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

> To make the transition easier, we’re offering a one-time credit for extra usage equal to your monthly subscription price. Redeem your credit by April 17. We’re also introducing discounts when you pre-purchase bundles of extra usage (up to 30%).

The Anthropic casino wants you to continue gambling tokens at their casino only on their machines (Claude Code) only by giving more promotional offers such as free spins, $20 bets and more free tokens at the roulette wheels and slot machines.

But you cannot repurpose your subscription on other slot machines that are not owned by Anthropic and if you want it badly, they charge you more for those credits.

The house (Anthropic) always wins.

"these tools put an outsized strain on our systems"

AKA when you fully use the capacity you paid for, that's too much!

Anthropic measures your usage based on token consumption

We are paying for a certain amount of token consumption

Why then, is this an outsized strain on your system Anthropic?

It's like buying gasoline from Shell, and then Shell's terms of services forcing you to use that gas in a Hummer that does 5 MPG, while everyone else wants to drive any other vehicle.

And so it begins...

I received it too. I wonder if they sent this to all pro/max subscribers or only those who they’ve flagged as having used a third party harness.

Doesn't this unfairly impact startups? Why not instead allow issuance of API keys with usage caps? It seems like a money grab.

Just give me a subscription tier where I’m not being blocked out every afternoon.

Im hitting rate limits within 1:45 during afternoons.

I can’t justify extra usage since it’s a variable cost, but I can justify a higher subscription tier.

Yes, this was made clear a while back and should not be a surprise. (Honestly, I had to double-check the date/time to see if this was actually posted today.

You can use your Claude Code subscription with third-party tools, but you have to use the Claude Code harness. Or, you use the API. OpenClaw could use the Claude Code harness, but they don't.

There are going to be a lot of tools coming soon that are "agent-agnostic", i.e. can run on CLIs including Claude Code. I am personally experimenting with using a combo of MCP + custom UI layer to provide custom tools with bespoke UX and thus turn Claude Code (or any other CLI agent for that matter) into whatever I want. I wonder how they'll deal with that.

For a good existing example developed by a known company, check Cline Kanban: https://cline.bot/kanban

They don't have the MCP-bundling idea that I'm experimenting with, however.

You never have been able to. It's against ToS.

This is why people are switching over to Codex

So now what happens to startups and ADE's orientated around Claude like Conductor.. no more Claude for them I guess back to Codex!

Yah well I'll be downgrading my subscription to the $20/month plan for the light chats I have with AI outside of using custom harnesses and will figure out a better provider for the agentic tooling.

Anthropic should calm down, I get that they're trying to either build a moat, or simply curb what is essentially subsidized tokens. It is technically true that when you've got a claude code subscription you pay for the product with its terms, and those terms doesn't include you grabbing the token and using it for another application. They're also trying to build a competitor to openclaw so it makes sense they're trying to crush it. But it feels like such a feeble moat, that it looks silly. Claude Code is nice, but it is not that nice.

You can cancel your subscription, there are like 5 competitors you can pick instead and anthropic offers an API plan where you can find out how many tokens circus tools like claws really consume compared to coding tasks.

The solution as usual is open source.

For example...

We recently moved a very expensive sonnet 4.6 agent to step-3.5-flash and it works surprising well. Obviously step-3.5-flash is nowhere near the raw performance of sonnet but step works perfectly fine for this case.

Another personal observation is that we are most likely going to see a lot of micro coding agent architectures everywhere. We have several such cases. GPT and Claude are not needed if you focus the agent to work on specific parts of the code. I wrote something about this here: https://chatbotkit.com/reflections/the-rise-of-micro-coding-...

That's why I am using Codex. I slightly prefer Claude in terms of code quality, but it's close, but not being able to use my subscription with other CLIs and apps ruins Claude for me.

Is anyone even getting anything out of a $20/mo sub for Anthropic?

I'm doing a side-by-side with GPT-5.4 for $20/mo and Sonnet for $20/mo and I can tell you that all my 5 hour tokens are eaten in 30 minutes with Claude. I still haven't used my tokens for OpenAI.

Code quality seems fine on both. Building an app in Go

What about when you use Claude agent SDK on your laptop?

Extra usage is very sneaky you don't get any notice that you are using extra usage and could end up with unnecessary costs in case you would have preferred to wait an hour or so.

[dead]

Looks like I'm going to be switching to OpenAI. I know the whole "well those are the terms" Stockholm syndrome argument, but no, those weren't the terms when I signed up. If one of the parties decided to unilaterally change terms in any other everyday situation, nobody would think it was acceptable, but we've become so resigned to corporations having enough money to make the law suit them that we think it's moral behavior.

No, Anthropic, just because you added a clause that says "we can change these terms whenever" doesn't make it right. I'm paying you a set amount of money a month for a set amount of tokens (that's what limits are), and I should be able to use these tokens however I want.

Luckily, there are alternatives.

Big Giant Million Dollar Question: Where does having Openclaw using Claude Code via ACP fall? It's using the Claude Code harness, not the model directly.

If you are not aware, ACP creates a persistent session for steering rather than using the models directly.

This is slightly different from what OpenCode was banned from doing; they were a separate harness grabbing a user’s Claude Code session and pretending to be Claude Code.

OpenClaw was still using Claude Code as the harness (via claude -p)[0]. I understand why Anthropic is doing this (and they’ve made it clear that building products around claude -p is disallowed) but I fear Conductor will be next.

[0]: See “Option B: Claude CLI as the message provider” here https://docs.openclaw.ai/providers/anthropic#option-b-claude...

> We’ve been working to manage demand across the board, but these tools put an outsized strain on our systems. Capacity is a resource we manage carefully and we need to prioritize our customers using our core products.

but couldn't i use this in off times only?