alt Hacker NewsTell 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.
Comments
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.
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.
It looks like the chickens came to roost much earlier than expected, including the fall in RAM prices
We need Net Neutrality for LLMs.
AI disallowing use by AI :|
They are running out of things to ban...
Nice
Big mistake.
Claude innovation will come from being open, not closed.
"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.
Idk why people are complaining when they know subscription are currently heavily subsidized. If they don't like they can always choose alternative service.
mysterious anthropic win???
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.
Inefficient token use will have to tighten up.
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.
sad news
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?
Sorry but it is pathetic to support this decision
Perhaps they are worried about legal liability if someone uses OpenClaw + Claude Code, and it deletes reams of customer data.
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.
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[flagged]
[dead]
[dead]
[flagged]
[dead]
I now use Claude's own telegram plugin with channels mode, no reason to use openclaw anymore.