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

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171–180 of 928 posts

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

#171
post #77

My answer to this is simply rolling back to the pro plan for interactive usage in the coming month, and forcefully cutting myself over to one of the alternative Chinese models to just get over the hump and normalise API pricing at a sensible rate with sensible semantics. Dealing with Claude going into stupid mode 15 times a day, constant HTTP errors, etc. just isn't really worth it for all it does. I can't see myself…

I think my next steps are: 1) try out openai $20/month. I've heard they're much more generous. 2) try out open router free models. I don't need geniuses, so long as I can see the thinking (something that Claude code obfuscates by default) I should be good. I've heard good things about the CLIO harness and want to try openrouter+clio

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

#172
post #71

Haha, I almost expected this. Say goodbye to my 600$/ month Anthropic.

So you were using API tokens already, this doesn’t affect you. Why are you quitting in protest?

Three Max subscriptions.

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

#173

Marketing geniuses. They had 2 options here: 1. Make a better product/alternative to Openclaw and start eating their userbase. They hold the advantage because the ones "using their servers too much" are already their clients so they could reach out and keep trying to convert. Openclaw literally brought them customers at the door. 2. Do everyone royally and get them off their platform - with a strong feeling of dislik…

I'm fine with it. I don't want my subscription subsidizing the claw people.

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

#176
post #164

There seem to be a ton of people who don't understand how subscription services work. Every single one of them oversells their capacity. The power users that use the services a lot are subsidized by those who don't use it as much, which tends to be the vast majority of the user base. OpenClaw is an autonomous power user. The growing adoption of this walking attack surface was either going to A) cause the cost of Clau…

I just discovered Pi Coding Agent and found that it's lean System Prompt + a tuned CLAUDE.md brought back a lot of the intelligence that Opus seemed to lose over the last month. Sucks to be pushed back to Claude Code with opaque system behavior and inconsistency. I bet many would rather pay more for stability than less for gambling on the model intelligence.

We use Pi at work (where we pay per token) and I’d love to use it personally too. From what I’ve read, nobody has been banned for using Pi yet… I wonder if Anthropic minds this much as long as it’s still human usage, or if they’re mostly focused on stamping out the autonomous harnesses. Unfortunately Pi is also what OpenClaw uses so it could easily get swept up in the enforcement attention.

Or maybe I’ll just get a Codex subscription instead. OpenAI has semi-officially blessed usage of third party harnesses, right?

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

#177

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, ch…

Some editor integrations are a bit like this already, where during use you don't actually touch the built-in TUI even for prompting or viewing the output and approving permissions requests.

I imagine how they treat these things will be contextual and maybe inconsistent. There aren't really hard lines between what they probably want editors that integrate with them to do and generic tools that try to sit a layer above the vendors' agent TUIs.

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

#178
post #77

My answer to this is simply rolling back to the pro plan for interactive usage in the coming month, and forcefully cutting myself over to one of the alternative Chinese models to just get over the hump and normalise API pricing at a sensible rate with sensible semantics. Dealing with Claude going into stupid mode 15 times a day, constant HTTP errors, etc. just isn't really worth it for all it does. I can't see myself…

Are you using the Chinese models through their individual services or via an intermediary layer?

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

#179

Ok. Someone explain to me why they would f themselves this hard with software engineers when they are absolutely winning. This just seems like a bad move. Is it infrastructure? Are they unable to control costs? Everyone else is spending like money is water to try to get adoption. Claude has it and is dialing back utility so that its most passionate users will probably leave. I don’t understand this move.

I mean, it is easy to understand once you realise that there is no spoon.

Despite their power, frontier models are threatened by open-source equivalents. If AGI is not on the horizon and model performance is likely not going to be enough of a differentiator to keep the momentum going, the only other way is to go horizontal - enterprise solutions, proprietary coding agent harnesses, market capture, etc.

If AGI is in sight, none of these short-term games really matter. You just need to race ahead.

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

#180
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You absolutely can, just pay for their API usage. The subscriptions are deeply discounted if you use your full quota compared to the API.

It is confusing for a company to sell you the subscription service, say "Claude Code is covered", ship Claude Code with `claude -p`, and then say "oh right, actually, not _all of Claude Code_, don't try and use it as a executable ... sorry, right, the subscription only works as long as you're looking at that juicy little Claude Code logo in the TUI" The disrespect Anthropic has for their user base is constant and pal…

This strikes me the same way the people in college who would print 497 empty pages at the end of the semester for the quota "they'd paid for" or that one guy who made lemonade at restaurants with the free lemon wedges and sugar packets. "Contempt for users" is silly. Adjusting terms to handle users who use things as not intended isn't contempt.
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