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

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

#381

Post by fluoridation »

dimmke wrote: post #376
fluoridation wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 wi…

>You can't use the gym model to defend Anthropic's pricing decisions if the two cost structures are nothing alike.

Am I? I think you read something into my comments that I didn't write.

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

#382

Post by paulcole »

benbojangles wrote: post #380

Anthropic 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.

“What I’m doing is real coding. What you’re doing is a mess full of vibe coding.”

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

#383

Post by fluoridation »

Yokohiii wrote: post #372
fluoridation wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The difference being that an LLM request is not an operating system. Since they're compartmentalized and ephemeral, you can very easily distribute requests among your available hardware so that you can switch off machines during periods of low activity.

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

#384

Post by armanj »

People in the comments are, in my opinion, overcomplicating this and making it more philosophical than it needs to be. The reason for their decision is dead simple: there aren’t enough GPUs, so they have to cut access somewhere, and they’re starting with claw.

It’s really that straightforward. If tomorrow they decide GPUs are better allocated to enterprise use, they could start removing the $20 plan just as quickly overnight, the same way they did tonight.

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

#385

Post by goosejuice »

Nevermark wrote: post #326
goosejuice wrote: post #160

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…

> Everyone on a plan pays for the max set of tokens in that plan. From Anthropic's perspective, everyone pays to be in bins with a given max. And to everyone's benefit, there is a wide distribution of actual use. Most people pay for the convenience of knowing they have a max if they need it, not so they always use it. So Anthropic does something nice, and drops the price for everyone. They kick back some of the (actu…

Yes, mostly what I'm saying, but forgetting the important part:

From the email: > but these tools put an outsized strain on our systems. Capacity is a resource we manage carefully and we need to prioritize our customers using our core products

OpenClaw doesn't put an outsized strain on their systems any more than Anthropics own tools. They just happen to have more demand than they can serve and they benefit more when people to use their own tools. They just aren't saying that explicitly.

It has nothing to do with fairness or being nice.

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

#386

Post by chunpaiyang »

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…

Good point. I agree with that. The key point is that heavy users benefit from this model while light users are basically subsidizing them. But it's a distribution when everyone shifts toward heavy usage, prices inevitably go up. The $17/mo pro price is already set to compete with other providers. Raising it would lose customers. Other tiers are also carefully priced to match competitors. So the only move left is to prevent the whole distribution from drifting toward heavier usage. That's exatly what this ban does.

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

#389

Post by bglusman »

For anyone interested, I’m cleaning up a project I’ve been working on that is a router for arbitrary agents derivative of/forked from ZeroClaw… part of what it does is let you switch between different agents on WhatsApp/Signal/Matrix etc via !switch commands, so that part isn’t an agent itself but just wants to own your channels so you can have any number of agents talking to the same handful of channels without contention.

I do also bundle a default agent with it, also forked from ZeroClaw, with a goal of being more or less prompt injection proof and hopefully able to centralize some configuration and permissions for most or all of the agents it manages, though that part is very rough sketch/plan at the moment I’d love feedback and help on from anyone interested…. Two projects, clash and nono caught my eye in this space, I think both leverage Linux landgrant but I may also use landrun for similar control of other processes like openclaw that it may manage for the user, still figuring out how and where to fit all the pieces together and what’s pragmatic/what’s overkill/what overlaps or duplicates across various strategies and tools. Right now there’s real bash wrappers that evaluate starlark policies, hoping to fully validate better end to end but if you’re interested a few others users testing, validating and/or contributing Claude tokens to the project could be invaluable at this stage. Plan to open source ASAP, maybe tonight or tomorrow if there’s interest and I have time to finish cleanup and rename (I was calling it PolyClaw but that confuses with some weird polymarket Claude skill, so now the router is going to be ZeroClawed and the agent will stay NonZeroClaw in homage to ZeroClaw who it’s forked from… we may also integrate the new Claw Code port which is also rust, just for good measure/as a native coding agent in addition to the native claw agent )

Anyway the main reason I mention is it already has a working ACP integration for any code agent, and working now on using Claude codes native channel integration to make it appear as a full fledged channel of its own, as it now more or less does already to OpenClaw, for anyone wanting to gradually migrate away from their existing OpenClaw installation using this, towards Claude or some other agent. Email me or respond here if interested, or I’ll try and post link here once it’s fully public/open source

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