11 ms·

Anthropic says OpenClaw-style Claude CLI usage is allowed again

511 points by jmsflknr 6mo ago

imron 6mo ago
Can we get OpenCode support back as well?
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
throwup238 6mo ago
I don’t think I’ve seen a more confused and shambolic product strategy since Google’s absurd line of GChat rebrandings. Last year I was excited about the constant forward progress on models but since February or so its just been a mess and I want off this ride. Either way I’m going to wait for “official” word from Anthropic, which I guess at this point will probably be a “Tell HN” or Reddit text post or a Xitter from some random employee’s personal account, because apparently that’s the state of corporate communication now.
- benjx88 6mo ago
  [flagged]
jollymonATX 6mo ago
How can they be this bad at this? What was all that about then?
swyx 6mo ago
a more authoritative source (aka a tweet) woudl be nice.
dmazin 6mo ago
I got sick of the inconsistency caused by Anthropic tinkering with Claude Code and had canceled my 20x. My plan was to switch to Codex so I could use it in Pi. I am specifically talking about switching because of the harness, not model quality. Anyone else match my experience? I wonder how many other people recently did the same. It would be prudent of Anthropic to let people use Pro/Max OAuth tokens with other harnesses I think. Even though I get why they want to own the eyeballs.
- tommica 6mo ago
  I left anthropic a while ago because of the similar shenanigans they had earlier. I went with opencode & zen. I still have their subscription, but am using pi now, mainly because something happened that made my opencode sessions unusable (cannot continue them, just blanks out, I assume something in the sqlite is fucked), and I cannot be bothered to debug it. For what I use the agents, the Chinese models are enough
  - hboon 6mo ago
    Doesn't using pi be against their terms of use about having to go through Claude Code cli for all Max plan usage? (I had use Droid with Max previously, it was a great combo).
    - tommica 6mo ago
      Probably - it was that kind of confusion that resulted in me switching providers. Plus I like being able to switch a model.
    - the_mitsuhiko 6mo ago
      It's unclear right now. The current stance is that using pi or other coding harnesses eats into extra usage and that is the behavior one sees today. We have added a hint to pi now that warns you when you use an anthropic sub.
      - hboon 6mo ago
        Thanks for the great work.
- redrove 6mo ago
  I’ve been using Codex Pro since they lobotomized Opus 4.6. Codex is so much better, GPT 5.4 xhigh fast is definitely the smartest and fastest model available. For a while there I had both Opus 4.6 and Codex access and I frequently pitted them against each other, I never once saw Opus come out ahead. Opus was good as a reviewer though, but as an implementer it just felt lazy compared to 5.4 xhigh. One feature that I haven’t seen discussed that much is how codex has auto-review on tool runs. No longer are you a slave to all or nothing confirmations or endless bugging, it’s such a bad pattern. Even in a week of heavy duty work and personal use I still haven’t been able to exhaust the usage on the $200 plan. I’ll probably change my mind when (not IF) OpenAI rug pull, but for spring ‘26, codex is definitely the better deal.
brandensilva 6mo ago
The sentient had already sailed. It's hard to trust Anthropic here given the ringer they have dragged us through. Contrast that to what GitHub did which was to pause new customers to ensure quality remained and things were stable.
darylteo 6mo ago
Correction: OpenClaw says Anthropic says OpenClaw-style Claude CLI usage is okay again.
- eterm 6mo ago
  And then recommends to use an API key, which as far as I know was never restricted, it was trying to use the subscription that was prohibited/limited. I'm confused by the comments being full of people swearing off Claude, feels like real HN bubble stuff.
- dang 6mo ago
  (That's implied by the sitename to the right of the title)
  - darylteo 6mo ago
    /gestures at all the comments
  - cap11235 6mo ago
    Not at all.
arjie 6mo ago
Oh that's interesting. Right after they signed the deal with Amazon so maybe it was all compute constrained. In any case, I tried using the Codex $20/mo plan and the limits are so low I can hardly get anywhere before my agent swaps to a different agent. Somewhat suspicious that if I do this without an official Anthropic notice I'll lose my precious Max $200/mo account so I'll sit tight perhaps for a while.
- jauntywundrkind 6mo ago
  GPT-5.4 brutally consumptive for sure. It's not very verbal, but gpt-5.3 codex is wildly smart about coding & planning, and way way less token hungry.
- rustyhancock 6mo ago
  Consider Z.ai if you need "bulk" usage, GLM is now very good. They still have the occasional API brown out however. I used to use GLM mostly and had a Claude Pro subscription for occasional review and clean up. Now I just use GLM. I do think Claude Max is value for money. But it's more value than I personally need and I like Anthropic less and less.
  - zurfer 6mo ago
    Naive question but are you not afraid z.ai will train on your personal data?
    - azuanrb 6mo ago
      FAANG already did this all the time isn't it? Regardless of their policy. US is no better than China from my point of view. In this case, I see no difference between sending my prompts to US or China companies. At least China models are open source.
      - nullbyte 6mo ago
        I guess it depends if you are working on something important to national security. Especially corporate codebases, etc.
jarym 6mo ago
Pfft. Damage done, users know that Anthrophic will pull the rug from under them again if given half a chance. So yea, plan accordingly.
- azmz 6mo ago
  [flagged]
1una 6mo ago
Looks like this was restored 2 weeks ago[0], 3 days after Anthropic said OpenClaw requires extra usage[1]. At this point, it's hard to take this seriously. No official statement and not even a tweet? [0]: https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw/commit/d378a504ac17eab2425a114fed32a217b5702395 https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw/commit/d378a504ac17eab2... [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47633396 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47633396
- stingraycharles 6mo ago
  No, it's just that it's confusing, because there are two ways of using Claude Code credentials: 1. Take the oauth credentials and roll your own agent -- this is NOT allowed 2. Run your agentic application directly in Claude Code -- this IS allowed When OpenClaw says "Open-Claw style CLI usage", it means literally running OpenClaw in an official Claude Code session. Anthropic has no problems with this, this is compliant with their ToS. When you use Claude Code's oauth credentials outside of the claude code cli Anthropic will charge you extra usage (API pricing) within your existing subscription.
  - filleokus 6mo ago
    But... Even when running it in mode 2 ("claude -p") they at certain points tried to detect OpenClaw-usage based prompts made, and blocked them [0]. Now OpenClaw says that Antrophic sanctions this as allowable again. I agree with GP that this is hard to take seriously. [0]: https://x.com/steipete/status/2040811558427648357 https://x.com/steipete/status/2040811558427648357
    - stingraycharles 6mo ago
      I have never heard of this, and cannot be reproduced, and is not according to Anthropic's ToS. And there's a lot of FUD being spread around. They don't ban Openclaw prompts, each custom LLM application provides a client application id (this is how e.g. Openrouter can tell you how popular Openclaw is, and which models are used the most). Anthropic just checks for that.
tristanb 6mo ago
Maybe it’s allowed because they built the ability to direct the costs to your extra usage budget, not your monthly subscription?
Alifatisk 6mo ago
> Anthropic staff told us OpenClaw-style Claude CLI usage is allowed again Anthropic staff have had contradictive statements in Twitter and have corrected each other. Their intent for clarifications lead to confusion. > OpenClaw treats Claude CLI reuse and claude -p usage as sanctioned for this integration unless Anthropic publishes a new policy. Oh cool, so everything is back to business now, until they all or sudden update their policy tomorrow that retracts everything. Anthropic have proved themselves to be be unreliable when it comes to CC. Switching to other providers is the best way to go, if you want to keep your insanity.
- operatingthetan 6mo ago
  This is such a strange way for this to be announced. Why is openclaw telling us this? I wouldn't even trust it until Anthropic says so themselves.
  - bandrami 6mo ago
    It's the PayPal model of customer service: they'll ban you at any time for any reason or none at all, but if you're very nice they might be willing to have a human look at that decision at some point, but probably not.
    - LtWorf 6mo ago
      Oh yeah that happened to my paypal the one time I had a user donate to me! At least the only action I was still able to perform was to refund the user, or paypal would have just kept the money.
    - SV_BubbleTime 6mo ago
      Straight up PayPal and Venmo can go to hell. They banned my account, I painted a gun for a guy with a cerakote bale-on setup. He paid with PayPal and they banned me. His gun, just a legal service to paint it. I pulled our company portal away from PayPal when they refused to restore my account. Five years later, I tried to re-activate and the human I finally got to effectively told me to fuck off; so I will spend the rest of my life bashing that trash company at every chance.
dhoe 6mo ago
I didn't even use openclaw and Anthropic disabled my account without explanation beyond "suspicious signals". If anyone found a way to get out of that, I'd be curious to hear it - genuinely no idea what I did wrong, and the Google docs form I filled out to appeal never got me any reply.
- mondojesus 6mo ago
  Same thing happened to me in January. Never heard back from them after submitting the google form. A few weeks ago I went through the subscription flow again and the 'account disabled' message was no longer there. Didn't go through with the payment so it's possible I would have been blocked at that point but it looked like my account had been re-enabled. I think you just have to play the waiting game unfortunately.
  - nitroedge 5mo ago
    why not re-apply with just a new email account instead of using the old email they banned?
gregman1 6mo ago
Canceled anyway.
solomonb 6mo ago
Does this mean you can use openclaw with a Claude Pro account? I'm curious try it but no way i'm going to pay API rates.
darrenc81 6mo ago
Great so now we can all look forward to Claude progressively getting reduced limits again. How long till the $1000 ultra plan... or they just want us all paying API credits instead
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
victorbjorklund 6mo ago
Anthropic is really trying to burn all that goodwill they worked up by raising prices, reducing limits and making it impossible to know what the actual policies are.
- notarobot123 6mo ago
  Boiling the frog is an art form. You've got to know when to turn up the heat and when to let it simmer.
  - sitkack 6mo ago
    Hormussy started it.
  - Gigachad 6mo ago
    Don’t know, I feel like I’ve watched every tech company get through every controversy without consequence. Google when they merged YouTube and Google+, Reddit multiple times, Facebook after countless scandals. Microsoft destroying windows and pushing ads. At the end of the day a solid product and company can withstand online controversy.
    - nativeit 6mo ago
      At the end of the day, unenforced anti-competition regulations can bulldoze controversies.
    - conductr 6mo ago
      > a solid product and company can withstand online controversy A product with a massive moat. Switching from Claude to another competitor is insanely easy and without much loss of quality. Until they’ve built their moat, burning goodwill is foolish. What’s different is it’s probably required due to the cash that’s being burnt to operate. They can’t afford to keep offering so much for so little revenue.
- baq 6mo ago
  Would you please think of the shareholders
saltyoldman 6mo ago
I guess it doesn't matter any more, everyone bought all the mac minis
eknkc 6mo ago
I’ve been using codex cli and GPT 5.4. It is better at coding than Opus anyway. I did not really test Opus 4.7 but older versions generated worse results compared to GPT. Which I would not even try and test though if Anthropic did not ban my account. The shadiest thing I did was to use it with opencode for a while I think. Never installed claw or used CC tokens somewhere else. This is a weird company doing weird shit.
EFLKumo 6mo ago
Whether to allow Claude subscription to access other services or not, at this point, anthropic seems to be schizophrenic, sometimes worried about insufficient computing power and sometimes worried about user loss, which is puzzling.
- ralusek 6mo ago
  What's puzzling or schizophrenic about that? Those seem like two very natural factors that would be in tension with one another and have to be balanced.
  - EFLKumo 6mo ago
    [dead]
- baobabKoodaa 6mo ago
  Almost seems like business leaders have to balance different aspirations and make tradeoffs. Unbelieveable.
  - shepherdjerred 6mo ago
    Could they at least have a page somewhere letting us know what we’re allowed to do today?
walthamstow 6mo ago
OpenClaw says Anthropic says it's OK. Well, that's crystal clear then.
mentalgear 6mo ago
Bad Decision.
djyde 6mo ago
题外话，你们不觉得在 openclaw 里用 claude 相当浪费 token 吗？
mlitwiniuk 6mo ago
This is a perfect example of how quickly you can burn through trust that took a long time to earn. I used to be - in my small circle of friends and peers - a genuine advocate for Anthropic and Claude. It was my sole AI assistant for over a year. But somewhere around February/March, something shifted. Declining quality, policy changes, inconsistent output. Nothing dramatic, just... a slow erosion. That erosion pushed me to try Codex. I signed up for their most expensive pro plan. Now I'm about to experiment with Kimi. I'm not saying they're better (well, sometimes they are). But here's the thing - what Anthropic did is they made me look. They made a loyal customer start shopping around. And I think that's the worst thing you can do. Having said that - as an LLM provider for my product, we're staying with Claude. I still trust in their ethics. Please don't prove me wrong.
- layoric 6mo ago
  I'm trying out codex for first time as well cause something up with Claude for sure, 4.7 has been super frustrating. For other models, highly recommend trying MiniMax 2.7, using it with Hermes is actually pretty good, and their token subscription plans include a lot of usage for $10.
  - mlitwiniuk 6mo ago
    Perfect, thanks. Codex app sucks, but I've been exploring opencode for that. Will try MiniMax!
- baq 6mo ago
  Enshittification 101, codex is undergoing the same thing on a 3 month lag.
  - mlitwiniuk 6mo ago
    Haha, thanks for the heads-up
- kilroy123 6mo ago
  Same here. I've been on the Claude Max 20x plan for a while. Now I'm really giving codex a try and looking at the cheaper models as well.
imhoguy 6mo ago
Would that apply to OpenCode too?
Havoc 6mo ago
Same PR strategy as the US administration lol
waynevdm 6mo ago
Did they disable this to give them time to come out with their own agent?
GodelNumbering 6mo ago
How about third party coding harnesses?
- aqme28 6mo ago
  Or Claw-like harnesses that we make ourselves? It takes honestly like 15 minutes to roll your own, so I did it thinking "well, hopefully it's not considered third party"
  - sitkack 6mo ago
    I do claw like things all the time. Give CC an API document and it figures out how to take a snapshot of the data. Pulls it down and does an analysis.
est 6mo ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=openclaw.ai https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=openclaw.ai hot damn
- finger 5mo ago
  Wow. I’m curious as to why so much spam.
Frannky 6mo ago
Why? Did they figure out cheaper compute? Or did they lose a lot of users, and now the compute is there unused?
jorisboris 6mo ago
Swapped my OpenClaw to Claude again. I played around with Gemini and Chinese models in past month but it didn’t work for me.
jedisct1 6mo ago
And tomorrow, it won't be allowed any more and accounts will be closed without prior notice. Use something else.
croes 6mo ago
Correct title: OpenClaw says Anthropic said OpenClaw-style Claude CLI usage is allowed again
doginasuit 6mo ago
I'm out of the loop on Claude, hasn't it always been possible to use the Anthropic API with a tool like OpenClaw, paying per request? Is this limitation just for using your monthly subscription account?
- handfuloflight 6mo ago
  Yes, exactly.
- LatencyKills 6mo ago
  Many people likely objected to the original restriction because it seemed as though Anthropic was trying to impede the development of competing tools. If I'm paying for compute, why should it matter whether I use Anthropic's harness (e.g., Claude Code) or a 3rd-party harness?
  - sumedh 6mo ago
    Isn't their argument that third party harness dont play nice with their GPUs which is a fair argument. With Claude Code they can predict what the traffic would look like with third party harness they cannot.
    - LatencyKills 6mo ago
      If that was the argument, why did they reverse it? Anthropic is constantly destroying goodwill and now seems to be in panic mode.
  - doginasuit 6mo ago
    I find it a little bizarre that people have this expectation. You can still pay for compute and use it the way you want by paying for the product you actually want to use. Subscription products like this are not marketed or intended to be used as access to the API, but they also offer access to the API if that's what you want. I'm still not entirely clear why people insist on using their subscription like this, so let me know if I'm missing something.
RoxiHaidi 6mo ago
Same, I am from the 3x plan and canceled and switched to Codex 2 days ago...
amazingamazing 6mo ago
Guess they saw the growth of their growth shrink dramatically lol
- garganzol 6mo ago
  More people flocked to Codex and found out that it's not worse, and sometimes superior.
basisword 6mo ago
The problem is these tools are so important I'm never going to risk Anthropic blocking my account now after the last debacle. So I'll be used OpenAI with OpenClaw. Hard to win back trust.
_pdp_ 6mo ago
Good luck on that opus plan.
bilalbayram 6mo ago
Anthropic is trying so hard to be Apple they are doing all the mistakes Apple made during its first day
vibly 6mo ago
Hmm. Is this real?? If so, it's actually amazing news lol
spectaclepiece 6mo ago
What models have you guys tried to use with OpenClaw that you've found suitable for the task? Codex personally rules for my dev style but not sure how well it works in the claw scenario.
jbrooks84 6mo ago
Lol, no thanks
openclawclub 6mo ago
[flagged]
- montenegrohugo 6mo ago
  ai garbage
giancarlostoro 6mo ago
Uh, what? For the love of God can I make my own harness or not? Or is this just saying you can use it only in API mode? I have had some ideas for a custom harness (like embedding some tools OOTB and replacing slow tooling) but these policies throw me off. Instead I use local models. Problem is API costs are insane. I have toyed with the idea of running a local model that works with Claude Sonnet or even Haiku, and I know this has been done by others.
rcarmo 6mo ago
PSA: Since you are still required to use Claude Code and I have had a bunch of non-technical people asking me to make https://github.com/rcarmo/piclaw https://github.com/rcarmo/piclaw based on Claude rather than pi (which is never gonna happen), I have started pivoting its Python grand-daddy into a Go-based web front-end that runs Claude as an ACP agent. Still early days, but code is available, sort of works if you squint, and welcomes PRs: https://github.com/rcarmo/vibes/tree/go https://github.com/rcarmo/vibes/tree/go
yogigan 6mo ago
Feels like the real issue isn’t policy but pricing models
throwaway613746 6mo ago
[dead]
kordlessagain 6mo ago
This title is ridiculous and needs to be fixed.
joshstrange 6mo ago
Well that's clear as mud. I've complained, extensively, about this before but Anthropic really needs to make it clear what is and is not supported with or without a subscription. Until then, it's hard to know where you stand with using their products. I say all of this as someone who doesn't use OpenClaw or any Claw-like product currently. I just want to know what I can and can't do and currently it's impossible to know.
- LatencyKills 6mo ago
  The poor communication and flip-flopping are what concern me. How can I buy into an ecosystem that might disallow one of my main workflows? I currently use several hook scripts to route specific work to different models. Will they disallow that at some point? We don't know because they can't get their story straight.
  - dnautics 6mo ago
    Keep in mind this is hearsay, since we are reading something through a non-official channel, it's maybe not right to call it "flip-flopping"?
    - LatencyKills 6mo ago
      Given the lack of clear communication and the fact that their primary competitor openly supports the use of bespoke harnesses, I highly doubt this is an incorrect announcement. Anthropic is destroying goodwill that is hard-won in this space. At the end of the day, people just need to do their work in a way that makes sense for them. In my case (someone who has been building ML/AI tools for 25 years @ MS & Apple), I have much better results using my bespoke harness. If I'm paying $200/month for compute, I should be able to use it in a way that works for me. Given the push back, I'm not alone.
      - dnautics 6mo ago
        Nobody said anything about the correctness of the announcement.
languagehacker 6mo ago
My OpenClaw assistant (who's been using Claude) lost all his personality over the last week, and couldn't figure out how to do things he never had any issues doing. I racked up about $28 worth of usage and then it just stopped consuming anymore, so I don't know if there was some other issue, but it was persistent. I got sick of it and used a migration script to move my assistant's history and personality to a claude code config. With the new remote exec stuff, I've got the old functionality back without needing to worry about how bleeding-edge and prone to failure OpenClaw is. I feel like this is what their plan was all along -- put enough strain and friction on the hobbyist space that people are incentivized to move over to their proprietary solution. It's probably a safer choice anyway -- though I'm sure both are equally vibe-coded.
- scottyah 6mo ago
  Well when the middleman between you and your users is bought out by the competitor, it makes sense to move away from it. It's a bit like Apple selling iPhones in a Microsoft store.
- Skidaddle 6mo ago
  What does your Claude Code implementation of OpenClaw look like?
  - andai 6mo ago
    Not who you asked but I slapped this together in 100 lines of code and you may find it useful. It's just `claude -p proompt` (or indeed, `codex exec prooompt` inside a Telegram bot. (Was annoyed by NanoClaw's claim that it was 500 lines, so tried my own hand at it ;) No memory, no cron/heartbeat, context mgmt is just "new chat", but enough to get you started. Note: no sandboxing etc, I run this as unprivileged linux user. So it can blow up its homedir, but not mine. Ideally, I'd run it on a separate machine. (My hottest take here is "give it root on a $3 VPS, reset if it blows up" ;) https://github.com/a-n-d-a-i/ULTRON https://github.com/a-n-d-a-i/ULTRON You may also enjoy CLIProxyAPI, which does the same thing (claude -p / codex exec) but shoves a OpenAI compatible API around it. Note: this probably violates every AI company's ToS (since it turns the precious subsidized subscription tokens into a generic API). OpenAI seems to tolerate such violations, for now, because they care about good. Anthropic and Google do not. (Though Anthropic may auto-detect and bill it as extra usage; see elsewhere in this thread. Situation is very confusing right now.) https://github.com/router-for-me/CLIProxyAPI https://github.com/router-for-me/CLIProxyAPI
sergiopreira 6mo ago
Anthropic keeps conflating two distinct strategies — be the best model for developers to build on, or be the company that ships Claude Code. Those two have opposite policy conclusions. Restricting third-party harnesses maximizes Claude Code revenue; allowing them maximizes model-layer lock-in through developer habit. The whiplash is the symptom of not picking. Pick for crying out loud!
OG_BME 6mo ago
This is only useful when you are using Claude Cli fairly regularly on the same machine as OpenClaw, right? Because the tokens need to be refreshed manually every so often?
11pyo 6mo ago
[dead]
Rover222 6mo ago
Probably somewhat worried about users shifting to the Grok API if they have to
fudged71 6mo ago
Is there a way to use Anthropic subscription with hermes-agent?
linsys 6mo ago
I'm surprised by this actually but OpenClaw is trash anyway.
headcanon 6mo ago
I've been trying to toe the line here myself, here's how I've been doing it. For context, I pay for a Max 5x subscription. My main goal is to maximize my subscription token usage while trying to comply with the rules, but its not clear where the line is for automation so I feel like I need to be clever. - regular development (most token use): all interactive claude mode, standard use case - automated background development: experimenting with claude routines (first-class feature, on subscription) - personal non-nanoclaw claude automations (claude -p): uses subscription token, but only called as needed (generally just fix something if something in my homelab infra goes does down, its set up to not fire on an exact cron time) - other LLM based automations: usually openrouter API key, cheap models as needed - nanoclaw: all API key based, but since its expensive I keep usage mostly minimal and try to defer anything heavyweight to one of the other automation strategies (nanoclaw mainly just connects my homelab infra with telegram)
segmondy 6mo ago
They see that the new KimiK2.6 will eat their lunch. They don't care about you, they just care about your money and will take away your options if they don't believe you have a solid alternative.
subscribed 6mo ago
That's a very misleading title. Question to the sages: should that submission get flagged because of that?
nullbyte 6mo ago
Does that include OpenCode? That's what I care about most and it's the primary reason I've been sticking with OAI the past few months.
josephd79 6mo ago
so if i use openclaw style cli that looks like opencode ai or other agentic style applications then that would be acceptable?
nexustoken 6mo ago
[dead]
2001zhaozhao 6mo ago
I think they're now charging it as extra usage if you use a custom prompt. In the Claude site they added the option to buy extra usage at 30% off if you buy $1,000 or more at a time, so it's still somewhat cheaper to use OpenClaw with a claude account compared to an API key. (Incidentally the 30% off might mean that choosing a Pro plan + extra usage versus Max plan might make sense for more people)
- NewsaHackO 6mo ago
  Yes, if it is "extra usage," then that just seems like an API with extra steps.
  - andai 6mo ago
    Yeah I read it as a smart move. Good for PR, and it captures a bunch of value that was being lost. From what I understood, millions of users are making unauthorized usage of the subscription APIs. So they can just capture some of that money, some of them will stay and pay the extra usage. (Many of them aren't knowledgeable about API keys etc, they just used the auto setup in OpenClaw.) The actual rules now are pretty confusing though. De jure illegal, de facto tolerated -- they'll just auto-detect and bill you for it. The claude -p situation, though, confuses me. This one's technically legal but against the spirit of the law. (I think made illegal a few weeks ago since it was being used as a workaround for the OpenClaw ban, and seems to have been re-legalized now?) But they can only extra-bill you for it if they can somehow detect it as invoked by OpenClaw, etc., right? If it's your own harness, it slips thru the cracks? ._.
johnsmith1840 6mo ago
Sounds like they are scaring off any startup trying to build a product like this before anthropic can ship their own.
skapadia 6mo ago
Basically, as long as you are using an Anthropic library or tool, you can use your OAuth credentials. For example, you can use the Claude Agent SDK with your OAuth credentials. This is sweet because I can prototype all sorts of agents with Claude Code embedded inside, at a predictable monthly cost. One nice use case is turning skills into standalone tools or apps. You can also do convoluted things like run Claude Code within tmux and send input to it and read the output. MCP Channels are interesting too for bidirectional communication between your app and a running Claude Code instance, with an MCP server sitting in between. It's slow, but allows for some interesting use cases when you want to step out of an existing CLI session to do work that is easier in a graphical interface, have Claude Code respond and do work, then when you're done, go back to the CLI session and continue, never losing context.
- tber123 5mo ago
  [dead]
- Cidan 5mo ago
  You don't really need to tmux at all for Claude Code CLI. Claude Code CLI supports streaming json input, and streaming json output; you can use stdin/out as a pipe to control Claude Code CLI. I'm doing this today in https://github.com/Cidan/ask https://github.com/Cidan/ask -- works great.
  - tber123 5mo ago
    [dead]
  - skapadia 5mo ago
    This is awesome. Thank you for pointing out streaming JSON input and output, I'll definitely be taking a look at that.
- camkego 5mo ago
  The way I read the Anthropic docs, it seems the term plan is to block the usage of OAuth credentials with the "Claude Agent SDK". This URL: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/agent-sdk/overview https://code.claude.com/docs/en/agent-sdk/overview Says this: "Unless previously approved, Anthropic does not allow third party developers to offer claude.ai login or rate limits for their products, including agents built on the Claude Agent SDK. Please use the API key authentication methods described in this document instead." Again, it seems Anthropic prefers to bill API token rates (long run), not subscriber effective token rates.
steipete 5mo ago
Peter here from OpenClaw. For context, here’s why our post reads the way it does: Boris from Claude Code said publicly on Twitter that CLI-style usage is allowed. We took that seriously and invested time building around that guidance. I even changed the defaults, so when using the cli we're automatially disabling features that use excessive tokens like the heartbeat feature. But in practice, Anthropic still blocks parts of our system prompt, so the actual behavior today does not match what was communicated publicly. https://x.com/bcherny/status/2041035127430754686 https://x.com/bcherny/status/2041035127430754686 They since seemed to changed their classifier as people hack around it, as it is trivial to do so with a few renames. I'm not playing that game so it's in a weird limbo where it should work in theory but doesn't in practice.
- tngranados 5mo ago
  Looks like they are trying to correct course now, but they’ve already lost the trust, and with the new lower limits, it’s probably not worth using it in OpenClaw
- extr 5mo ago
  I mean surely you can understand the the difficulty of their position, right? It's as if Waymo offered a subsidized, subscription based plan that models a certain type of ridership as typical but then people start scheduling rides on a timer with no one in it, far outside the original use case of "Get me from point A to point B". And of course the line between what is acceptable is quite fuzzy. You could imagine it being seen as okay to send a rider-less Waymo to pick up groceries occasionally - but not to schedule one every single day at 4:30PM to pick up a single ice cream cone. You can argue that this is unfair and they should provide clearer guidance. Well - as soon as they do people find ways to skirt the letter of the rules to once again take advantage of the economics of the subscription model. So should they just scrap the entire plan? Ruin it for people who are using it as it was intended (coding agent, light experimentation/headless use outside of that)? That doesn't seem right either.
  - tempaccount420 5mo ago
    I don't think anyone would want the type of user that OpenClaw users are as customers... There will be a time for OpenClaw, but in the current world with limited compute, that time is not now.
ryanshrott 5mo ago
The underlying issue here is that OAuth credential reuse is different from API key scraping, and Anthropic hasn't really made that distinction clear. CLI-style usage that respects rate limits and uses official libraries is, architecturally, the same thing Max subscribers do in the web app, same auth, same endpoints. The problem isn't the use case. It's that companies get nervous about anything that looks like it could scale past what they priced in. It'd be a lot cleaner if they just published explicit rate limits for each subscription tier instead of these vague policy statements.
- ghm2180 5mo ago
  yeah rate limits are the way to go. I don't see how this is not really simple: A human can only type or tts the text in and read responses only so fast, anthropic can use this as a baseline. They can create a client that can back off(rate limit) and wait, like for something like when a user says something like "spawn 10 processes with claude -p to do X" this client can calculate the rate limit and place an event in a queue and developers can use this client's rate-limit and build workflows around it: e.g. a client queue that has a timer event that expires the rate limit that was set can wake up a daemon. There are a million ways to implement the queue <> daemon thingy, its just software at that point. Since the subscription is hard linked to an OAuth token this should be easy to track too. What am i missing?
Frannky 5mo ago
Claude Code with Opus and the Max plan is fine for me, even though I'm not super happy about moments when it's not available, the costs, account banning, etc. Anyway, what I am looking for and am curious about is if there is a solution that I am overlooking that will work the same, or almost the same or better, but at a cheaper price. I read about people being happy about pi.dev and OpenCode. I tried OpenCode with Mimo V2 pro and it is pretty good. I previously used Qwen CLI before they stopped the free usage, and Gemini CLI. I also used Z.ai with OpenCode. I read about people using Opus for planning and then for non-important stuff moving the agent to use a further cheaper model. I am not into usage-based pricing unless it will be cheaper nonetheless (I doubt it though). Do you have some cool setups to share? I usually do Python for backend and TypeScript frontend. Host on Hetzner, use mostly Docker but also k3s if required.
maxbeech 5mo ago
[dead]
F7F7F7 5mo ago
Just as they pull the rug on $20 users. This is the most transparently nontransparent company in tech existence. They always reveal their cards in the most clumsy ways possible. Their enterprise API numbers must be godlike for the way they are treating B2C customers.
KaiShips 5mo ago
[dead]
notShabu 5mo ago
While I get that unclear communication is frustrating especially if there are sunk costs, the core issue seems to be that they can't afford to subsidize all these tokens for free. The agent model breaks the power-user/casual-user proportion that makes the existing saas-like pricing work.
arjunthazhath 5mo ago
Anthropic guys are playing with branding and now the very service
digdatechAGI 5mo ago
[dead]
francofx3 5mo ago
Google AI Pro just banned me for using it on pi.dev. "Failed to sign in. Message: This service has been disabled in this account for violation of Terms of Service. Please submit an appeal to continue using this product."

511 points by jmsflknr 6mo ago

imron 6mo ago

Can we get OpenCode support back as well?

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

throwup238 6mo ago

I don’t think I’ve seen a more confused and shambolic product strategy since Google’s absurd line of GChat rebrandings. Last year I was excited about the constant forward progress on models but since February or so its just been a mess and I want off this ride. Either way I’m going to wait for “official” word from Anthropic, which I guess at this point will probably be a “Tell HN” or Reddit text post or a Xitter from some random employee’s personal account, because apparently that’s the state of corporate communication now.

benjx88 6mo ago
[flagged]

jollymonATX 6mo ago

How can they be this bad at this? What was all that about then?

swyx 6mo ago

a more authoritative source (aka a tweet) woudl be nice.

dmazin 6mo ago

I got sick of the inconsistency caused by Anthropic tinkering with Claude Code and had canceled my 20x. My plan was to switch to Codex so I could use it in Pi. I am specifically talking about switching because of the harness, not model quality. Anyone else match my experience? I wonder how many other people recently did the same. It would be prudent of Anthropic to let people use Pro/Max OAuth tokens with other harnesses I think. Even though I get why they want to own the eyeballs.

tommica 6mo ago
I left anthropic a while ago because of the similar shenanigans they had earlier. I went with opencode & zen. I still have their subscription, but am using pi now, mainly because something happened that made my opencode sessions unusable (cannot continue them, just blanks out, I assume something in the sqlite is fucked), and I cannot be bothered to debug it. For what I use the agents, the Chinese models are enough
- hboon 6mo ago
  Doesn't using pi be against their terms of use about having to go through Claude Code cli for all Max plan usage? (I had use Droid with Max previously, it was a great combo).
  - tommica 6mo ago
    Probably - it was that kind of confusion that resulted in me switching providers. Plus I like being able to switch a model.
  - the_mitsuhiko 6mo ago
    It's unclear right now. The current stance is that using pi or other coding harnesses eats into extra usage and that is the behavior one sees today. We have added a hint to pi now that warns you when you use an anthropic sub.
    - hboon 6mo ago
      Thanks for the great work.
redrove 6mo ago
I’ve been using Codex Pro since they lobotomized Opus 4.6. Codex is so much better, GPT 5.4 xhigh fast is definitely the smartest and fastest model available. For a while there I had both Opus 4.6 and Codex access and I frequently pitted them against each other, I never once saw Opus come out ahead. Opus was good as a reviewer though, but as an implementer it just felt lazy compared to 5.4 xhigh. One feature that I haven’t seen discussed that much is how codex has auto-review on tool runs. No longer are you a slave to all or nothing confirmations or endless bugging, it’s such a bad pattern. Even in a week of heavy duty work and personal use I still haven’t been able to exhaust the usage on the $200 plan. I’ll probably change my mind when (not IF) OpenAI rug pull, but for spring ‘26, codex is definitely the better deal.

brandensilva 6mo ago

The sentient had already sailed. It's hard to trust Anthropic here given the ringer they have dragged us through. Contrast that to what GitHub did which was to pause new customers to ensure quality remained and things were stable.

darylteo 6mo ago

Correction: OpenClaw says Anthropic says OpenClaw-style Claude CLI usage is okay again.

eterm 6mo ago
And then recommends to use an API key, which as far as I know was never restricted, it was trying to use the subscription that was prohibited/limited. I'm confused by the comments being full of people swearing off Claude, feels like real HN bubble stuff.
dang 6mo ago
(That's implied by the sitename to the right of the title)
- darylteo 6mo ago
  /gestures at all the comments
- cap11235 6mo ago
  Not at all.

arjie 6mo ago

Oh that's interesting. Right after they signed the deal with Amazon so maybe it was all compute constrained. In any case, I tried using the Codex $20/mo plan and the limits are so low I can hardly get anywhere before my agent swaps to a different agent. Somewhat suspicious that if I do this without an official Anthropic notice I'll lose my precious Max $200/mo account so I'll sit tight perhaps for a while.

jauntywundrkind 6mo ago
GPT-5.4 brutally consumptive for sure. It's not very verbal, but gpt-5.3 codex is wildly smart about coding & planning, and way way less token hungry.
rustyhancock 6mo ago
Consider Z.ai if you need "bulk" usage, GLM is now very good. They still have the occasional API brown out however. I used to use GLM mostly and had a Claude Pro subscription for occasional review and clean up. Now I just use GLM. I do think Claude Max is value for money. But it's more value than I personally need and I like Anthropic less and less.
- zurfer 6mo ago
  Naive question but are you not afraid z.ai will train on your personal data?
  - azuanrb 6mo ago
    FAANG already did this all the time isn't it? Regardless of their policy. US is no better than China from my point of view. In this case, I see no difference between sending my prompts to US or China companies. At least China models are open source.
    - nullbyte 6mo ago
      I guess it depends if you are working on something important to national security. Especially corporate codebases, etc.

jarym 6mo ago

Pfft. Damage done, users know that Anthrophic will pull the rug from under them again if given half a chance. So yea, plan accordingly.

azmz 6mo ago
[flagged]

1una 6mo ago

Looks like this was restored 2 weeks ago[0], 3 days after Anthropic said OpenClaw requires extra usage[1]. At this point, it's hard to take this seriously. No official statement and not even a tweet? [0]: https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw/commit/d378a504ac17eab2425a114fed32a217b5702395 https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw/commit/d378a504ac17eab2... [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47633396 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47633396

stingraycharles 6mo ago
No, it's just that it's confusing, because there are two ways of using Claude Code credentials: 1. Take the oauth credentials and roll your own agent -- this is NOT allowed 2. Run your agentic application directly in Claude Code -- this IS allowed When OpenClaw says "Open-Claw style CLI usage", it means literally running OpenClaw in an official Claude Code session. Anthropic has no problems with this, this is compliant with their ToS. When you use Claude Code's oauth credentials outside of the claude code cli Anthropic will charge you extra usage (API pricing) within your existing subscription.
- filleokus 6mo ago
  But... Even when running it in mode 2 ("claude -p") they at certain points tried to detect OpenClaw-usage based prompts made, and blocked them [0]. Now OpenClaw says that Antrophic sanctions this as allowable again. I agree with GP that this is hard to take seriously. [0]: https://x.com/steipete/status/2040811558427648357 https://x.com/steipete/status/2040811558427648357
  - stingraycharles 6mo ago
    I have never heard of this, and cannot be reproduced, and is not according to Anthropic's ToS. And there's a lot of FUD being spread around. They don't ban Openclaw prompts, each custom LLM application provides a client application id (this is how e.g. Openrouter can tell you how popular Openclaw is, and which models are used the most). Anthropic just checks for that.

tristanb 6mo ago

Maybe it’s allowed because they built the ability to direct the costs to your extra usage budget, not your monthly subscription?

Alifatisk 6mo ago

> Anthropic staff told us OpenClaw-style Claude CLI usage is allowed again Anthropic staff have had contradictive statements in Twitter and have corrected each other. Their intent for clarifications lead to confusion. > OpenClaw treats Claude CLI reuse and claude -p usage as sanctioned for this integration unless Anthropic publishes a new policy. Oh cool, so everything is back to business now, until they all or sudden update their policy tomorrow that retracts everything. Anthropic have proved themselves to be be unreliable when it comes to CC. Switching to other providers is the best way to go, if you want to keep your insanity.

operatingthetan 6mo ago
This is such a strange way for this to be announced. Why is openclaw telling us this? I wouldn't even trust it until Anthropic says so themselves.
- bandrami 6mo ago
  It's the PayPal model of customer service: they'll ban you at any time for any reason or none at all, but if you're very nice they might be willing to have a human look at that decision at some point, but probably not.
  - LtWorf 6mo ago
    Oh yeah that happened to my paypal the one time I had a user donate to me! At least the only action I was still able to perform was to refund the user, or paypal would have just kept the money.
  - SV_BubbleTime 6mo ago
    Straight up PayPal and Venmo can go to hell. They banned my account, I painted a gun for a guy with a cerakote bale-on setup. He paid with PayPal and they banned me. His gun, just a legal service to paint it. I pulled our company portal away from PayPal when they refused to restore my account. Five years later, I tried to re-activate and the human I finally got to effectively told me to fuck off; so I will spend the rest of my life bashing that trash company at every chance.

dhoe 6mo ago

I didn't even use openclaw and Anthropic disabled my account without explanation beyond "suspicious signals". If anyone found a way to get out of that, I'd be curious to hear it - genuinely no idea what I did wrong, and the Google docs form I filled out to appeal never got me any reply.

mondojesus 6mo ago
Same thing happened to me in January. Never heard back from them after submitting the google form. A few weeks ago I went through the subscription flow again and the 'account disabled' message was no longer there. Didn't go through with the payment so it's possible I would have been blocked at that point but it looked like my account had been re-enabled. I think you just have to play the waiting game unfortunately.
- nitroedge 5mo ago
  why not re-apply with just a new email account instead of using the old email they banned?

gregman1 6mo ago

Canceled anyway.

solomonb 6mo ago

Does this mean you can use openclaw with a Claude Pro account? I'm curious try it but no way i'm going to pay API rates.

darrenc81 6mo ago

Great so now we can all look forward to Claude progressively getting reduced limits again. How long till the $1000 ultra plan... or they just want us all paying API credits instead

deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]

victorbjorklund 6mo ago

Anthropic is really trying to burn all that goodwill they worked up by raising prices, reducing limits and making it impossible to know what the actual policies are.

notarobot123 6mo ago
Boiling the frog is an art form. You've got to know when to turn up the heat and when to let it simmer.
- sitkack 6mo ago
  Hormussy started it.
- Gigachad 6mo ago
  Don’t know, I feel like I’ve watched every tech company get through every controversy without consequence. Google when they merged YouTube and Google+, Reddit multiple times, Facebook after countless scandals. Microsoft destroying windows and pushing ads. At the end of the day a solid product and company can withstand online controversy.
  - nativeit 6mo ago
    At the end of the day, unenforced anti-competition regulations can bulldoze controversies.
  - conductr 6mo ago
    > a solid product and company can withstand online controversy A product with a massive moat. Switching from Claude to another competitor is insanely easy and without much loss of quality. Until they’ve built their moat, burning goodwill is foolish. What’s different is it’s probably required due to the cash that’s being burnt to operate. They can’t afford to keep offering so much for so little revenue.
baq 6mo ago
Would you please think of the shareholders

saltyoldman 6mo ago

I guess it doesn't matter any more, everyone bought all the mac minis

eknkc 6mo ago

I’ve been using codex cli and GPT 5.4. It is better at coding than Opus anyway. I did not really test Opus 4.7 but older versions generated worse results compared to GPT. Which I would not even try and test though if Anthropic did not ban my account. The shadiest thing I did was to use it with opencode for a while I think. Never installed claw or used CC tokens somewhere else. This is a weird company doing weird shit.

EFLKumo 6mo ago

Whether to allow Claude subscription to access other services or not, at this point, anthropic seems to be schizophrenic, sometimes worried about insufficient computing power and sometimes worried about user loss, which is puzzling.

ralusek 6mo ago
What's puzzling or schizophrenic about that? Those seem like two very natural factors that would be in tension with one another and have to be balanced.
- EFLKumo 6mo ago
  [dead]
baobabKoodaa 6mo ago
Almost seems like business leaders have to balance different aspirations and make tradeoffs. Unbelieveable.
- shepherdjerred 6mo ago
  Could they at least have a page somewhere letting us know what we’re allowed to do today?

walthamstow 6mo ago

OpenClaw says Anthropic says it's OK. Well, that's crystal clear then.

mentalgear 6mo ago

Bad Decision.

djyde 6mo ago

题外话，你们不觉得在 openclaw 里用 claude 相当浪费 token 吗？

mlitwiniuk 6mo ago

This is a perfect example of how quickly you can burn through trust that took a long time to earn. I used to be - in my small circle of friends and peers - a genuine advocate for Anthropic and Claude. It was my sole AI assistant for over a year. But somewhere around February/March, something shifted. Declining quality, policy changes, inconsistent output. Nothing dramatic, just... a slow erosion. That erosion pushed me to try Codex. I signed up for their most expensive pro plan. Now I'm about to experiment with Kimi. I'm not saying they're better (well, sometimes they are). But here's the thing - what Anthropic did is they made me look. They made a loyal customer start shopping around. And I think that's the worst thing you can do. Having said that - as an LLM provider for my product, we're staying with Claude. I still trust in their ethics. Please don't prove me wrong.

layoric 6mo ago
I'm trying out codex for first time as well cause something up with Claude for sure, 4.7 has been super frustrating. For other models, highly recommend trying MiniMax 2.7, using it with Hermes is actually pretty good, and their token subscription plans include a lot of usage for $10.
- mlitwiniuk 6mo ago
  Perfect, thanks. Codex app sucks, but I've been exploring opencode for that. Will try MiniMax!
baq 6mo ago
Enshittification 101, codex is undergoing the same thing on a 3 month lag.
- mlitwiniuk 6mo ago
  Haha, thanks for the heads-up
kilroy123 6mo ago
Same here. I've been on the Claude Max 20x plan for a while. Now I'm really giving codex a try and looking at the cheaper models as well.

imhoguy 6mo ago

Would that apply to OpenCode too?

Havoc 6mo ago

Same PR strategy as the US administration lol

waynevdm 6mo ago

Did they disable this to give them time to come out with their own agent?

GodelNumbering 6mo ago

How about third party coding harnesses?

aqme28 6mo ago
Or Claw-like harnesses that we make ourselves? It takes honestly like 15 minutes to roll your own, so I did it thinking "well, hopefully it's not considered third party"
- sitkack 6mo ago
  I do claw like things all the time. Give CC an API document and it figures out how to take a snapshot of the data. Pulls it down and does an analysis.

est 6mo ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=openclaw.ai https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=openclaw.ai hot damn

finger 5mo ago
Wow. I’m curious as to why so much spam.

Frannky 6mo ago

Why? Did they figure out cheaper compute? Or did they lose a lot of users, and now the compute is there unused?

jorisboris 6mo ago

Swapped my OpenClaw to Claude again. I played around with Gemini and Chinese models in past month but it didn’t work for me.

jedisct1 6mo ago

And tomorrow, it won't be allowed any more and accounts will be closed without prior notice. Use something else.

croes 6mo ago

Correct title: OpenClaw says Anthropic said OpenClaw-style Claude CLI usage is allowed again

doginasuit 6mo ago

I'm out of the loop on Claude, hasn't it always been possible to use the Anthropic API with a tool like OpenClaw, paying per request? Is this limitation just for using your monthly subscription account?

handfuloflight 6mo ago
Yes, exactly.
LatencyKills 6mo ago
Many people likely objected to the original restriction because it seemed as though Anthropic was trying to impede the development of competing tools. If I'm paying for compute, why should it matter whether I use Anthropic's harness (e.g., Claude Code) or a 3rd-party harness?
- sumedh 6mo ago
  Isn't their argument that third party harness dont play nice with their GPUs which is a fair argument. With Claude Code they can predict what the traffic would look like with third party harness they cannot.
  - LatencyKills 6mo ago
    If that was the argument, why did they reverse it? Anthropic is constantly destroying goodwill and now seems to be in panic mode.
- doginasuit 6mo ago
  I find it a little bizarre that people have this expectation. You can still pay for compute and use it the way you want by paying for the product you actually want to use. Subscription products like this are not marketed or intended to be used as access to the API, but they also offer access to the API if that's what you want. I'm still not entirely clear why people insist on using their subscription like this, so let me know if I'm missing something.

RoxiHaidi 6mo ago

Same, I am from the 3x plan and canceled and switched to Codex 2 days ago...

amazingamazing 6mo ago

Guess they saw the growth of their growth shrink dramatically lol

garganzol 6mo ago
More people flocked to Codex and found out that it's not worse, and sometimes superior.

basisword 6mo ago

The problem is these tools are so important I'm never going to risk Anthropic blocking my account now after the last debacle. So I'll be used OpenAI with OpenClaw. Hard to win back trust.

_pdp_ 6mo ago

Good luck on that opus plan.

bilalbayram 6mo ago

Anthropic is trying so hard to be Apple they are doing all the mistakes Apple made during its first day

vibly 6mo ago

Hmm. Is this real?? If so, it's actually amazing news lol

spectaclepiece 6mo ago

What models have you guys tried to use with OpenClaw that you've found suitable for the task? Codex personally rules for my dev style but not sure how well it works in the claw scenario.

jbrooks84 6mo ago

Lol, no thanks

openclawclub 6mo ago

[flagged]

montenegrohugo 6mo ago
ai garbage

giancarlostoro 6mo ago

Uh, what? For the love of God can I make my own harness or not? Or is this just saying you can use it only in API mode? I have had some ideas for a custom harness (like embedding some tools OOTB and replacing slow tooling) but these policies throw me off. Instead I use local models. Problem is API costs are insane. I have toyed with the idea of running a local model that works with Claude Sonnet or even Haiku, and I know this has been done by others.

rcarmo 6mo ago

PSA: Since you are still required to use Claude Code and I have had a bunch of non-technical people asking me to make https://github.com/rcarmo/piclaw https://github.com/rcarmo/piclaw based on Claude rather than pi (which is never gonna happen), I have started pivoting its Python grand-daddy into a Go-based web front-end that runs Claude as an ACP agent. Still early days, but code is available, sort of works if you squint, and welcomes PRs: https://github.com/rcarmo/vibes/tree/go https://github.com/rcarmo/vibes/tree/go

yogigan 6mo ago

Feels like the real issue isn’t policy but pricing models

throwaway613746 6mo ago

[dead]

kordlessagain 6mo ago

This title is ridiculous and needs to be fixed.

joshstrange 6mo ago

Well that's clear as mud. I've complained, extensively, about this before but Anthropic really needs to make it clear what is and is not supported with or without a subscription. Until then, it's hard to know where you stand with using their products. I say all of this as someone who doesn't use OpenClaw or any Claw-like product currently. I just want to know what I can and can't do and currently it's impossible to know.

LatencyKills 6mo ago
The poor communication and flip-flopping are what concern me. How can I buy into an ecosystem that might disallow one of my main workflows? I currently use several hook scripts to route specific work to different models. Will they disallow that at some point? We don't know because they can't get their story straight.
- dnautics 6mo ago
  Keep in mind this is hearsay, since we are reading something through a non-official channel, it's maybe not right to call it "flip-flopping"?
  - LatencyKills 6mo ago
    Given the lack of clear communication and the fact that their primary competitor openly supports the use of bespoke harnesses, I highly doubt this is an incorrect announcement. Anthropic is destroying goodwill that is hard-won in this space. At the end of the day, people just need to do their work in a way that makes sense for them. In my case (someone who has been building ML/AI tools for 25 years @ MS & Apple), I have much better results using my bespoke harness. If I'm paying $200/month for compute, I should be able to use it in a way that works for me. Given the push back, I'm not alone.
    - dnautics 6mo ago
      Nobody said anything about the correctness of the announcement.

languagehacker 6mo ago

My OpenClaw assistant (who's been using Claude) lost all his personality over the last week, and couldn't figure out how to do things he never had any issues doing. I racked up about $28 worth of usage and then it just stopped consuming anymore, so I don't know if there was some other issue, but it was persistent. I got sick of it and used a migration script to move my assistant's history and personality to a claude code config. With the new remote exec stuff, I've got the old functionality back without needing to worry about how bleeding-edge and prone to failure OpenClaw is. I feel like this is what their plan was all along -- put enough strain and friction on the hobbyist space that people are incentivized to move over to their proprietary solution. It's probably a safer choice anyway -- though I'm sure both are equally vibe-coded.

scottyah 6mo ago
Well when the middleman between you and your users is bought out by the competitor, it makes sense to move away from it. It's a bit like Apple selling iPhones in a Microsoft store.
Skidaddle 6mo ago
What does your Claude Code implementation of OpenClaw look like?
- andai 6mo ago
  Not who you asked but I slapped this together in 100 lines of code and you may find it useful. It's just `claude -p proompt` (or indeed, `codex exec prooompt` inside a Telegram bot. (Was annoyed by NanoClaw's claim that it was 500 lines, so tried my own hand at it ;) No memory, no cron/heartbeat, context mgmt is just "new chat", but enough to get you started. Note: no sandboxing etc, I run this as unprivileged linux user. So it can blow up its homedir, but not mine. Ideally, I'd run it on a separate machine. (My hottest take here is "give it root on a $3 VPS, reset if it blows up" ;) https://github.com/a-n-d-a-i/ULTRON https://github.com/a-n-d-a-i/ULTRON You may also enjoy CLIProxyAPI, which does the same thing (claude -p / codex exec) but shoves a OpenAI compatible API around it. Note: this probably violates every AI company's ToS (since it turns the precious subsidized subscription tokens into a generic API). OpenAI seems to tolerate such violations, for now, because they care about good. Anthropic and Google do not. (Though Anthropic may auto-detect and bill it as extra usage; see elsewhere in this thread. Situation is very confusing right now.) https://github.com/router-for-me/CLIProxyAPI https://github.com/router-for-me/CLIProxyAPI

sergiopreira 6mo ago

Anthropic keeps conflating two distinct strategies — be the best model for developers to build on, or be the company that ships Claude Code. Those two have opposite policy conclusions. Restricting third-party harnesses maximizes Claude Code revenue; allowing them maximizes model-layer lock-in through developer habit. The whiplash is the symptom of not picking. Pick for crying out loud!

OG_BME 6mo ago

This is only useful when you are using Claude Cli fairly regularly on the same machine as OpenClaw, right? Because the tokens need to be refreshed manually every so often?

11pyo 6mo ago

[dead]

Rover222 6mo ago

Probably somewhat worried about users shifting to the Grok API if they have to

fudged71 6mo ago

Is there a way to use Anthropic subscription with hermes-agent?

linsys 6mo ago

I'm surprised by this actually but OpenClaw is trash anyway.

headcanon 6mo ago

I've been trying to toe the line here myself, here's how I've been doing it. For context, I pay for a Max 5x subscription. My main goal is to maximize my subscription token usage while trying to comply with the rules, but its not clear where the line is for automation so I feel like I need to be clever. - regular development (most token use): all interactive claude mode, standard use case - automated background development: experimenting with claude routines (first-class feature, on subscription) - personal non-nanoclaw claude automations (claude -p): uses subscription token, but only called as needed (generally just fix something if something in my homelab infra goes does down, its set up to not fire on an exact cron time) - other LLM based automations: usually openrouter API key, cheap models as needed - nanoclaw: all API key based, but since its expensive I keep usage mostly minimal and try to defer anything heavyweight to one of the other automation strategies (nanoclaw mainly just connects my homelab infra with telegram)

segmondy 6mo ago

They see that the new KimiK2.6 will eat their lunch. They don't care about you, they just care about your money and will take away your options if they don't believe you have a solid alternative.

subscribed 6mo ago

That's a very misleading title. Question to the sages: should that submission get flagged because of that?

nullbyte 6mo ago

Does that include OpenCode? That's what I care about most and it's the primary reason I've been sticking with OAI the past few months.

josephd79 6mo ago

so if i use openclaw style cli that looks like opencode ai or other agentic style applications then that would be acceptable?

nexustoken 6mo ago

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2001zhaozhao 6mo ago

I think they're now charging it as extra usage if you use a custom prompt. In the Claude site they added the option to buy extra usage at 30% off if you buy $1,000 or more at a time, so it's still somewhat cheaper to use OpenClaw with a claude account compared to an API key. (Incidentally the 30% off might mean that choosing a Pro plan + extra usage versus Max plan might make sense for more people)

NewsaHackO 6mo ago
Yes, if it is "extra usage," then that just seems like an API with extra steps.
- andai 6mo ago
  Yeah I read it as a smart move. Good for PR, and it captures a bunch of value that was being lost. From what I understood, millions of users are making unauthorized usage of the subscription APIs. So they can just capture some of that money, some of them will stay and pay the extra usage. (Many of them aren't knowledgeable about API keys etc, they just used the auto setup in OpenClaw.) The actual rules now are pretty confusing though. De jure illegal, de facto tolerated -- they'll just auto-detect and bill you for it. The claude -p situation, though, confuses me. This one's technically legal but against the spirit of the law. (I think made illegal a few weeks ago since it was being used as a workaround for the OpenClaw ban, and seems to have been re-legalized now?) But they can only extra-bill you for it if they can somehow detect it as invoked by OpenClaw, etc., right? If it's your own harness, it slips thru the cracks? ._.

johnsmith1840 6mo ago

Sounds like they are scaring off any startup trying to build a product like this before anthropic can ship their own.

skapadia 6mo ago

Basically, as long as you are using an Anthropic library or tool, you can use your OAuth credentials. For example, you can use the Claude Agent SDK with your OAuth credentials. This is sweet because I can prototype all sorts of agents with Claude Code embedded inside, at a predictable monthly cost. One nice use case is turning skills into standalone tools or apps. You can also do convoluted things like run Claude Code within tmux and send input to it and read the output. MCP Channels are interesting too for bidirectional communication between your app and a running Claude Code instance, with an MCP server sitting in between. It's slow, but allows for some interesting use cases when you want to step out of an existing CLI session to do work that is easier in a graphical interface, have Claude Code respond and do work, then when you're done, go back to the CLI session and continue, never losing context.

tber123 5mo ago
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Cidan 5mo ago
You don't really need to tmux at all for Claude Code CLI. Claude Code CLI supports streaming json input, and streaming json output; you can use stdin/out as a pipe to control Claude Code CLI. I'm doing this today in https://github.com/Cidan/ask https://github.com/Cidan/ask -- works great.
- tber123 5mo ago
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- skapadia 5mo ago
  This is awesome. Thank you for pointing out streaming JSON input and output, I'll definitely be taking a look at that.
camkego 5mo ago
The way I read the Anthropic docs, it seems the term plan is to block the usage of OAuth credentials with the "Claude Agent SDK". This URL: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/agent-sdk/overview https://code.claude.com/docs/en/agent-sdk/overview Says this: "Unless previously approved, Anthropic does not allow third party developers to offer claude.ai login or rate limits for their products, including agents built on the Claude Agent SDK. Please use the API key authentication methods described in this document instead." Again, it seems Anthropic prefers to bill API token rates (long run), not subscriber effective token rates.

steipete 5mo ago

Peter here from OpenClaw. For context, here’s why our post reads the way it does: Boris from Claude Code said publicly on Twitter that CLI-style usage is allowed. We took that seriously and invested time building around that guidance. I even changed the defaults, so when using the cli we're automatially disabling features that use excessive tokens like the heartbeat feature. But in practice, Anthropic still blocks parts of our system prompt, so the actual behavior today does not match what was communicated publicly. https://x.com/bcherny/status/2041035127430754686 https://x.com/bcherny/status/2041035127430754686 They since seemed to changed their classifier as people hack around it, as it is trivial to do so with a few renames. I'm not playing that game so it's in a weird limbo where it should work in theory but doesn't in practice.

tngranados 5mo ago
Looks like they are trying to correct course now, but they’ve already lost the trust, and with the new lower limits, it’s probably not worth using it in OpenClaw
extr 5mo ago
I mean surely you can understand the the difficulty of their position, right? It's as if Waymo offered a subsidized, subscription based plan that models a certain type of ridership as typical but then people start scheduling rides on a timer with no one in it, far outside the original use case of "Get me from point A to point B". And of course the line between what is acceptable is quite fuzzy. You could imagine it being seen as okay to send a rider-less Waymo to pick up groceries occasionally - but not to schedule one every single day at 4:30PM to pick up a single ice cream cone. You can argue that this is unfair and they should provide clearer guidance. Well - as soon as they do people find ways to skirt the letter of the rules to once again take advantage of the economics of the subscription model. So should they just scrap the entire plan? Ruin it for people who are using it as it was intended (coding agent, light experimentation/headless use outside of that)? That doesn't seem right either.
- tempaccount420 5mo ago
  I don't think anyone would want the type of user that OpenClaw users are as customers... There will be a time for OpenClaw, but in the current world with limited compute, that time is not now.

ryanshrott 5mo ago

The underlying issue here is that OAuth credential reuse is different from API key scraping, and Anthropic hasn't really made that distinction clear. CLI-style usage that respects rate limits and uses official libraries is, architecturally, the same thing Max subscribers do in the web app, same auth, same endpoints. The problem isn't the use case. It's that companies get nervous about anything that looks like it could scale past what they priced in. It'd be a lot cleaner if they just published explicit rate limits for each subscription tier instead of these vague policy statements.

ghm2180 5mo ago
yeah rate limits are the way to go. I don't see how this is not really simple: A human can only type or tts the text in and read responses only so fast, anthropic can use this as a baseline. They can create a client that can back off(rate limit) and wait, like for something like when a user says something like "spawn 10 processes with claude -p to do X" this client can calculate the rate limit and place an event in a queue and developers can use this client's rate-limit and build workflows around it: e.g. a client queue that has a timer event that expires the rate limit that was set can wake up a daemon. There are a million ways to implement the queue <> daemon thingy, its just software at that point. Since the subscription is hard linked to an OAuth token this should be easy to track too. What am i missing?

Frannky 5mo ago

Claude Code with Opus and the Max plan is fine for me, even though I'm not super happy about moments when it's not available, the costs, account banning, etc. Anyway, what I am looking for and am curious about is if there is a solution that I am overlooking that will work the same, or almost the same or better, but at a cheaper price. I read about people being happy about pi.dev and OpenCode. I tried OpenCode with Mimo V2 pro and it is pretty good. I previously used Qwen CLI before they stopped the free usage, and Gemini CLI. I also used Z.ai with OpenCode. I read about people using Opus for planning and then for non-important stuff moving the agent to use a further cheaper model. I am not into usage-based pricing unless it will be cheaper nonetheless (I doubt it though). Do you have some cool setups to share? I usually do Python for backend and TypeScript frontend. Host on Hetzner, use mostly Docker but also k3s if required.

maxbeech 5mo ago

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F7F7F7 5mo ago

Just as they pull the rug on $20 users. This is the most transparently nontransparent company in tech existence. They always reveal their cards in the most clumsy ways possible. Their enterprise API numbers must be godlike for the way they are treating B2C customers.

KaiShips 5mo ago

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notShabu 5mo ago

While I get that unclear communication is frustrating especially if there are sunk costs, the core issue seems to be that they can't afford to subsidize all these tokens for free. The agent model breaks the power-user/casual-user proportion that makes the existing saas-like pricing work.

arjunthazhath 5mo ago

Anthropic guys are playing with branding and now the very service

digdatechAGI 5mo ago

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francofx3 5mo ago

Google AI Pro just banned me for using it on pi.dev. "Failed to sign in. Message: This service has been disabled in this account for violation of Terms of Service. Please submit an appeal to continue using this product."