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Tell HN: Anthropic no longer allowing Claude Code subscriptions to use OpenClaw
371–380 of 928 posts
Re: Tell HN: Anthropic no longer allowing Claude Code subscriptions to use OpenClaw
#372Earlier quoted context omitted.
Very valid. My comment was fixated around the fact that big tech has the addiction to have subscriptions for everything. It's common that you provide generic subscription plans for the masses and supply "call us" custom plans for the specific (usually corporate) needs. If anthropic doesn't provide that or vibe coders are too cheap to do that, then those are issues, but the subscription models are itself valid. It is…
It's pretty stupid because as others in this thread have pointed out it's already not a flat plan. Even from their side it makes zero sense to bill things this way rather than based on usage. It's not like a VPS where your VM shares the hardware, which consumes electricity more or less regardless of what you use the machine for.
Those yottabytes of VRAM are also consuming electricity constantly.
Re: Tell HN: Anthropic no longer allowing Claude Code subscriptions to use OpenClaw
#373If you spend $200/month on Anthropic, that's $2400/year. Buy a fast GPU or Strix Halo machine, do the AI locally, after a year you're saving money.
Re: Tell HN: Anthropic no longer allowing Claude Code subscriptions to use OpenClaw
#374I suspect people are misdiagnosing the root cause of why Anthropic is doing this a bit.
I don't think this is particularly about the financial impact of people using OpenClaw - they can adjust the amount of tokens in a subscription quite easily.
I think the root cause is that Anthropic is capacity constrained so is having to make choices about the customers they want to serve and have chosen people who use Claude Code above other segments.
We know Anthropic weren't as aggressive as OpenAI through 2025 in signing huge capacity deals with the hyperscalers and instead signed smaller deals with more neo-clouds, and we know some of the neo-clouds have had trouble delivering capacity as quickly as they promised.
We also know Claude Code usage is growing very fast - almost certainly faster since December 2025 than Anthropic predicted 12 months ago when they were doing 12-month capacity planning.
We know Anthropic has suffered from brown-outs in Claude availability.
Put this all together and a reasonable hypothesis is that Anthropic is choosing which customers to service rather than raising prices.
Re: Tell HN: Anthropic no longer allowing Claude Code subscriptions to use OpenClaw
#375I think this is why the LLM era will not produce as much automation as people think. We have had the ability to automate browser activities for a long time—but, online service providers don’t want to be behind a layer of automation, which is why captchas were invented. Automating things on the Internet has never been a technology obstacle, it has been a social one. I don’t see how anything has changed! In fact I rece…
While I agree with you, thats not what this announcement is about. Anthropic wants to disallow programmatic use of their subscription plans for business reasons as a way to manage demand. They’re having outages, at least weekly, since March.
Re: Tell HN: Anthropic no longer allowing Claude Code subscriptions to use OpenClaw
#376Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Two people can't use a single machine at the same time make it wear out twice as fast The machine doesn't care about the number of people using it. If it's constantly being used, it will wear out faster. You are conflating "we price based on expected under-utilization" with "costs don't scale with usage." Those are different things. The inverse correlation you talk about isn't relevant here - People buy gym membersh…
>If it's constantly being used, it will wear out faster. Yeah, but there's an absolute limit to that, beyond which the cost doesn't keep increasing. Beyond that point, the QoS goes down (queues). >You are conflating "we price based on expected under-utilization" with "costs don't scale with usage." I'm not conflating anything, I'm responding to what you said: >If gyms faced a situation where people would go and spend…
Gym costs absolutely scale with usage. Equipment wears faster under heavier use. Cleaning and maintenance staff hours scale with how much the facility is used. Consumables like towels, soap, and chalk go faster. HVAC runs harder. The reason gyms can offer flat-rate pricing is that they bet on under-utilization, not that costs are flat.
Setting that aside, even if we accept your argument that gym costs barely scale with usage, then that makes gyms a bad comparison case for Anthropic, whose costs directly scale with usage. You can't use the gym model to defend Anthropic's pricing decisions if the two cost structures are nothing alike.
I'm arguing that both gyms and Anthropic have usage costs that scale with usage, but gym business model assumes a large margin of under-utilization and there's a hard cap to "power user" - I think both of those extremes don't apply to Anthropic's situation. Under-utilizers aren't paying for AI they have a free tier. There's also a natural ceiling on how much any one person can use a gym. There's no equivalent constraint on API usage.
Re: Tell HN: Anthropic no longer allowing Claude Code subscriptions to use OpenClaw
#377Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!
Defining earnest (placeholder word btw) is the hard part of the trade-off, though.
When your least automated, most interactive users are competing for capacity with fully-automated tools, let's say, you're forced to define some sort of periphery between these groups.
OpenClaw is a self-directed, automated loop that sits on a server. It's wowing its owner by shitposting on moltbook and doing any number of crazy stories you can find online that amount to "omg I can't believe my self-directed claude loop spent all day doing this crazy thing haha."
On the other end of the spectrum is someone using Claude.app's interface.
And then in the middle, you can imagine "claude -p" inside a CI tool that was still invoked downstream of a user's action. Still quite different from the claude loop.
Re: Tell HN: Anthropic no longer allowing Claude Code subscriptions to use OpenClaw
#378Earlier quoted context omitted.
How about the people that don't use OpenClaw, but alternative agent harnesses that are vastly better than Claude Code?
> alternative agent harnesses that are vastly better than Claude Code? Okay, that got my attention. What harnesses are those?
pi-coding-agent (https://shittycodingagent.ai/) is what I use and is particularly popular due to its simplicity and minimal system prompt.
Re: Tell HN: Anthropic no longer allowing Claude Code subscriptions to use OpenClaw
#379I suspect people are misdiagnosing the root cause of why Anthropic is doing this a bit. I don't think this is particularly about the financial impact of people using OpenClaw - they can adjust the amount of tokens in a subscription quite easily. I think the root cause is that Anthropic is capacity constrained so is having to make choices about the customers they want to serve and have chosen people who use Claude Cod…
I'm at large company and pretty much everyone has settled on opus or sonnet 4.6. We would absolutely not allow something like OpenClaw on our network so your point kinda fits here where, if capacity is constrained, then by setting focus away from OpenClaw you're essentially prioritising the enterprise clients.
Just spitballing of course
Re: Tell HN: Anthropic no longer allowing Claude Code subscriptions to use OpenClaw
#380Anthropic are a smart clever research based bunch of people, they probably realised that openclaw is a mess, full of vibe coding get rich quick people, nothing particularly interesting to observe, and don't want to mix this data with the data they have already from real coders.