This diagram illustrates the coverage of OAuth tokens quite clearly: on the left, claude.ai, Claude Code, and Claude Desktop still receive the “golden child” treatment, while on the right, OpenClaw, NanoClaw, and OpenCode have all been kicked out of the subscription circle.
Browsing X last night and seeing Boris Cherny’s post, my first reaction was: it’s finally here. It wasn’t a surprise, but rather a feeling of “the inevitable has happened.”
At 12:00 PM PT on April 4th, Anthropic officially announced that Claude Pro and Max subscriptions will no longer cover the usage of third-party tools like OpenClaw. Want to keep using them? You either buy an additional usage package or switch to the pay-as-you-go API.
A Friday Evening Email That Kicked Out Half the Ecosystem
According to The Verge, this notification email was sent out on a Friday evening. Choosing this specific time is, well, the classic “release bad news on a Friday afternoon” maneuver.
What is OpenClaw? Simply put, it’s an open-source AI assistant framework running on your own computer. It connects to WhatsApp, Slack, and Discord, helping you process emails, manage schedules, and run scripts—it’s not just for chatting; it actually does the work for you. With 145,000 stars on GitHub, it was a project built single-handedly by Peter Steinberger. It became so popular that Anthropic even filed a trademark complaint over its name (originally called Clawdbot in homage to Claude, later renamed Moltbot, and finally becoming OpenClaw).
The problem is: A massive number of OpenClaw users were previously utilizing their $20/month Claude Pro subscriptions to call Claude models directly via OAuth tokens. This is essentially like paying for one all-you-can-eat buffet ticket, but letting your friends eat using your ticket too. Anthropic is now saying: No, this ticket can only be used by you in our own restaurant.
The wording in this email is quite “decent,” but the reaction from the developer community has been anything but mild.
“Managing Capacity” Is the Truth, But Not the Whole Truth
Boris Cherny’s exact words were: “our subscriptions weren’t built for the usage patterns of these third-party tools. Capacity is a resource we manage thoughtfully.”
To be fair, this statement isn’t false. According to technical analysis by apiyi, third-party tools bypass Anthropic’s Prompt Cache optimization, taking a disproportionate toll on computing resources. When you chat on claude.ai, the system can cache the context for you, saving tokens; but tools like OpenClaw manage the session state themselves, meaning almost every request is a “cold start.” For Anthropic’s servers, this is like someone walking in with a buffet ticket, but demanding every dish be made to order by the kitchen—the costs are completely different.
But here is the catch.
Peter Steinberger was just poached by Sam Altman to join OpenAI in February of this year. Altman personally posted that “Peter is joining OpenAI to drive the next generation of personal agents,” while OpenClaw was placed into an open-source foundation with OpenAI promising continued support.
Then, Anthropic started restricting OAuth tokens in January, updated its terms of service in February to explicitly ban using subscription quotas for third-party tools, and fully enforced it in April.
Steinberger himself complained on X: “First copy some popular features into your own closed tools, and then lock the open-source ones out.” He stated that he and OpenClaw board member Dave Morin tried to reason with Anthropic, “and the best we could do was push it back a week.”
Frankly speaking, “capacity management” is the technical reason, but the business considerations are likely much heavier. Anthropic just released Claude Cowork in January—its positioning almost completely overlaps with OpenClaw, both being “AI agents that do the work for you,” except Cowork is closed-source and runs on Anthropic’s own platform. According to Reuters, Anthropic’s annualized revenue for 2025 has already reached $3 billion. For a company of this scale, it’s impossible to ignore the fact that their subscriptions are being “freeloaded.”
The Paths Ahead for Developers
The policy has changed, but life goes on. As it stands now, there are roughly a few choices:
Stay in the Claude ecosystem: Switch to the pay-as-you-go API. The price for Claude Opus 4.6 is $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens. Anthropic provided a one-time compensation ($20 for Pro users, $200 for Max users) and up to a 30% discount on prepaid usage packages. However, this compensation expired on April 17th. Not exactly generous.
Switch models: OpenClaw natively supports multiple models, including GPT, Gemini, and DeepSeek. According to Engadget, xAI and Perplexity are also viable options. Interestingly, OpenAI is capitalizing on this very moment to woo developers—after all, OpenClaw’s founder is now one of their own.
Use Anthropic’s “golden children”: Claude Code (the command-line development tool) and Claude Cowork (the agent for non-programmers) are currently still fully included in the subscription. To put it bluntly, Anthropic’s move is essentially forcing you to use its own products.
But there’s a problem you should know: Claude Cowork was only released in January, and many developer reviews on LinkedIn note that “the features are okay but it’s quite buggy.” Compared to OpenClaw’s 145,000-star community ecosystem, its maturity is lacking by more than an order of magnitude. OpenClaw has an active Discord community of over 8,900 people, ultra-lightweight community-built variants like PicoClaw and ZeroClaw, and some have even managed to run it on a $5 ESP32 chip. These things cannot be caught up with overnight.
On the left, OpenClaw features a “background-resident, always-on” design, while on the right, Claude Code is “session-triggered” — two philosophies, two different routes.
If I Were Anthropic, I Would Do the Same, But I Don’t Like the Result
Sometimes I think Anthropic’s situation is actually quite delicate.
On one hand, there is the ecological prosperity brought by the open-source community—OpenClaw’s explosive popularity objectively helped Claude expand its developer base. On the other hand, there are tangible computing costs and revenue pressures. When an OpenClaw user does $200 worth of API work on a $20 subscription, the math simply doesn’t add up.
From a business logic perspective, I can understand this move.
But from an ecosystem perspective, this sends a signal to the open-source community: I can change the rules on whatever you build on my platform at any time. Today it’s OpenClaw, tomorrow could it be NanoClaw, OpenCode, or the day after, some little tool you wrote yourself?
According to apiyi’s analysis, this policy change directly impacts the entire token arbitrage model—previously, people used the fixed cost of a subscription to run massive requests through third-party tools, essentially doing pay-as-you-go work for a flat monthly fee. With this loophole closed, the open-source AI agent ecosystem is certainly bearing significant pressure.
Or maybe I’m overthinking it. Perhaps for the majority of ordinary users, claude.ai is enough, and this only affects a small handful of heavy developers. But it is often this small handful of people who define a platform’s technical ceiling and innovation baseline.
The coffee is gone, and dawn is breaking outside. After saying all this, I have just one final question for you: if you are currently an OpenClaw + Claude user, will you pay for the API to stay, or will you just switch models?
References:
- Anthropic essentially bans OpenClaw from Claude by making it pay-as-you-go
- OpenClaw creator reacts to Anthropic banning his AI agent
- It’s no longer free to use Claude through third-party tools like OpenClaw
- Interpreting Anthropic’s Third-Party Tool Ban: 5 Key Impacts
- Who is OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger?
—— Lyra Celest @ Turbulence τ.
