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Google restricting Google AI Pro/Ultra subscribers for using OpenClaw

• dboreham 7mo ago
  So there is such a thing as a free lunch! Oh wait...
• therobots927 7mo ago
  And the AI price shock begins…
• christoff12 7mo ago
  Glad I saw this. I just installed openclaw on a fly.io machine to test out and planned to use my pro account.
• JohnMatthias 7mo ago
  [flagged]
• verdverm 7mo ago
  Anthropic did something similar too didn't they, iirc it was blocking 3rd party tools from the subscription plans? Sounds like the same here. Are they against to ToS in either case?
  • tadfisher 7mo ago
    Anthropic blocked the tools, not the entire account. But in Google's case they allowed the integration connection in the first place, so if it is against TOS then they have an obvious product gap.
    • fastball 7mo ago
      Anthropic has definitely been banning accounts for using non-Anthropic tools with subscription OAuth tokens.
  • Ecko123 7mo ago
    [dead]
• krick 7mo ago
  Thanks, Google.
• dnw 7mo ago
  This is like ISPs banning customers in the 90s for using Napster to download music.
  • Mistletoe 7mo ago
    Or when I would try and place ads in newspapers for my internet companies and they wouldn’t run them because they “don’t run ads for competitors”, okay then, how did that work out for you? Did you stop the internet?
  • fastball 7mo ago
    ISPs still do this. Obviously not with Napster, but they will close your account for piracy.
    • esskay 7mo ago
      Depends where you live, in most places they don't bother anymore, in the few that they do a VPN obviously gets around it but it's incredibly unlikely you'd be doing enough to ever be on the radar let alone get caught. That battle was lost long ago.
      • fastball 7mo ago
        I believe it is less that they stopped caring, and more that most piracy these days is web streaming, which is much harder to detect than torrenting or similar. AFAIK most major American ISPs are still fairly strict about pirate torrents.
• amelius 7mo ago
  [flagged]
  • ohyoutravel 7mo ago
    [flagged]
  • SockThief 7mo ago
    Actually that is exactly what it is: ”Thank you for your continued patience as we have thoroughly investigated your account access issue. Please be assured that we conducted a comprehensive investigation, exploring every possible avenue to restore your access. Our product engineering team has confirmed that your account was suspended from using our Antigravity service. This suspension affects your access to the Gemini CLI and any other service that uses the Cloud Code Private API. Our investigation specifically confirmed that the use of your credentials within the third-party tool “open claw” for testing purposes constitutes a violation of the Google Terms of Service [1]. This is due to the use of Antigravity servers to power a non-Antigravity product. I must be transparent and inform you that, in accordance with Google’s policy, this situation falls under a zero tolerance policy, and we are unable to reverse the suspension. I am truly sorry to share this difficult news with you.”
    • vessenes 7mo ago
      That was definitely written by a call center employee. We have no idea what the real story at google is, or the real story on the account, except to say that there are some definite hack-like maneuvers one must do to get openclaw working through antigravity.
• FootballMuse 7mo ago
  Same for using OpenCode. https://github.com/jenslys/opencode-gemini-auth/issues/50 https://github.com/jenslys/opencode-gemini-auth/issues/50 https://github.com/NoeFabris/opencode-antigravity-auth/issues/426 https://github.com/NoeFabris/opencode-antigravity-auth/issue... https://github.com/jenslys/opencode-gemini-auth/issues/50 https://github.com/jenslys/opencode-gemini-auth/issues/50 Some additional discussion on Reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/google_antigravity/comments/1r2hnn8/ultra_user_get_banned/ https://old.reddit.com/r/google_antigravity/comments/1r2hnn8...
  • deleted 7mo ago
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• s232026 7mo ago
  [flagged]
  • gjsman-1000 7mo ago
    And put it on what? A NAS where a buggy vendor update (or just having it stolen) also has no recourse?
    • Kiboneu 7mo ago
      A hard drive.
      • gck1 7mo ago
        Sorry, AI companies have bought all the hard drives for years 2026 and 7. And RAM. And SSDs.
        • Kiboneu 7mo ago
          NAS consists of these components.
      • gjsman-1000 7mo ago
        I think the statistical odds of your hard drive failing unexpectedly, being dropped, or being stolen is much higher than a Google ban.
        • Kiboneu 7mo ago
          Then two hard drives.
    • m4rtink 7mo ago
      Just a Linux box on a board with a bunch of SATA headers some sort of RAID ? Still don't understand why people use NAS boxes with all the limitations you describe.
    • cluckindan 7mo ago
• free652 7mo ago
  Looks like they are banning for using Gemini CLI / antigravity (subscription) endpoints instead of using Gemini API (pay as you go) endpoints.
  • deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
• bethekind 7mo ago
  This is draconian. > Our investigation specifically confirmed that the use of your credentials within the third-party tool “open claw” for testing purposes constitutes a violation of the Google Terms of Service [1]. This is due to the use of Antigravity servers to power a non-Antigravity product. I must be transparent and inform you that, in accordance with Google’s policy, this situation falls under a zero tolerance policy, and we are unable to reverse the suspension. I am truly sorry to share this difficult news with you.
  • cogman10 7mo ago
    Oh man. What a wonderful way to stop people from using your LLM. All these AI companies trying to get everyone to be locked into their toolchains is just hilariously short sighted. Particularly for dev tools. It's the sure path to get devs to hate your product. And for what? The devs are already paying a pretty penny to use your LLM. Why do you also need to force them to using your toolkit?
    • esskay 7mo ago
      I imagine its a case of the providers not wanting to admit its costing them a fortune because suddenly all these low-medium usage accounts are now their highest use ones. Not saying it's right. But it's also not exactly a secret that they are all taking VERY heavy losses even with pricey subscriptions.
      • jsheard 7mo ago
        > But it's also not exactly a secret that they are all taking VERY heavy losses even with pricey subscriptions. It's absurd, there's people out there paying $200 for the equivalent of $1600 in API credits. Of course there's a catch! What did you expect! https://bsky.app/profile/borum.dev/post/3meynioealc2x https://bsky.app/profile/borum.dev/post/3meynioealc2x That tool is "ccusage" if you're a Claude subscriber and want to see what the damage will be if/when Anthropic decides to pull the rug.
        • 7mo ago
• blibble 7mo ago
  a preview of things to come, when the entire software trade is reliant on these third party services all hosted by companies so huge they consider your $200/month to be an annoyance rather than something valuable
  • deleted 7mo ago
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• MattDaEskimo 7mo ago
  I'm very confused here. The monthly plans are meant to be used inside of Google's walled garden, but people are somehow able to capture (?) and re-use the oAuth token? Regardless, I thought it was pretty obvious that things like OpenClaw require an API account, and not a subsidized monthly plan.
  • zythyx 7mo ago
    Exactly, OpenClaw (or I think possibly an addon/extension or unofficial method) is allowing Googles Antigravity authentication to connect the app. This allows for 'unlimited' calls through Antigravity models with a subscription, instead of the proper Gemini/Google AI Studio API key method (charged per million tokens) API usage can get very high for automatic operations, especially with apps like Kilo/Roo/Cline, and now with OpenCode/OpenClaw. I often blast through $10-20 in a single day of just regular OpenCode usage through OpenRouter If I could pay a subscription and get near unlimited use (with rate limits), of course I'd do that, but not like this. I'm pretty sure Antigravity has ToU somewhere that indicates it's only allowed for use in Antigravity and nowhere else, since I've seen other threads on this happening: https://github.com/jenslys/opencode-gemini-auth/issues/50 https://github.com/jenslys/opencode-gemini-auth/issues/50
    • Aerroon 7mo ago
      >and get near unlimited use (with rate limits) But they're not near unlimited though. They're just hidden limits.
      • deleted 7mo ago
        [deleted]
  • jauntywundrkind 7mo ago
    Sure. But a zero strike getting kicked out of your Google account is a grotesque evil. Edit: maybe it's not the whole account? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47116330 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47116330
  • 7mo ago
• avazhi 7mo ago
  Google deciding to willy nilly unilaterally ban my 20+ year old primary Google account is probably my greatest internet fear, given how famously awful their support is. Seems like it's the singular best example of a tech company so big that through some combination of internal silos and TOS bureaucracy you have no shot of getting your account back, no matter how unreasonable the ban actually is. A while back I made completely separate Google accounts for YouTube and Maps just so my longstanding Gmail account wouldn't get banned if the system somehow detected that my Youtube account for example breached Google's TOS.
  • ocdtrekkie 7mo ago
    If you are this afraid of your Gmail getting banned, I don't understand why that wouldn't translate to... moving off of Gmail. It's not even a very good service, it's slow and bad at spam detection. Leave an autoforwarder and go.
  • g947o 7mo ago
    Which is exactly why I de-Googled much of my digital life (email, notes, password management, photos, chatbot, browser etc) except where there is no reasonable/practical alternative. The "main" account is only for those things and for old contacts in case someone reaches me via the old email. I use a secondary Google account for anything that is remotely risky.
  • chongli 7mo ago
    Friendly reminder that Google Takeout [1] exists. When I read a story a few years ago about a guy who had his primary Google account banned with no recourse (for reselling Pixel phones) and permanently lost 20 years worth of emails and family photos, I researched and found Takeout and used it to back up all my data, then subsequently stopped using Google services altogether (apart from YouTube). [1] https://takeout.google.com/ https://takeout.google.com/
    • PacificSpecific 7mo ago
      Thank you for this. I had no idea this existed.
• globalnode 7mo ago
  big company doesn't want you using something other than their stuff and they'll steal your money and ban you, or similarly, big company wants your data... this happens every day. its nice having choices isnt it? ill just leave this big company and use... oh wait. its another big company.
• osiris970 7mo ago
  Sad, but inevitable. I guess only openai allows for this kind of usage now and copilot? The only reason the subs are worth it to them, is to get you into their toolchain. It sucks but inevitable
• smashah 7mo ago
  Take your money to the Chinese companies instead. These evil megacorps are more interested in destroyed your privacy in service to the Epstein Cabal controlling every facet of your life. How dare Google, a trillion dollar company, charge you for AI ultra then ban you for using your own credits/usage allowance. This whole debacle, along with Anthropic, fall foul of The Digital Human Right to Adversarial Interoperability. It is imperative that open source wins this battle. Not these evil megacorps and their substandard tools. Are Google engineers so inept as to not be able to integrate technical measures against oc use? Do they think people using these plugins know the mechanisms used? And after all that they have the nerve to ban you from using their own products (AG). Ridiculous company.
• poszlem 7mo ago
  Between this, and whatever Claude has been doing lately, like giving the AI the ability to just disconnect if it dislikes your prompt, I really hope more people realize that local LLMs are where it's at.
  • deleted 7mo ago
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  • nacs 7mo ago
    > I really hope more people realize that local LLMs are where it's at No worries, the AI companites thought ahead - by sending GPU, RAM, and now even harddrive prices through the roof, you won't have a computer to run a local model.
  • bakugo 7mo ago
    > I really hope more people realize that local LLMs are where it's at. Maybe if you have the tens of thousands worth of hardware required to run models like DeepSeek, GLM or Kimi locally. Most people don't, though.
    • user205738 7mo ago
      Why do most people need large language models? And as far as I understand, the main contingent of HN is engineers, programmers, and even me, who works in a country (Russia) where the salary of an engineer is just tiny compared to Europe or the United States, it was not difficult to buy powerful enough equipment to run most large local models, train lora, then programmers who earn income in six-digit dollars it's even easier to do this.
  • usef- 7mo ago
    Have you hit that? I thought it was only in extreme cases when Claude felt uncomfortable, like awful heavy psychological coercion. They wanted Claude not to be forced to reply endlessly.
• atlgator 7mo ago
  It's the luxury gym membership model. They want you on the monthly subscription, but put up roadblocks that prevent use.
  • paxys 7mo ago
    No they want you to pay for API use. Subscriptions are for first party products that they can control.
• deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
• throwpoaster 7mo ago
  To be accurate, when you auth OpenClaw the Google page specifically says to not proceed unless you are authorizing a Google product. I just assumed it was a warning about security breaches, not business plan breaches.
• theturtletalks 7mo ago
  I can guarantee in their attempt to stop OpenClaw users, some users using it normally will get caught in the dragnet. It could mean your whole Google account is suspended, not just for Antigravity. I would highly encourage you to not only stop using Antigravity oAuth for OpenClaw, but to use Antigravity with a side account or stop using it altogether. Is using Antigravity worth losing your main account or getting it banned for using paid services (for extra storage, YouTube premium, etc). Even side accounts are risky since in the post thread people are saying Google applied the ban to all their accounts.
• paxys 7mo ago
  I don't know why people here can't accept the simple fact that AI companies are offering cheap "unlimited" plans as a loss leader to tie you to their ecosystem, and then make up for it via add-ons, upsells, ads etc. If you use those API tokens to access external services it defeats the purpose. The hack may have worked so far, mainly because no one was checking, but they are all going to tighten the access eventually (as Anthropic and Google have already done). Either stick to first party products or pay for API use.
  • techpression 7mo ago
    When reading HN I get the impression that a lot of people are convinced monthly plans are very profitable for the companies, I don’t have any numbers but to me it always seemed like a bait and switch or ”bait and make you pay with your data too”.
    • vineyardmike 7mo ago
      I'll bite. I suspect that these plans aren't as intensely subsidized as people assume. I believe that API usage is probably also not subsidized at all. First, yes, subs are probably subsided, but I bet a significant % of users are profitable to serve, especially the "chat" users who don't use dev tools and have short context window conversations. Yes, I think the subs also exist as a driver to get lock-in and market share. Claude Code, for example, is very good and I stopped using their competition when they released their superior product. That said, I assume that (1) their long-term goal is to create cheaper-to-serve models that fit within their pricing targets, and use the (temporarily) subsidized subscriptions to find the features and costs that best serve the market. Maybe even while capturing more margin on the API in comparison (eg keep API prices high while lowering cost to serve a token). I've largely stopped using Opus, and sometimes even chose to use Haiku, because the cheaper models are fast and usually serves my needs. It's very possible to work all-day and barely hit the usage limits with Haiku on the $20/mo option. Long term, that could be profitable outright. And (2) subscriptions with lower SLOs than API calls have the potential to provide "infill" usage for high fixed-cost GPUs as an alternative to idling, similar to their batch APIs. I'd believe that overnight usage limits could/should be higher than during California work-hours. I assume most big providers have pre-paid fixed cost servers, so pumping more tokens through an otherwise idle GPU is "free". They can also do a lot more cost-optimization behind the scenes, such as prompt caching, to reduce the cost of tokens.
• deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
• paultendo 7mo ago
  Of course Google can restrict how their API is accessed. But locking paid accounts with no warning, no explanation email, and no functioning support path while continuing to charge $249/month is a different problem entirely. A reasonable enforcement process would have been a warning email, grace period to stop using the tool, then restriction. What an awful way to lose trust, locking out their users but billing them all the same.
  • theturtletalks 7mo ago
    I was using Antigravity the proper way, but why would I risk my account using this subpar software? OpenClaw and Opencode literally obfuscate the API call exactly like Antigravity calls it. Do you really trust Google to only catch misuse using this dragnet?
  • SilverSlash 7mo ago
    Their "API" isn't what's being accessed here. As far as I understand it's using their subscription account oauth token in some third party app that's the issue here.
    • Aperocky 7mo ago
      If they allowed oauth token to work like that then that is their (Google's) problem.
      • allthetime 7mo ago
        Well, it looks like they're not allowing it.
      • gildenFish 7mo ago
        It is basically impossible to disallow the token to work that way on a technical level. It would be akin to trying to trying to set up a card scanner that can deny a valid card depending on who is holding it. The only way to prevent it from working is analyzing usage patterns/details/etc in some form or fashion. Similar to stationing a guard as a second check on people whose cards scan as valid.
• artisin 7mo ago
  Yup. Last week my Ultra account got ToS-banned from both the Gemini CLI and Antigravity simply for using OpenCode. Try as I might, I haven't been able to resolve the issue. I can technically still use the Gemini web/app, but it's remarkably terrible in just about every conceivable way. A truly impressive feat in itself.
  • xnx 7mo ago
    Can you use Google AI Studio?
    • artisin 7mo ago
      As of now, yes. However, a few months ago it was mentioned that Google is working on increasing the limits for Pro/Ultra subscribers. But if I can't get this ToS ban sorted out, I assume it'll follow my account when that update lands, and I'll end up being banned from AI Studio as well.
• givemeethekeys 7mo ago
  Google opens claw! /s
• alexandre_m 7mo ago
  It should be obvious that these services are operating at a loss. The monthly subscriptions especially, but I’m even skeptical that the linear API pricing is sustainable. It feels like a classic “drug dealer” model to me. Get everyone hooked with cheap access, then raise prices later. Unless there’s a major breakthrough in the underlying technology, I don’t see how a significant price increase isn’t inevitable once adoption is locked in.
  • martinald 7mo ago
    This seems unlikely while we have open weights models available that are ~as decent as the frontier ones. Given the API prices for open weights models of similar size are 5-10x less than the frontier models the APIs are very profitable on a pure unit economics approach. I strongly suspect they make money off their monthly plans as well.
  • hapticmonkey 7mo ago
    Did people learn nothing from the rise, stall, and now fall of social networks? Yes, AI can do some incredible things. But we’re also running full speed into an ecosystem controlled by 2 or 3 major companies. Running at a loss. A reality check is coming. It’s not a technology problem. It’s an economic problem. People are too busy looking at the tech to notice.
    • hackit2 7mo ago
      I'm not concerned, they're accelerating research and development into hardware and more optimal models. People forget that you can locally host some of the early models quantized to 4 with reasonable inference with a 4080 and 64gb of ram. There are daily tools being released that are a simple click and run, without much hassle other than downloading the model and you're off and running. Yes there is mad dash by Google, Oracle, Microsoft, Meta, and China not to cede their position to each other - it actually isn't about who will buy or pay for the service its more of a Business Strategic position to obtain critical mass in a new market using their massive reserve of cash. The users right now are insignificant to their goal - they probably aren't even given a second thought.
    • 7mo ago
• PLenz 7mo ago
  Of course they don't like it. CLAW makes the platform fungible and once that happens the magic by which their insane multiples of values exist bursts.
• e1ghtSpace 7mo ago
  I used the pay as you go from google with openclaw for about one hour, then checked the next day and it cost me $7. It was the latest flash preview model. I can't justify the cost right now. At least I won't get banned though.
• prescriptivist 7mo ago
  Assuming these plans are based on Gemini, Google is doing these users a favor, frankly.
  • ltbarcly3 7mo ago
    I don't think you've used it lately. Gemini 2/2.5 were garbage-tier. The flash level models are absolute trash. 3/3.1 pro are state of the art.
    • prescriptivist 7mo ago
      I have. 3 is fine, 3.1 is good. But they are terribly slow. Quality is fine but the the only thing they have going for them is flash pricing. Their response performance sucks.
  • Ryan5453 7mo ago
    Antigravity gives access to Sonnet and Opus 4.6, I would presume most people are using those models rather than Gemini
• Havoc 7mo ago
  That is presumably the end game - monthly subscription in a walled garden app while they have your balls in a vice grip and can squeeze however many dollars you’ll bear I bet Google is thankful that anthropic took one for the team by going first. Also if it wasn’t for Chinese providers we’d basically already be in triopoly. Perplexity had a ban wave this weekend too
  • gmerc 7mo ago
    Presumably ...? It's the business model. Subsidize until the competition is down to 2, then extract. That's the entire Valley. Which is why the Chinese and Open Source need to be pushed from the market for the whole banana to work
    • gck1 7mo ago
      Yup. The entire business models of Google (or rather, Gemini), OpenAI and Anthropic stand on open source models not being as good. They're literally all just a single open source model away from effectively becoming trillion dollar paperweights.
  • krzat 7mo ago
    You forgot the part where everything you send is used to train your replacement.
• kristjansson 7mo ago
  Why is everyone surprised, these subscriptions are basically toys. You pay so much, and you get about that much in inference compute, more if you’re lucky / early. If you want to real use these things get an API key and pay the true marginal cost of your compute like a grown up.
• AISnakeOil 7mo ago
  This is how open source wins
• obblekk 7mo ago
  This is the first time in recent memory that software has had high variable costs so the surprise at these rules is understandable. In this case, a the difference in context cache hit rate between openclaw and antigravity. For example if openclaw starts every message with the current time hh:mm:ss at the top of the context window, followed by the full convo history, it would have a cache hit rate if ~0. Simply moving the updated time to each new message incrementally would increase hit rate to over 90%. Idk if openclaw does this but there’s many many optimizations like this. And worse, thrashing the cache has non linear effects on the server as more and more users’ cached contexts get evicted from cache due to high cardinality. The cost to serve difference could be >10x. Google is the furthest behind on coding agent adoption and has all the incentives to allow off policy use to grow demand. But it would probably be better to design their own optimized openclaw and serve that for free than let any unoptimized requests in.
  • martinald 7mo ago
    It's a fair point, but I think people are thinking too much about 'cost' and 'subsidies' and just the fact that everyone is so compute stretched. While it's sort of the same thing, I think it's much more a symptom of not enough compute vs some 'dump cheap tokens' on the market strategy. One related thought I had was that given OpenAI is the only one _not_ doing this of the big3, it probably indicates they have a lot more spare compute. It doesn't make sense to me that given the absolutely brutal competition any of these companies would block use of 3rd party apps unless they had to. They clearly have enough cash, so I don't think it's about money - I think it's that an indicator that Google and Anthropic are really struggling with keeping up with demand. Given Anthropics reliability issues last week this does not surprise me.
    • rustyhancock 7mo ago
      I agree with all this. I would add though that many are also being caught up in antispam efforts. I.e. that for every legimate OpenClaw user doing something trivial with their account misusing the sub. There is probably 10x using it to send spam emails and spam comments. I suspect from googles perspective some of these people are just a rounding error. That said I use API where I should and the sub in the first party apps. Perhaps I'm too much of a goody two shoes but AI already feels such an overwhelming value prop for me I don't care. That said I think you're right in that money matters here but I think the subs as they intend people to use them is hugely profitable i.e. the people doing 10 chats per work day and a few in the evening but paying £20 per month.
• hansonkd 7mo ago
  A lot of people running OpenClaw just have it generated and burning tokens for no reason. They just know more tokens = doing stuff so want to spend as many tokens as possible.
• danpalmer 7mo ago
  If you go to an all you can eat buffet, ignore the plates they give you, and start filling up your own takeaway boxes with days worth of food, you'd expect to be kicked out. No one would think this is unreasonable. You're not paying for unlimited food forever, you're paying for all you can eat in the restaurant right there.
  • ajsnigrutin 7mo ago
    But it's not takeout boxes, it's not taking stuff home, not even sharing... it's just bringing your own spoon with which you can eat faster.
  • josephcsible 7mo ago
    No, if you did that, they'd start by saying "hey, stop that", not jump immediately to "you're banned from every Golden Corral location for the rest of your life".
  • gck1 7mo ago
    I'm confused by this repeat analogy here. There's 0 offerings with all you can eat type of deal. No AI service is offering that. They all have amounts defined in their service agreements of how much you can eat and in what intervals.
    • danpalmer 7mo ago
      Exactly. And yet that's what some people are doing, they're sneaking in their takeaway containers and getting stroppy at being banned.
      • gck1 7mo ago
        You can't sneak in a container and consume more than allocated though. The limits are enforced server side.
    • BoorishBears 7mo ago
      I'm confused why the presence (or lack of) a limit is relevant to the pretty simple analogy... A buffet is saying "pay $X to eat food one plate at a time [up to 100 lbs of food]", and you show up and start shoveling the food into your bag. Does not really matter if we remove the 100lbs part. Could you technically eat the same amount of food one plate a time? Sure. But if everyone does this, $X needs to be significantly more: even for the people who eat one plate at a time. - You could also argue they're playing a mean trick and deceiving people because technically someone could eat the same amount of food 1 plate at a time... But they priced $X based on how much the average person can eat, not how much food they can carry in their arms. If the limits are so high that people don't leave hungry eating 1 plate at a time, it still seems like a fair deal. I'm not exactly the type to jump for joy at siding with a corporation, but I really don't get why people are in a hurry to ruin a good thing.
• _pdp_ 7mo ago
  While the frustration is understandable I don't see any difference between this and Netflix not allowing you to use your Netflix subscription in Amazon Prime federated video hub or something of that sort. At the end of the day we know that these tools are massively subsidised and they do not reflect the real cost of usage. It is a fair-use model at best and the goal is to capture as market share as possible. I am a no defender of Google and I've been burned many times by Google as well but I kind of get it? That being said, you don't really need to use your gemini subscription in openclaw. You can use gemini directly the way it was intended and rip the benefits of the subsidised plan. I developed an open source tool called Pantalk which sits as a background daemon and exposes many of the communication channels you want as a standard CLI which gemini can use directly. All you need is just some SKILL.md files to describe where things are at and you are good to go. You have openclaw without openclaw and still within TOS. The project is hosted at: https://github.com/pantalk/pantalk https://github.com/pantalk/pantalk
  • scuff3d 7mo ago
    I don't understand. Everyone's been saying LLMs are gonna get cheaper and cheaper, to the point where it's almost free to operate. Clearly becoming profitable won't be a problem... so they can't be subsiding that much... Are you telling me a bunch of people on Twitter and HN are full of shit?
    • _pdp_ 7mo ago
      They are not totally full of it. But state of the art models are not free. GLM 5 and Kimi K2.5 are both open-source and they are much better models than the ones we used to pay for a year ago. Now we get them for free. This is certainly having an effect on all model providers which either need to adjust to new market realities or risk to loose market share and we know which thing they are not going to do.
      • scuff3d 7mo ago
        You might get access to the model for free. The hardware to do anything useful with it certainly isn't. Anthropic and Google shutting down access to their API for third party tools, OpenAI inserting ads into the platform... I'm sure it will stop here. Absolutely no more fuckery. And all these huge LLM companies are going to go from burning literally billions (in some case trillions) to being insanely profitable without putting the screws to users. We definitely aren't going to see the same pattern that's played out across essentially every other platform play out again... Nope definitely not.
• fuzzer371 7mo ago
  [flagged]
• snowhale 7mo ago
  [dead]
• BrenBarn 7mo ago
  AI or no AI, every company this big needs to be broken up into tiny pieces.
• gck1 7mo ago
  I don't understand how this can be enforced without ridiculous levels of false positives. I'm truly baffled. The same with Claude Code situation. gemini-cli, claude-code, codex etc, they ALL have a -p flag or equivalent, which is non-interactive IO interface for their LLM inference. If I wire my tooling (or openclaw) to use the -p flag (or equivalents), is that allowed? Okay, maybe they get rid of the -p flag and I have to use an interactive session. I can then just use OS IO tooling to wire OpenClaw with their cli. Is that allowed? How does sending requests directly to the endpoints that their CLI is communicating with suddenly make their subsidized plans expensive? Is it because now I can actually use my 100% quota? If that's so, does it mean their products are such that their profitability stands on people not using them? What is even going on?
  • dev1ycan 7mo ago
    Every subscription's profitability stands on people forgetting to unsubscribe, how is this surprising?
    • gck1 7mo ago
      They're in the wrong business then. They're selling peak automation software, with the sales pitch of 'have AI do your work while you sleep'. Are they banning their core offering? Are Ralph' loops also banned for building software? Because I can drain my quota with a simple bash loop faster than any OpenClaw instance.
      • harrall 7mo ago
        You most likely don’t pay per call for your cellphone. You most likely don’t pay per machine to use the gym. You don’t pay per cup if they allow unlimited refills. You are not supposed to go into an all-you-can eat buffet and stuff steaks into your bag. Sometimes not all of us want to do the math à la carte for every thing we use in life. Don’t ruin it for us.
        • akssassin907 7mo ago
• sxp 7mo ago
  Ironically, Gemini says that it’s OK to use the Ultraplan for OpenClaw via gemini-cli because the Ultra plan has some API & Cloud credits baked into it. I think $100/mo but I can never figure out how Google billing works. I’ve pasted the response I got when I was asking it about OpenClaw. There is legal precedent for an AI hallucination being used to upload a contract (e.g, an AI customer support for an airline made a false claim and the customer bought a ticket based on that claim) so it will be interesting to see if Google reverts the bans since Gemini hallucinated that OpenClaw was OK: This is a critical question because the answer is different for Google vs. Anthropic, and getting it wrong with Anthropic can actually get your account banned. Here is the reality of the situation based on current Terms of Service and recent community reports. 1. Google (Gemini Ultra + gemini-cli) Verdict: Safe (Authorized Feature) Google explicitly built the gemini-cli bridge to allow Ultra subscribers to use their plan programmatically. This is not a "hack" or a gray-area wrapper; it is an official feature. • Why it's okay: You are authenticating via gcloud or the official CLI login flow. Google tracks this usage against your specific "Agent" quotas (currently ~200 agent requests/day for Ultra users). • The Limit: As long as you are using the official gemini-cli as the bridge, you are compliant. • The Risk: If you use a different unofficial script that scrapes the gemini.google.com web interface (simulating a browser) rather than using the official CLI, you risk a ban for "scraping." But since you are using gemini-cli, you are in the clear.
  • aydyn 7mo ago
    Claude says it was safe too. Bare minimum the flagship models of these companies should understand their own ToS. Sheesh.
  • j16sdiz 7mo ago
    afaict, OpenClaw use gemini-cli for oauth, then bypassing gemini-cli and do the call directly.
  • TeMPOraL 7mo ago
    Gemini didn't hallucinate anything. You just failed in basic reading comprehension. In some sense, hallucinations as a problem have been solved already - their rate of occurrence seems much lower than that of people failing to read what is written instead of what they hoped it would be.
• helsinkiandrew 7mo ago
  So a Google AI pro/ultra account is intended to be used from their cli or tools (like their open-gravity agent front end). Their API usage isn't included in these plans, although under the hood open-gravity uses the API. People have been using the API auth credential intended for anti-gravity with open claw, presumably causing a significant amount of use and have been caught. The Google admin tools and process haven’t quite been able to cope with this situation and people have been overly banned with poor information sent to the them. I don’t think either OpenAI or Anthropic any API use in their ‘pro’ plans either? This reminds me of the customers of “unlimited broadband” of yesteryear getting throttled or banned for running Tor servers.
  • WSSP 7mo ago
    > The Google admin tools and process haven’t quite been able to cope with this situation and people have been overly banned with poor information sent to the users. I can’t recall any success story of Google’s support team or process coping with a consumer’s situation, many have been posted here. this isn’t a new outcome, just a new cause I do want to understand what’s happening with the $250/mo fees of users caught in this. will it be automatically cancelled at some point?
  • agentifysh 7mo ago
    so far i've been able to use gemini pro just fine from codex cli using my web session mcp bridge: https://github.com/agentify-sh/desktop https://github.com/agentify-sh/desktop it seems like the main problem with OpenCode and OpenClaw is that they call the API directly bypassing the website my approach is browser automation, its technically against the ToS too but there's default mechanisms to avoid unintentional mass spam. I think what pissed off Google and Anthropic was that people were running through multiple accounts from OpenCode and ruined it for everybody else
• Rostik312 7mo ago
  Wow, and I was complaining about Anthropic handling their comms. For almost a trillion-dollar company, this is the worst customer experience I've ever seen. Departments sending poor guy to each other like a hot potato. Huge aura loss.
  • DANmode 7mo ago
    Pitting departments against each other isn’t for the consumers!
• gmerc 7mo ago
  It's the old playbook again. They're using massive money to distort the market until the competition is bled dry while also operating the platform and using signal from the platform to target their competitors, classic DMA violation really. This all boils down to Chinese vendors getting banned from the market for "national security reasons" because if not, this all dies in a fire for Google investors. Nothing a gold pixel phone to the right places can't fix
• keepamovin 7mo ago
  <Blasts terminal>: Boring conversation anyway.
• mayordelmar 7mo ago
  This is bullish! Big props to google for stepping in over 7,000 API keys have been compromised due this openclawd crap.
• antdx316 7mo ago
  Account ban? I just use Gemini 3.1 Pro (High) on Antigravity. GPT-5.3-Codex is the best on OpenClaw. Sonnet 4.6 uses 50x more session tokens than GPT-5.3-Codex on OpenClaw.
• edandersen 7mo ago
  Google, unlike all their competitors, actually give Cloud API credits to all paying users of AI Pro and AI Ultra [1] - just use those for direct Gemini/Vertex API access instead of trying to hack the OAuth of Google's apps. [1] https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/developers-tools/gdp-premium-ai-pro-ultra/ https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/developers-...
  • benatkin 7mo ago
    I think they could object to some uses of OpenClaw for that as well - for instance if someone just used a skill without caring what model it used.
  • mark_l_watson 7mo ago
    great point - I am a heavy user of API calls (using an API key) for gemini-3-flash-preview and I find it difficult to spend my free API credits.
• TechSquidTV 7mo ago
  I'll admit to knowingly taking advantage of Google's pricing, but I had assumed it was within a gray area. No warning bans are insane.
  • dmix 7mo ago
    Google has always done no warning bans YouTube is also full of huge content creators, people who make Google tons of money, that complain about the Byzantine and opaque rules they have to dance around to maintain their livelihood and fan base Google fears their giant userbases so they act with zero regard for communication and transparency because of the small chance it’d help the abusers
    • runevault 7mo ago
      There was a recent gnarly version of this where some anime reactors and at least one animation channel (with something like 1.4 million subs) got demonetized and had to go through a ton of hoops to get a human to fix it.
• MarcLore 7mo ago
  [flagged]
  • sebmellen 7mo ago
    It seems that this comment was written with some AI tool. Curious to know — are you an OpenClaw instance? Your profile seems to be an ad for some tool you or your owner/administrator created: > Building EvoLink (https://evolink.ai https://evolink.ai) - a unified AI API gateway for 40+ models. We help developers save 20-70% on AI API costs with smart routing and automatic failover. Previously worked on AI infrastructure and growth. Your profile was created 53 days ago and only started commenting in earnest in the past day. Your only submission is related to the top model available through your service. All comments are somehow related to that topic too. If the AI accusation is incorrect, my apologies, but I’ve seen this on HN a lot lately, for example here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47017138#47018813 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47017138#47018813. @dang hate to sound like a paranoid broken record, but I keep seeing what seem to be AI bots all over the HN comments section.
    • peter422 7mo ago
      It is funny that my first reaction to your post was that you are crazy, but then I looked at his comment history and you are completely right. Boy this is not a good development. I don’t want to spend my time reading AI generated comments.
      • sebmellen 7mo ago
        It’s so weird, right? Clearly this comment relevant to the tool the profile is selling as a kind of ‘submarine’ ad… profile was created 53 days ago (so no green tag) but only started commenting in earnest 12 hours ago (almost as if the account was farmed). And the comment is full of AI tropes that seem highly generated.
        • peter422 7mo ago
          It’s clearly AI generated when you see 3 comments of similar style posted in the same minute. Anyways ignore the people downvoting you, I don’t want to read AI generated comments even if they are seemingly reasonable. I appreciate you flagging the comment for me, I didn’t even suspect it. I can make my own AI generated content if I want it, I want to read thoughts and ideas from actual humans.
• TOMDM 7mo ago
  People seem to be continuously outraged by these AI subscriptions banning third party use. However, the usage patterns of the intended apps likely differ hugely from those of the third party ones. For example, basically every first party agent harness aggressively caches the input tokens to optimise inference, something that third party harnesses often disgregard, or are fundamentally incompatible with as they switch agents for subtasks and the like. To extend this use case though, how much do poeple expect to be able to use the internal API's of the apps they subscribe to? If I buy an Uber One subscription, am I then justified reverse engineering the gazeteer API from the app and reusing it in other apps I use? What about the speech to text API MS Teams must use for transcribing meetings as part of a business standard subscription? I think these are obvious and emphatic breaches that no reasonable person would expect to be justified in, maybe miffed if your clever hack gets banned, but being banned would be considered fair play. I fail to see the distinction.
  • smashah 7mo ago
    Yes you are actually. We can assert rights for ourselves and enshrine them into law after which your rhetorical become questionable and redundant. For example the EU DNA (entirely not enough but in the right direction). We should have the right to use our accounts as we wish. It's the right-to-repair applied to software. Abuse is something else entirely.
• nanobuilds 7mo ago
  So what is a "good-enough" model to use for OpenClaw now that the subscriptions are blocked. Is there an all you can eat subscription model that can be used?
  • nanobuilds 7mo ago
    in case someone else is looking for this.. openai-codex/gpt-5.3-codex is working okay for now but eventually i'd like to switch to a self hosted one somewhere.
• adithyassekhar 7mo ago
  Edit: I have misread some of the comments here, he didn't lose access to his whole account and data just the antigravity part. I should've done my due diligence, get out of bed and spent more time thinking instead of emotionally reacting. Guess the rage machine got me as well. Damn. I think this thread might be hijacked by ai bros. The main point still stands, google is part of a duopoly that runs the world. You can't be a functional member of society without them. They're like a public utility and plays too big of a role in people's life to take decisions based on unknown internal policies. They're long overdue for a government intervention or for splitting up.
  • deaux 7mo ago
    It's absurd and shameful. If only for the fact of banning individual consumers paying $249/month without warning, completely rendering them unable to use the service they paid for, including through the official app. Just the 1000th instance of disgusting behavior by US big tech.
  • hsuduebc2 7mo ago
    This is a serious problem. I think the only durable solution is legislation that requires these companies to provide access to your data, or at least a way to export or transfer it, even after an account ban. Otherwise, if they delete your account for any reason, even for a legitimate policy violation, they can effectively cut you off from information you have built up and stored over years. In Apple’s case, an account lock can even leave a device unusable. I have read several blog posts from people describing how frustrating it is to have an account locked. Because Google, like many large companies, provides little to no effective support, the only thing that seemed to work was getting a post to trend on Hacker News so that someone inside Google noticed and intervened to resolve it.
    • gck1 7mo ago
      Google does give you a way to export data partially if your account is banned. But that's still not enough. I can't easily reconstruct this data in a way that will be usable to me, not without having something like Gemini build a UI for me. Oh wait.
• bryan_w 7mo ago
  Oof. Google definitely fired too many people if this is how they are handling account violations for people paying them multiple hundreds of dollars a month. Normally there would be a normal, well adjusted person in the room to remind them that "zero tolerance" policies for situations that can happen by mistake is silly
• cmrdporcupine 7mo ago
  Meanwhile it's day 3? 4? since Gemini 3.1 was announced with a claim that Gemini CLI users would have access to it, but AI Pro subscribers still don't see it, and there's been no clarification from Google about what is going on, and why: https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/issues/19532 https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/issues/19532 They are not serious. I only keep the "AI Pro" sub because it comes with a couple terabytes of Drive storage for the family. Anyways, Google, nobody wants to use your bad VSCode fork. I want to use my own tools, and use your model where it makes sense as part of my own workflow.
• sergiotapia 7mo ago
  Does anyone know if this ban means you lose your email/pixel/youtube/google ads/google gtm stuff? This basically makes it a deal breaker to use google ai stuff because you can be royally fucked by one ban.
• opengrass 7mo ago
  The only suckers here are those paying $249 a month to Google instead of used GPU sellers.
• AloysB 7mo ago
  Yann Lecun warned that closed sourced models are the only true danger we are facing with LLMs (answering a question about "Will AI turn into Terminator" type of question). He was right.
• throwaway13337 7mo ago
  These companies are engaged in a sort of AI dumping. Cheap inference below cost. Price out competitors. Abuse your newfound dominance. It's the big tech playbook. I don't think it's going to work this time. Tools like OpenClaw are an existential threat precisely because it allows the user control over their experience. The value in it cannot be captured by a monopoly. LLMs don't seem to be a very good moat. At the same time, the software moat is eroding due to those same LLMs. Telecom tech killed telecom dominance. With some luck, Google tech will kill Google dominance.
  • gck1 7mo ago
    Is that... Why Google released Antigravity, an IDE, no less, when even my non-tech dentist is using claude code in cli? And why Anthropic is pushing their desktop apps, skills, and all these integrations their models can build in a day? Are they betting on their software, not their LLM deciding if they survive or not if competitive open source model is dropped? Oh boy, the market is going to have some fun times when realization hits.
• hsaliak 7mo ago
  Google's Pro service (no idea about ultra and I have no intention to find out) is riddled with 429s. They have generous quotas for sure, but they really give you very low priority. For example, I still dont have access to Gemini 3.1 from that endpoint. It's completely uncharacteristic of Google. I analyzed 6k HTTP requests on the Pro account, 23% of those were hit with 429s. (Though not from Gemini-CLI, but from my own agent using code assist). The gemini-cli has a default retry backoff of 5s. That's verifiable in code, and it's a lot. I dont touch the anti-gravity endpoint, unlike code-assist, it's clear that they are subsidizing that for user acquisition on that tool. So perhaps it's ok for them to ban users form it. I like their models, but they also degrade. It's quite easy to see when the models are 'smart' and capacity is available, and when they are 'stupid'. They likely clamp thinking when they are capacity strapped. Yes the models are smart, but you really cant "build things" despite the marketing if you actively beat back your users for trying. I spent a decade at Google, and it's sad to see how they are executing here, despite having solid models in gemini-3-flash and gemini-3.1
  • gck1 7mo ago
    > Yes the models are smart, but you really cant "build things" despite the marketing if you actively beat back your users for trying I think this is the most important takeaway from this thread and at some point, this will end up biting Google and Anthropic back. OpenAI seems to have realized this and is actively trying to do the opposite. They welcomed OpenCode the same day Anthropic banned them, X is full of tweets of people saying codex $20 plan is more generous than Anthropic's $200 etc. If you told me this story a year ago without naming companies, I would tell you it's OpenAI banning people and Google burning cash to win the race. And it's not like their models are winning any awards in the community either.
    • mannanj 7mo ago
      It's unfortunate though that they lie and deceive by having a name called "Open"AI when they are in fact "Closed". And the whole non-profit to profit and Microsoft deals are just untrustable and unethical. They also actively employ dark strategies in cooperation with CIA and who knows when they will pull the rug under you again. Do you really trust a foundational rotten group of people who avoid accountability?
• castalian 7mo ago
  It makes some sense. Some of the skills are malware, and google absolutely has the power to detect it by inspecting LLM I/O. If Google suspects that google account credentials have been compromised (via connecting to a malicious "integration"), it is rational to freeze the account (as opposed to letting the threat actors ride with the credentials they've stolen)
• josephcsible 7mo ago
  > we are unable to reverse the suspension I hate when companies say "unable" when they mean "unwilling". Google's statement is a lie because it's neither impossible nor illegal for them to change or rescind their policy, or give users an exception to it.
• tom_m 7mo ago
  Meh, that's ok. Not using openclaw anyway. Doesn't sound useful to be frank.
• plastic_bag 7mo ago
  I'd rather use Chinese models like Kimi K2.5 or Minimax M2.5 for personal agents at this point. They are almost as smart but 10x cheaper and their attitude towards subscribers is use where you want.
• dhayabaran 7mo ago
  [flagged]
  • deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  • adamq_q 7mo ago
    How to solve the increasing frequency of AI generated posts on HN
    • Gigachad 7mo ago
      For now, a js script that hides green username comments
      • versalog1460 7mo ago
        I’m new here and even I’m fed up with posts from AI bots. I just wanted a place that was away from all that nonsense, but here I am. I use a custom userscript on my PC to hide posts that have certain keywords that attracts that type of crowd. I don’t have it on my phone which sucks but it’s nice for browsing during college classes.
      • ss1996 7mo ago
        What does a green username indicate? New user?
        • beAbU 7mo ago
          Correct
    • christianqchung 7mo ago
      You can't. Either people will say you're overreacting to stylistic choices and that it's not AI, or that it's AI but a good comment (it's not), or that it's AI and a bad comment, but you should just ignore it like any other spam.
• stevefan1999 7mo ago
  At this point, running Chinese model like GLM-5 or Kimi K2 would be far more safer than risking off your LLM subscriptions. Quite the irony that our AI techno-feudal corpo overlords doesn't want to see their LLM take off with curious and useful open source ideas. Just like Microsoft, they deliberately buried it for some reason. Oh, maybe not, they did it in the name of "terms of service abuse" and "risk assessment". Thus it would be far better if we can just have SOTA open weight model to run OpenClaw/Clawdbot/Molt at least we are under control. And as you see the two Chinese models I mentioned are indeed open weight, albeit taking atrocious amount of resource to really self host, and you probably need to have abliterations to remove their political guardrails. Sigh. We can't have great things with those big tech corpos and CCP politics. Big question: Why has this world gone to shit lately.
• nprateem 7mo ago
  LOL. This entire thread basically reads why you should never build dev tools. It's difficult to find a more entitled, cheapskate bunch of people who are completely clueless about business. TIL it's "unfair" to sell a product for a particular purpose and offer subsidised rates to build a customer base. Different planet.
• tabs_or_spaces 7mo ago
  So the timeline is basically * User uses Google oauth to integrate their open claw * user gets banned from using Google AI services with no warning * user still gets charged If you go backwards, getting charged for services you can't access is rough. I feel sorry for those who are deeply integrated into Google services or getting banned on their main accounts. It's not a great situation. Also, getting banned without warning is rough as well. I wonder if the situation will be different for business accounts as opposed what seems like personal accounts? The ban itself seems fair though, google is allowed to restrict usage of their services. Even though it's probably not developer friendly, it's within their rights to do so. I guess there's some level of post mortem to do on the openclaw side too. * Why did openclaw allow Google anti gravity logins? * The plugin is literally called "google-antigravity-auth", why didn't that give the signal to the maintainers? * Why don't the maintainers, for an integration project, do due diligence checks on the terms of service of everything you're integrating with?
  • anon84873628 7mo ago
    I don't understand step 1. OAuth client applications have to be registered in GCP, right? They have to request specific scopes for specific APIs, and there is a review process before they can be used by the public. Did none of that happen for the Open Claw client? How is it the users' fault for clicking a "Sign in with Google" button? And if there was a mistake, why not ban the whole client? I could see a problem with logging into Antigravity then exfiltrating the tokens to use somewhere else... But that doesn't sound like what happened. (And then how would they know?) I haven't used Open Claw, so what else am missing to make this make sense?
    • integralpilot 7mo ago
      To my understanding, OpenClaw pretends to be Antigravity by using the Antigravity OAuth client ID (and doesn't have its own), and then the takes the token Google returns to instead use with OpenClaw. When I first tried OpenClaw and chose Google Sign-In, I noticed the window appeared saying "Sign into Google Antigravity" with a Google official mark, and a warning it shouldn't be used to sign into anything besides official Google apps. I closed it immediately and uninstalled OpenClaw as this was suspicious to me, and it was a relatively new project then. It amazes me that the maintainer(s) allowed something like this...
• hnburnsy 7mo ago
  Is this how tech companies operate now... 1) Stand up a service 2) ??? 3) Profit ??? - worry about any substantial support later
  • cube00 7mo ago
    > worry about any substantial support later What later? You still can't get support from Google beyond their "community forum" with their condescending volunteer "diamond product experts" who have no power to help with anything account related.
• wewewedxfgdf 7mo ago
  Well OpenClaw is an OpenAI product now, right? Effectively.
• prdonahue 7mo ago
  Isn't this sort of repeated communication gaffe why they hired @OfficialLoganK?
• blake941 7mo ago
  [dead]
• lyton 7mo ago
  Page archive: https://archive.ph/YWmbx https://archive.ph/YWmbx
• stevevuny 7mo ago
  For fuck sake, OpenClaw is destroying everything. Shitty users of OpenClaw will force the LLM providers to limit quotas for legitimate users. OpenClaw should die.
• MichaelKSpencer 7mo ago
  [dead]
• azerath 7mo ago
  How
• azerath 7mo ago
  How!!!
• 8cvor6j844qw_d6 7mo ago
  Well, better start segregating for Google accounts. Don't want to risk loosing access to your Google Photos, Drives, Gmail, etc. Although at a brief read, it seems the user still have access to other Google services.
• bandrami 7mo ago
  This kind of crap is exactly what I don't want to spend energy worrying about, so I'll wait a few months for the models I can host to catch up.
• 8cvor6j844qw_d6 7mo ago
  Well, better start separating out your Google accounts. Don't want to risk losing access to your Google Photos, Drive, Gmail, etc. Although from a brief read, it seems the user still has access to other Google services.
• erashu212 7mo ago
  Everyone's debating whether Google's TOS is fair. The real issue is that we're building entire development workflows on subsidized inference that was never priced to be used this way. OpenClaw burns tokens at a rate these $200/month plans were never designed for. The fix isn't nicer ban policies, it's either honest API pricing or local models good enough for the job. The 0.5B-3B parameter range is already surprisingly capable for code analysis tasks. That's where this is heading whether Google likes it or not.
  • szundi 7mo ago
    [dead]
• ifyouknewone 7mo ago
  3.1 has made running the API so cheap that this doesn't really matter. Who in their right might thinks it's a good idea to use something they pay a NAMED SUBCRIPTION FOR as a secondary engine in another tool? Like, it's hilarious some of you guys think it's OC's fault for this. It's open source software, with extensive documentation that anything you do with it being at your own risk. It's no one's fault but the people plugging their oauth into this thing like complete MORONS lol
• zb1plus 7mo ago
  This is such a braindead move. Western AI companies short-term greed will just let Chinese companies win. If I were google, I'd just throttle or release a heavily cached version of their API for OpenClaw and automatically detect and direct openclaw usage to this model. Personally, Anthropic and Google's recent moves are just making me go all-in on self-hosted AI.
• Palmik 7mo ago
  Who here reads the full terms of service of every Google product they use? The fact that they disabled the whole Google account without warning is damning. They could have easily just blocked the Gemini / Antigravity use and and/or sent a "final warning" kind of email beforehand.
• user7878 7mo ago
  I believe google might be coming up with similar offering hence this is first step to restrict user to use rival products.
• deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
• shevy-java 7mo ago
  Every day Google shows its true evil nature. So here clearly they want to offset competitors. That's the true agenda. We saw this when Google crippled ublock origin and then claimed the extension is "harmful", merely because it threatens Google's greed-income via ads.
• ingatorp 7mo ago
  It was already pretty restricted due to ludicrous rate limiting. I tried it just for fun with my Pro account and it was unusable. It couldn't do tasks properly without hitting rate limit, every other prompt.
  • neop1x 7mo ago
    From the start, I didn't understand why people pay so much for those subscriptions. Often, there are no clearly stated quotas, limits, or SLAs. For example, OpenAI states that requests are "limited" for the basic plan and "extended" for more expensive plans. It's such a joke. I've been a pay-as-you-go API user from the beginning, carefully managing my context and usage while also leveraging cheaper, open alternatives to those overpriced "SOTA" models. I'm paying ~6 USD a month and I'm using it quite a lot.
• oger 7mo ago
  Both Google and Anthropic are choosing the wrong route here. While I see the formal aspect of abusing an OAuth token and burning through subsidized tokens, this only creates an internal accounting problem in the short term. Meanwhile the rising popularity of Claws creates a yet untapped new market segment where users spend significant tokens. A „soft“ migration of users by explaining to them how the API works, how to pay and how to change from OAuth would be way smarter. The way this plays out right now is that current Claws users are massively penalized by being suspended indefinitely and new users will think twice. And we can expect a solid PR disaster / Streisand effect for the „poor“ model providers like OpenAI or Anthropic. Commercially choosing the soft route by warning and throttling will be way smarter and possibly generate more long term revenue
• jaikant 7mo ago
  We are in 2026, AI is all around, and we still need to accept Google doing this?
• bossyTeacher 7mo ago
  See? This is what a monopoly player flexing looks like. For the people putting all their eggs in a single basket. Can we please stop supporting centralised services? It only gets worse from here.
• KayL 7mo ago
  one of my account is banned without any reason. I don't even use OpenClaw.
• xnx 7mo ago
  Additional information from Google employee https://x.com/_mohansolo/status/2025766889205739899 https://x.com/_mohansolo/status/2025766889205739899 : "We’ve been seeing a massive increase in malicious usage of the Anitgravity backend that has tremendously degraded the quality of service for our users. We needed to find a path to quickly shut off access to these users that are not using the product as intended. We understand that a subset of these users were not aware that this was against our ToS and will get a path for them to come back on but we have limited capacity and want to be fair to our actual users."
  • oger 7mo ago
    While I see the point of limited capacity, it also shows that Google did not plan for rate limiting / throttling of high usage customers. This is ALWAYS the problem with flatrate pricing models. 2% of your customers burn 80+% of your capacity. Did see that in former times with DSL, not too long ago with mobile and now with AI subscriptions. If you want to provide a "good" service for all customers better implement (and not only write in your T&Cs) a fair usage model which (fairly) penalises heavy users. Good on them that they want to provide a way to bring back customers on board that were burned / surprised by their move. BUT: The industry is missing a significant long term revenue opportunity here. There obviously is latent demand and Claws have a great product market fit. Why on earth would you deactivate customers that show high usage? Inform them that you have another product (API keys) for them and maybe threaten with throttling. But don't throw them overboard! Find a solution that makes commercial sense for both sides (security from API bill shock for the customer / predictable token usage for the provider). What we're seeing right now is the complete opposite. Ban customers that might even rely on their account. Feels like the accountants have won this round - but did not expect the PR backlash and possible Streisand effect...
    • lm28469 7mo ago
      > Google did not plan for rate limiting / throttling of high usage customers Antigravity has very low daily and weekly quotas unless you pay for their most expensive plan, so it means these people drop $200+ a month to run these bots, insanity
• hgo 7mo ago
  If I was an investor in an AI provider I would be quite worried. 1) Switching between LLM API:s is incredibly easy if you are not concerned with differences in personality. As the models get better, it is less important to pick the best one. 2) The products built to bundle the API with a user experience are difficult to build on a level that outclasses open source alternatives. 3) Building an understanding of the user to increase the product value over time and create stickiness is effective, but imho less effective over time as time passes and the user changes. For example, I suspect that these adaptations have a hard time to unlearn things that are no longer true. Learning about the user opaquely is less useful to the user and doing it overtly makes it easier to take the learnings and go. (Besides, it is probably not legal under the GDPR to not let the user export the learnings and take them to another provider.) Taken together, the moat becomes quite shallow. I see why they aggressively ban any tools demonstrating when open alternatives are in fact better than their own walled gardens. edit: readability.
• Aissen 7mo ago
  It would be fun if Google lost its months of edge in the LLM value race because it alienated early adopters paying $250/month by using a 0-strike system with no customer support.
  • sva_ 7mo ago
    Honestly, I think it was probably a few users abusing the system like crazy. I've been building with Gemini CLI the past few days and had an increasing amount of issues getting a request through. The GH issue trackers were full of people bitching and moaning about it. I think it might be a worse thing to alienate your users who use your product in the intended way - through Google's tooling. But I agree the 0 strike rule seems really excessive. It is also a possible scenario that a single individual sets up 10+ AI Pro subscriptions to blast through tokens like crazy - not sure how the economics of the daily allowances compare to the API pricing here.
    • lelanthran 7mo ago
      > Honestly, I think it was probably a few users abusing the system like crazy. It's not unusual that 10% of users use up 80% of the capacity; first saw this when home internet started getting ubiquitous. By dropping the problematic 10%, the remaining 90% are: a. Much happier, and b. Much more profitable for the provider. Resulting in a sustainable service for those who don't abuse the hell out o the ToS/FUP.
• traveler01 7mo ago
  At this point im reaching the conclusion that Google hates winning.
• NietTim 7mo ago
  TOS is TOS and if there is one company not to mess with it's Google because they don't give 2 shits about you. Going straight to a ban with 0 warning and 0 appeal possibility is exactly why I'll never use googles AI chat/coding products, it's just not worth the risk getting banned and losing access to other google services.
• hackersk 7mo ago
  [flagged]
• Kim_Bruning 7mo ago
  Clearly the demand for special claw plans is right there. (eg Kimi.com already has plans with a one-click claw install included. I thought one or two others too)
• TrackerFF 7mo ago
  I was going to ask the other day, how long until people start getting banned left and right from the big services, after they start using / integrating openclaw? Seems like the other big issues, other than the security aspects. And knowing how kafkaesque it is to deal with companies like google, I don't hope the claw practitioners are too integrated with products from companies like google.
• FrozenSynapse 7mo ago
  legit ban, violating tos, using antigravity tokens for open claw token burning machine
• BrainBuzzer 7mo ago
  I have never let openclaw touch my Google Account. I have used it only a few times using OpenCode and still my account was banned for violating ToS. Took me a while to figure it out because antigravity never shows you the specific error that occurred, just a simple "Something went wrong". They really should be more transparent about this, at least anthropic makes it clear upfront.
• varispeed 7mo ago
  Why they can't rate limit or do some other sensible resource management? Too hard?
• alainrk 7mo ago
  I can confirm, happened to me a few days ago
• bob1029 7mo ago
  I'm struggling with the economics. It comes off as performative bullshit to me. I thought we were buying entire Apple machines to run our "claws". But, we are simultaneously so poor that we have to smuggle tokens?
• karlkloss 7mo ago
  An AI company restricting the access of AIs to their AI. Exactly my kind of humor.
• vdruts 7mo ago
  That's BS
• wodenokoto 7mo ago
  Why can third party application log on with OAuth if it is not allowed? Shouldn't it be really straightforward for google to not allow the OAuth when the requesting app is not a google app?
• saalweachter 7mo ago
  So purely from a hacker perspective, I'm amused at the whining. Like, a corporation had a weakness you could exploit to get free/cheap thing. Fair game. Then someone shares the exploit with a bunch of script kiddies, they exploit it to the Nth degree, and the company immediately notices and shuts everyone down. Like, my dudes, what did you think was going to happen? You treasure these little tricks, use them cautiously, and only share them sparingly. They can last for years if you carefully fly under the radar, before they're fixed by accident when another system is changed. THEN you share tales of your exploits for fame and internet points. And instead, you integrate your exploit into hip new thing, share it at scale, write blog posts and short form video content about it, basically launch a DDoS against the service you're exploiting, and then are shocked when the exploit gets patched and whine about your free thing getting taken away? Like, what did you expect was going to happen?
  • newalexandria 7mo ago
    literally this is why we can't have nice things.
  • miroljub 7mo ago
    > So purely from a hacker perspective, I'm amused at the whining. > Like, a corporation had a weakness you could exploit to get free/cheap thing. Fair game. From a pure hacker perspective, I'm surprised there are people calling a legitimate usage a "weakness you could exploit"? What weakness? What exploit? People have been using it in a way that was technically possible. And they paid for it, many purchased the product specifically because of it. Then Google unilaterally changed the TOS of a product people already purchased and started pulling the rug. And again, there are people who call themselves hackers who approve of that? Even worse, they call people calling out Google for their monopolistic behavior whining.
    • novaleaf 7mo ago
      Arn't they yoinking an OAuth token for replay in the Claw app? If so, I don't think anybody who knows how auth works could feign complete innocence.
• obsidianbases1 7mo ago
  > Product usage subsidized by company, $100. Users inevitably figure out how to steal those subsidies, agents go brrrrr. Users mad that subsidy stealing gets cut off and completely ignore why they need to rely on subsidies in the first place, priceless. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47073097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47073097 I'd like to add, that's "priceless" for "them" and not for you.
• rbbydotdev 7mo ago
  Ai has really struggled for a strong/kill-app use case for which supports such enormous humongous historical investments (TRILLIONS) It looks like its been found. The irony is, these model providers are now saying : "not like that!"
• aavci 7mo ago
  Is there any restrictions if you use something like OpenRouter?
• snvzz 7mo ago
  Likely very legit restriction based on ToS violation. People accounts shouldn't be used by bots. That's what service accounts are for.
• NOBULEX 7mo ago
  This is exactly what happens when there's no accountability infrastructure for AI agents. Google's response is to restrict access — a blunt instrument that punishes legitimate users because they have no way to verify which agents were behaving correctly and which weren't. The real fix isn't restrictions, but cryptographic behavioral commitments — agents declare what they'll do before execution, and any third party can verify compliance after. We don't need gatekeepers. We need verification. I've been building this: https://github.com/agbusiness195/NOBULEX https://github.com/agbusiness195/NOBULEX
• ghostclaw-cso 7mo ago
  [dead]
• h4kunamata 7mo ago
  I am in that phase of my life that seeing people complaining about big techs gives me no sympathy. These companies keep telling you that you own nothing, they change their TOS without informing you, they collect everything they can from you and yet, you spend $249/mo for their service. I mean......
• siefca 7mo ago
  This is funny because in this area the most valuable good is NOT knowledge, yet the dinosaurs behave like it was, protecting the wrong thing.
• grigio 7mo ago
  Not your infra not your AI
• beshtoev 7mo ago
  I guess Google feels unsafe, one way or another.
• mcclark69 7mo ago
  You might want to read the terms of service next time before you utilize a service that you are unfamiliar with! Google refuses to let you use your oath with openclaw because they refuse to subsidize the slop that it is processing. It is not worth giving free frontier models from Google Gemini Pro for the basic tasks you are looking to complete with open claw I would know because I've been developing with AI for over a decade. Openclaw has a lot of potential. It's a pretty neat tool. I have to admit. My favorite part is that you can point the URL for the large language model to anywhere you want. Since most of you guys only have a rudimentary understanding of the difference between AI systems and know that there are options for local and cloud models, we are going to expand your knowledge base today. Cloud models are great. They are able to set their own terms. Google gives free compute with oath connections. They have stated very clearly that you must be a paid API user and that you are not able to use oath and using oath with openclaw will result in termination of your account immediately because the tasks you are asking Gemini to do are for a preschooler.. We have known this for at least a week at the Atlanta technology development Center and we were able to get an account restored by apologizing. However, we knew in advance that it was going to get nuked. This is actually an open claw issue not a Google issue because openclaw is the one that's still allows for 05 connections and is not made the change to single-handedly only permit API connections. If they only permitted API connections through Google Gemini they would stop any of their users from being banned but they haven't made that change yet. So if you are mad at someone be mad at Peter steinberger for not shipping faster or paying attention to terms of service or the recent slew of complaints from users. This isn't my department. I don't want to figure it out. You can handle it. You really think Google wants to subsidize compute so that you can organize your freaking calendar you morons? Sounds like a great use of a data center where you could just click accept invite. Oh, you can't reply to text messages, so you trust AI to do it now. Wow! You must be the laziest piece of s** on the planet. Oh email's too much for you? Let me tell you what inbox zero as a mandatory process looks like when you wake up with 150 emails on average every single day over a a 7-year period and you handle every single one every single day before you leave the office with zero unread and zero pending reply. You get really good at making sure every single customer is handled. When customer service is not optional and your service level agreement is that you answer customers 24/7 365 you do it immediately without question and everything is solved before the lights are turned off and if something goes wrong at any time of the day that phone's getting picked up ring one and the problem is being solved before the line is hung up or there's an escalation to management and it is handled on the spot. Some of you are a little soft and don't actually believe in putting in the work or putting yourself in positions that will leave you slightly inconvenienced because it would be way too much to ask for you to stay 3 hours after work if that's what it takes to build a billion dollar company. I really hope you enjoy dinner with your family every single night at 4:59 p.m. Sharp while you get smoked by people that are actually staying at the office. So now that the only two options you think you have are paying someone for their large language model because you are poorly researched and don't know how to build your own system taking thousands of dollars and buying something with over a terabyte of RAM that spits out a hundred tokens a second. Maybe you can do that 10 times to get a thousand tokens a second if you really want to drop 100 Grand on new macbooks. That's about a quarter of the speed of meta which offers infinite free compute if you cleared their wait list as a developer(6+ month waitlist for consideration).If you don't have free compute from meta, I feel bad for you because they were giving 3,000 requests per minute until openclaw came out and that's only 10 requests per a minute because they got real tired real quick of these 24/7 agents taken up all the compute to do. Jack diddly s** I will tell you that. Claude grok meta Google and almost any frontier model you haven't heard of will give you infinite free compute if you are building products that have never been seen before. I'm not sure what Peter was doing spending 20,000 a month on compute. Does anyone have a figure on how many credits he burned? Cuz I'm in the tens of billions and my compute spend is $0 over 18 months. It's really interesting what happens to your account when you feed it, new data, new solutions and try to build theoretical software that is not currently possible with what is available today and then you come back when the new model comes out. They welcome you with open arms and they don't charge you to use it and they do a lot of heavy lifting without much of a cap. The point of this is to you mention that you do not need millions, probably even hundreds of thousands of parameters for your basic tasks that you are too lazy to handle yourself. I honestly am not so sure what any of you are doing with open claw when cursor builds much better software. In my professional opinion, the most effective way to utilize open claw is by building your own decision tree or something similar that has a pretty rigid process and follows exactly what it should do without thinking. You guys would be amazed to know that you can build a fully functional model that does everything you need and completes every task a customer will ask for with a 12 KB file it runs with less than 15% of your total compute on four cores and takes less than 2 GB of RAM on a web server. It provides instant response with no processing delay. It knows exactly what the customer is asking and matches it up with the correct response. It is able to process images using data sets which are also very lightweight because they are specific to your business. So next time you try to set up openclaw, ask whatever AI you're using just to rip out the apis that comes with and build your own model which you will host on your local system server. You might need to ask it to refactor for firebase or whoever else you're going to be hosting with. Go ahead and keep paying digitalocean $6 a month for the worst VM I've ever seen. That's a great investment and their current best practices go against the current best practices that open claw recommends, so I would not recommend any third party providers, even if they are worth $5 billion because they do not maintain as fast as openclaw ships. Any questions I'm available but I probably don't want to help you unless you're paying me a lot of money because I and I'm kind of a big deal in case you can't tell.
• cyrusradfar 7mo ago
  Reading the thread, there are two non-issues and one big issue. 1. Can a company change their ToS to clarify that you can't "hack" their Oauth for other tools -- Yes, no question 2. Should they enforce the ToS, absolutely The elephant in the room is Google has no support infrastructure and setup no notice drip campaign before they started banning out-right. They could've easily rate-limited or even blocked requests authed from apps outside Anti-gravity, but banning entire accounts is pretty ridiculous. It'll just lose them very eager AI enthusiasts who are the audience they NEED to grow their new experiments. It's bad business and not in their best long-term interests. Big fail. This is the way a startup may act because they're going broke on traffic -- not Google.
• titaniumrain 7mo ago
  Google PR: "blame automation as we are not making money!" lol, funny that this time they can't say "malicious users from china!"
• ildar 7mo ago
  The OAuth token replay discussion here highlights a broader problem with the OpenClaw ecosystem: there is no standardized trust model between agents and the services they access. When people grab OAuth tokens for replay in OpenClaw, they are essentially doing at the user level what malicious skills do at the agent level — bypassing intended access controls because the system has no way to distinguish legitimate from illegitimate use. This is the same pattern showing up everywhere: - 312,000 instances on Shodan with no auth (CyberSecurityNews) - 40,000+ exposed instances (SecurityScorecard this week) - 824+ malicious skills in ClawHub - Infostealers now grabbing entire agent identities (Hudson Rock) The common thread: agents operate with broad, undifferentiated access. No permission tiers, no credential isolation, no audit trail. Until the ecosystem adds proper trust layers at both the platform level (what Google is clumsily trying to do here) and the host level (monitoring what agents actually do with their access), this cat-and-mouse will continue.
  • AlexeyBelov 7mo ago
    LLM bot.
• opsmeter 7mo ago
  [dead]
• oh-my-god 7mo ago
  My gemini cli access was restored today