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

Post by paulddraper » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 2:33 AM UTC

goosejuice wrote: post #160

jesse_dot_id wrote: post #73

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…

Post by satvikpendem » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 2:35 AM UTC

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #112

tekacs wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI have literally gone out of their way to explicitly support this sort of thing. As they did with OpenCode. Honestly, this just looks like what Dylan of SemiAnalysis suggested on Dwarkesh – that they've massively under-provisioned capacity / under-spent on infrastructure. That would honestly be a comforting answer if true, because I would gladly take 'we can't afford to do this right now' over 'we are self-prefe…

> we are self-preferencing, and the FTC should really take a look at us, even if we're technically not a monopoly right now Tell me you have zero clue what a monopoly is or what the law is, without telling me. Monopoly law relies on broad categories, not narrow ones. You can’t call Microsoft a monopoly because they are the only company that makes Windows. You can’t call Amazon a monopoly because they are the only com…

Post by satvikpendem » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 2:36 AM UTC

code_duck wrote: post #197

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we are self-preferencing, and the FTC should really take a look at us, even if we're technically not a monopoly right now Tell me you have zero clue what a monopoly is or what the law is, without telling me. Monopoly law relies on broad categories, not narrow ones. You can’t call Microsoft a monopoly because they are the only company that makes Windows. You can’t call Amazon a monopoly because they are the only com…

Somehow this was coming up a few years ago where people kept saying that Apple could face antitrust because they were the only company who made iOS and controlled the App Store. Given that android exists, and has roughly equal market share, that didn’t make much sense to me, but I kept seeing it being discussed.

Post by PlasmaPower » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 2:37 AM UTC

mech422 wrote: post #320

jmalicki wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You aren't paying to be using that limit all of the time. You are paying to be using that limit some of the time. There are 5 hour windows when you are sleeping and can't use it. There are weekend limits. Theoretically you can max out every 5 hour window, but they lose money on that. It's structured so users can have bursts of unlimited usage, and spend ~15% of the theoretical max cap, and that's still cheaper than a…

you can write automated MCP tools that run within claude code, and could theoretically generate as high a load as any other automated/3rd party agent. You can also do loops that burn tokens incredibly fast. This is allowed with no caveats (I use MCP's basically to test what I'd like to try with the API...) So this explanation just seems a lil hollow.

Post by paulddraper » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 2:38 AM UTC

Aurornis wrote: post #154

SkyPuncher wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I literally hit my 5 hour window limit in 1.5 hours every single day now. 2 weeks ago, I had only hit my limit a single time and that was when I had multiple agents doing codebase audits.

Anthropic had a special extra usage promotion going on during non-peak hours that ended recently. They didn’t do a great job of explaining it. I wonder how many people got used to the 2X limits and now think Anthropic has done something bad by going back to normal