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The creator of OpenClaw has criticised Anthropic’s policy of charging extra for third-party use. It has sparked debate about pricing models and developer accessibility within the AI ecosystem. Anthropic has also introduced its own OpenClaw alternatives, unleashing a wave of new features and upgrades across Claude.
Claude Code subscribers may soon have to pay more to continue using Anthropic’s AI coding assistant with OpenClaw and other third-party tools.
The AI startup has rolled out a new policy where subscribers will “no longer be able to use your Claude subscription limits for third-party harnesses including OpenClaw.” Instead, they will need to pay for extra usage through “a pay-as-you-go option billed separately from your subscription,” the AI startup reportedly wrote in emails sent to customers.
The development was confirmed by Boris Cherny, Anthropic’s head of Claude Code.
“We’ve been working hard to meet the increase in demand for Claude, and our subscriptions weren’t built for the usage patterns of these third-party tools. Capacity is a resource we manage thoughtfully and we are prioritizing our customers using our products and API,” Cherny wrote in a post on X.
“We want to be intentional in managing our growth to continue to serve our customers sustainably long-term. This change is a step toward that,” he added.
While it is starting with OpenClaw today, the policy “applies to all third-party harnesses and will be rolled out to more shortly,” Anthropic further said.
Anthropic’s competitive posture also arrives in the backdrop of Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw, joining rival OpenAI. It previously sent a cease-and-desist letter to Steinberger over the original OpenClaw project name ‘Clawd’.
Commenting on Anthropic’s new policy barring OpenClaw usage within subscription limits, Steinberger said that he and OpenClaw board member Dave Morin “tried to talk sense into Anthropic” but were only able to delay the increased pricing by a week. “Funny how timings match up, first they copy some popular features into their closed harness, then they lock out open source,” Steinberger said.
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The announcement comes as LLM-powered AI agents gain momentum, fueled in part by the popularity of OpenClaw which is an open-source, agentic AI framework that lets developers orchestrate autonomous agents in structured flows.
Cherny said that Claude Code team members are “big fans of open source” and that he himself “just put up a few [pull requests] to improve prompt cache efficiency for OpenClaw specifically.”
“This is more about engineering constraints. We know not everyone realized this isn’t something we support, and this is an attempt to make it clear and explicit,” he said, adding that Anthropic is still offering full refunds for subscribers.
The debate over AI monetization reflects a larger shift in the industry, balancing innovation with sustainability. As pricing models evolve, companies must ensure accessibility for developers while maintaining viable, long-term business growth.
