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Claude Code refuses requests or charges extra if your commits mention "OpenClaw"

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Re: Claude Code refuses requests or charges extra if your commits mention "OpenClaw"

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a lawyer but is this legal? It's extremely anticompetitive.

what is illegal about it?! their product, they can do whatever they want and you can choose to be a customer or not, no?

They are technically billing people for services not rendered without any disclaimer?

Re: Claude Code refuses requests or charges extra if your commits mention "OpenClaw"

#142
Having had Claude Code jump to inserting juvenile and all-filtering regex to (attempt to) solve open-ended semantic natural language problems (-sigh- there's 12 hours of my life I'll never get back), I can absolutely imagine that this was someone trying to code up a "defense in depth" mechanic that was explosively insufficient after Claude Code (even Opus 4.6) made a series of faulty assumptions.

This one feels like prime space for Hanlon's razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

The hassle with the performance of these systems is that they're ~70% of the way to awesome. For advanced prototyping (my current job description), a fast 60% of awesome is groundbreaking and game-changing. For production and real businesses, that last 30% is a really, really important thing to figure out.

Re: Claude Code refuses requests or charges extra if your commits mention "OpenClaw"

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lmao, I can 100% believe that they are deliberately filling your usage bar to sabotage their competition. These people have no morals.

I mean that also just sounds illegal...

Would they act differently if it was?

Re: Claude Code refuses requests or charges extra if your commits mention "OpenClaw"

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand that very well, yes. The point I'm making is that I don't think Anthropic or OpenAI would have ever gotten significant traction if they didn't have flat-rate plans, because flat-rate plans themselves are not inherently predatory or part of the enshittification slope but actually extremely UX-friendly. Perhaps in another timeline, if their product was actually valuable enough to pay this price for, they c…

> The point I'm making is that I don't think Anthropic or OpenAI would have ever gotten significant traction if they didn't have flat-rate plans... That seems likely. If people had to pay their share of the actual all-in cost of the service (rather than having it be subsidized by investors with extremely deep pockets and a small handful of corporate customers), very, very few regular people would use it. The point th…

The crux of my argument is that there is a timeline where people would've paid the all-in cost of the service, with margin, as a flat-rate sub. The $20 rate was not sustainable when factoring in training costs but if not for DeepSeek they could have simply raised the prices rather than gestures broadly whatever the fuck is going on at Anthropic now, with a new PR fumble every three days. If the Chinese models didn't exist, people would've groaned but would likely still pay $40 or $50 for an LLM subscription.

You misdirected my quoted statement to assert a position I did not take. When I talk about flat-rate subs being a good UX, I am not talking about at a subsidized rate. My position is that people will pay more for a flat-rate sub than they are willing to through per-token billing. That is, a consumer who would only pay average $10/mo if they used the API will voluntarily pay $20/mo for a sub, because even though it's a worse value the latter is a tremendously more friendly user experience. When I say that flat-rate subs are necessary for traction, I mean that solely from a user experience perspective, not "subsidized usage is necessary for traction".

Re: Claude Code refuses requests or charges extra if your commits mention "OpenClaw"

#145

Subscription models only work when marginal costs are low and/or there’s a good variety of usage that roughly averages out. Or, you need to be able to kick out abuse. Unfortunately for those of us who just want to eat a nice filling meal at the fixed price all you can eat buffet of AI subscriptions, a minority of customers keeps paying for the all you can eat buffet and staying for hours and bringing containers to sn…

I wouldn't be surprised if the AI usage model moves towards a bidder/auction model. Set how much you'd willing to pay for your AI request, and they evaluate requests starting from the highest to lowest bids.

It definitely would make sense, especially if they are capacity constrained, but it’s also a losing PR move for whoever moves first in the space unless the big players all shift at the same time.

Re: Claude Code refuses requests or charges extra if your commits mention "OpenClaw"

#146
post #20
post #7

It sounds like Anthropic is dangerously low on compute availability if they’re prioritizing these refusals as their OKRs.

I think it's obvious that they are critically lacking in compute capacity especially since OpenAI has committed billions to locking up all the future compute production. And I don't necessarily think it's wrong for Anthropic to introduce QoS or throttling on users of their models. It's pretty much a necessity when offering public access to a scarce resource and it's been a common practice for decades. What is the alt…

I agree. If compute is the issue and pricing can't budge then something has to give.

They would have kept my business if they were honest and upfront. Instead they sold me something that worked well, broke it without warning, remained silent about it until enough people caught on, chose to do nothing, then proceeded to release a model that eats ~30% more tokens with no advantage over prior models.

If they chose to unbrick their model and offered what we had a couple months ago at a 50% hike, I would have been onboard. I've seen enough now of how this company treats its customers to continue using or recommending them.

Also, Codex works much better than CC now for anyone who happens to be on the fence.

Re: Claude Code refuses requests or charges extra if your commits mention "OpenClaw"

#147
post #3

I really want to stick with A\ given everything known about Altman, but man are they speedrunning the "how to destroy your reputation" guidebook.

I cancelled my subscription the minute they blocked access via OpenCode and switched to Ollama Cloud.

A bunch of people here tried to defend Anthropic, saying that it was justified because it was likely that Claude Code's harness had optimizations that would not be possible on OpenCode. It was clear from the source leak that nothing of this sort was the case, and that they were simply trying to avoid others distilling their models.

GLM and Queen are not on par with Opus, but they are good enough and I never had hit the usage limits, even with 2-3 sessions running.

Re: Claude Code refuses requests or charges extra if your commits mention "OpenClaw"

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lmao, I can 100% believe that they are deliberately filling your usage bar to sabotage their competition. These people have no morals.

I mean that also just sounds illegal...

It also sounds extremely counterproductive to try and sabotage your competition by.. driving your customers away? I have no love for these companies but it's a silly conclusion to jump to.

Re: Claude Code refuses requests or charges extra if your commits mention "OpenClaw"

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's rather shitty. It's one thing to disallow bypassing preferential pricing models, it's a completely different thing to castrate your model against some uses. You can see how it goes in the future. Wanna vibe code a throwaway script? $0.20. Ah, it's for a legal document search? $10k then. Oh and we'll charge 20% of your app sales too - I can see how they are going in real time, mind you!

Unironically yes. I predict that costs will grow to 80% of what it would cost a human, across the board for everything AI can do. "It's still cheaper than a human" they'll say. Loudly here on HN too. Of course this will happen slowly, very slowly. Lets meet again in 10-20 years.

> "It's still cheaper than a human" they'll say.

The question is how much friction there will be for people to switch over to Gemini, GPT or maybe even DeepSeek or Mistral or whatever. Even if price hikes are inevitable across the board, the moat any single org has is somewhat limited, so prices definitely will be a factor they'll compete on with one another at least a bit.

Re: Claude Code refuses requests or charges extra if your commits mention "OpenClaw"

#150
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dragons steal gold and jewels... and they guard their plunder as long as they live... and never enjoy a brass ring of it. Indeed they hardly know a good bit of work from a bad, though they usually have a good notion of the market value

My theory is the dragons actually benefit immensely from sitting atop the gold piles as it acts as an amazing heat sink. I don’t think that really fits with the metaphor but I wanted to say my piece regardless.

We don’t really have dwarven gold hoards anymore - I’m thinking we can prove climate change is caused by overheating dragons.

Everyone send me all your gold and I’ll prove it.

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