” according to a customer email shared on the Hacker News forum, and reported by TechCrunch.
Instead, subscribers must now pay for extra usage through “a pay-as-you-go option billed separately from your subscription.”
The changes are beginning with OpenClaw, though the policy “applies to all third-party harnesses and will be rolled out to more shortly,” the email said.
Anthropic’s head of Claude Code Boris Cherny said in a post on social media platform X that the company’s “subscriptions weren’t built for the usage patterns of these third-party tools” and that Anthropic was now attempting “to be intentional in managing our growth to continue to serve our customers sustainably long-term.”
OpenClaw is an open-source personal agentic assistant that links to any large language model through an application programming interface (API). The company’s creator Peter Steinberger announced recently that he was joining Anthropic rival OpenAI, with OpenClaw continuing as an open source project with backing from the ChatGPT maker.
Per the TechCrunch report, Steinberger posted that he and OpenClaw board member Dave Morin “tried to talk sense into Anthropic” but were only able to get the company to delay the price increase by one week.
“Funny how timings match up, first they copy some popular features into their closed harness, then they lock out open source,” Steinberger said.
Cherny maintained that Claude Code team members are “big fans of open source” and that he himself “just put up a few [pull requests] to improve prompt cache efficiency for OpenClaw specifically.”
Writing about the rise of OpenClaw earlier this year, PYMNTS said that the tool had demonstrated something companies can no longer put off addressing.
“When an AI agent such as OpenClaw browses the web, reads email, retrieves files or initiates a transaction, it does not interact with dashboards or graphical interfaces designed for human users. It operates entirely through APIs,” that report said.
“It calls endpoints. It authenticates. It executes instructions in structured formats. It sequences actions across domains, maintains state across sessions and adapts its next call based on prior responses. That change reframes what enterprise software is and who it is built for.”
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