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

news.ycombinator.com

221–230 of 928 posts

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

#221

GitHub Copilot supports Anthropic models with any client but they have a monthly usage cap after which it is pay-per-prompt. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46936105 Billing can be bypassed using a combo of subagents with an agent definition > "Even without hacks, Copilot is still a cheap way to use Claude models" 20260116 https://github.blog/changelog/2026-01-16-github-copilot-now-... https://github.com/feature…

Last time I looked Copilot's context window for Anthropic models was something like 150,000 tokens only.

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

#222

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…

Well, I don't use openclaw and I don't think it would be fair if everyone had to pay more to subscribe them.

Why hatred btw? They're not even banning accounts left and right like Google?

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

#223
I don't understand exactly what is being banned. I have a vibe coded context manager + chat thread UI that I use to manage multiple claude code cli sessions simultaneous. Is this allowed? If not how would this get identified vs other cli usage? How is this different than openclaw?

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

#224
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.

I wonder if there's a way to bring some of what Pi Coding Agent has to claude code itself.

It seems that installing claude code directly from npm shields from some of the current issues.

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

#225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're saying is conceptually true for subscription services in general, but thats not why they are making this change. There's a 5 hour limit and a weekly limit. Those are hard token limits. Everyone on a plan pays for the max set of tokens in that plan. The limits manage capacity. The solution to that isn't a change of ToS, it's adjusting the limits. In other words this is about Anthropic subsidizing their own…

The trade-off is that if you set your usage limits so that you can handle the case where everyone is saturating their limit at all times, then (1) the usage limits would be too small and (2) you're optimizing for a usage pattern that doesn't exist and (3) you're severely underprovisioning, which is worse for everyone. Instead, you can prioritize people "earnestly" bursting to the usage limits, like the users who are…

Well earnest here just means using Claude code directly or the Claude app. Both that just happen to support using tokens while you sleep!

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

#226

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.

Extra usage seems like the right thing for you. It's pre-paid so if you only ever fill in $100 more per-month it works as a higher subscription tier.

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

#227

How does Anthropic detect that a person is using OpenClaw vs using Claude Code? Forgive me if someone asked this already and I can't find it in the comments.

Continuous requests at a constant rate for days with interruptions?

That's just a ralph loop: https://ghuntley.com/ralph/

I can do that now with claude code and a "while true" bash loop.

Or with the built-in "/schedule" in claude code to set an agent to run say once every few minutes.

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

#228

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…

What you're saying is conceptually true for subscription services in general, but thats not why they are making this change. There's a 5 hour limit and a weekly limit. Those are hard token limits. Everyone on a plan pays for the max set of tokens in that plan. The limits manage capacity. The solution to that isn't a change of ToS, it's adjusting the limits. In other words this is about Anthropic subsidizing their own…

> The agent consuming those tokens is irrelevant.

This is so wrong.

The subscription is to Claude (the app, Claude code, etc) not the API.

Anthropic subsidizes Claude code because they collect a ton of super useful telemetry and logs so they can improve… Claude code.

Wanting to pay for a subscription to Claude and treat it like an API discount is like going to an all you can eat buffet and asking them to bring unlimited quantities of raw ingredients to you so you can cook at home. Ok, not a perfect analogy, but you get the idea.

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

#229
post #3

"these tools put an outsized strain on our systems" AKA when you fully use the capacity you paid for, that's too much!

Meh this argument does not hold up. If you don’t like it pay for the API. We all know these services are priced for human use, as in your not using it 24/7.

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

#230
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

Word on the street is that Opus is much much larger of a model than GPT-5.4 and that’s why the rate limits on Codex are so much more generous. But I guess you could also just switch to Sonnet or Haiku in Claude Code?
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