Mastodawn

Tell HN: Anthropic no longer allowing Claude Code subscriptions to use OpenClaw

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.

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jesse_dot_id 5d ago

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.

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nightski 5d ago

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.

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asgraham 5d ago

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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tekacs

OpenAI have literally gone out of their way to explicitly support this sort of thing. As they did with OpenCode.

Honestly, this just looks like what Dylan of SemiAnalysis suggested on Dwarkesh – that they've massively under-provisioned capacity / under-spent on infrastructure.

That would honestly be a comforting answer if true, because I would gladly take 'we can't afford to do this right now' over 'we are self-preferencing, and the FTC should really take a look at us, even if we're technically not a monopoly right now, since we're the only strongly-instruction-following model in town and we clearly know it'.