Anthropic says OpenClaw-style Claude CLI usage is allowed again • Hacker News Board

Re: Anthropic says OpenClaw-style Claude CLI usage is allowed again

#271

Post by yokoprime » Tue, Apr 21, 2026, 8:26 PM UTC

serial_dev wrote: post #24

dmazin wrote: post #7

I got sick of the inconsistency caused by Anthropic tinkering with Claude Code and had canceled my 20x. My plan was to switch to Codex so I could use it in Pi. I am specifically talking about switching because of the harness, not model quality. Anyone else match my experience? I wonder how many other people recently did the same. It would be prudent of Anthropic to let people use Pro/Max OAuth tokens with other harne…

My experience is the opposite of this thread's consensus. Context: Full time SWE, working on large and messy codebase. Not working on crazy automations, working on fixing bugs, troubleshooting crashes, implementing features. Anthropic models write much better code, they are easy to follow, reasonable and very close to what I would done if I had the time... OpenAI's on the other hand generate extremely complex solutio…

I feel like Opus 4.7 vs GPT 5.4 is pretty much just flavor variants, the big difference is in the harness. I like the Claude Code CLI better than the Codex CLI, it just clicks with how I like to interact with agents. The codex app on the other hand is better than the Claude app in code view, so if I had to stick to an app it would be codex all the way.

Re: Anthropic says OpenClaw-style Claude CLI usage is allowed again

#272

Post by tber123 » Tue, Apr 21, 2026, 8:34 PM UTC

Cidan wrote: post #265

skapadia wrote: post #262

Basically, as long as you are using an Anthropic library or tool, you can use your OAuth credentials. For example, you can use the Claude Agent SDK with your OAuth credentials. This is sweet because I can prototype all sorts of agents with Claude Code embedded inside, at a predictable monthly cost. One nice use case is turning skills into standalone tools or apps. You can also do convoluted things like run Claude Cod…

You don't really need to tmux at all for Claude Code CLI. Claude Code CLI supports streaming json input, and streaming json output; you can use stdin/out as a pipe to control Claude Code CLI. I'm doing this today in https://github.com/Cidan/ask -- works great.

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Re: Anthropic says OpenClaw-style Claude CLI usage is allowed again

#273

Post by extr » Tue, Apr 21, 2026, 8:39 PM UTC

steipete wrote: post #269

Peter here from OpenClaw. For context, here’s why our post reads the way it does: Boris from Claude Code said publicly on Twitter that CLI-style usage is allowed. We took that seriously and invested time building around that guidance. I even changed the defaults, so when using the cli we're automatially disabling features that use excessive tokens like the heartbeat feature. But in practice, Anthropic still blocks pa…

I mean surely you can understand the the difficulty of their position, right? It's as if Waymo offered a subsidized, subscription based plan that models a certain type of ridership as typical but then people start scheduling rides on a timer with no one in it, far outside the original use case of "Get me from point A to point B". And of course the line between what is acceptable is quite fuzzy. You could imagine it being seen as okay to send a rider-less Waymo to pick up groceries occasionally - but not to schedule one every single day at 4:30PM to pick up a single ice cream cone.

You can argue that this is unfair and they should provide clearer guidance. Well - as soon as they do people find ways to skirt the letter of the rules to once again take advantage of the economics of the subscription model. So should they just scrap the entire plan? Ruin it for people who are using it as it was intended (coding agent, light experimentation/headless use outside of that)? That doesn't seem right either.

Re: Anthropic says OpenClaw-style Claude CLI usage is allowed again

#274

Post by tempaccount420 » Tue, Apr 21, 2026, 8:44 PM UTC

extr wrote: post #273

steipete wrote: post #269

Peter here from OpenClaw. For context, here’s why our post reads the way it does: Boris from Claude Code said publicly on Twitter that CLI-style usage is allowed. We took that seriously and invested time building around that guidance. I even changed the defaults, so when using the cli we're automatially disabling features that use excessive tokens like the heartbeat feature. But in practice, Anthropic still blocks pa…

I mean surely you can understand the the difficulty of their position, right? It's as if Waymo offered a subsidized, subscription based plan that models a certain type of ridership as typical but then people start scheduling rides on a timer with no one in it, far outside the original use case of "Get me from point A to point B". And of course the line between what is acceptable is quite fuzzy. You could imagine it b…

I don't think anyone would want the type of user that OpenClaw users are as customers...

There will be a time for OpenClaw, but in the current world with limited compute, that time is not now.

Re: Anthropic says OpenClaw-style Claude CLI usage is allowed again

#275

Post by MillionOClock » Tue, Apr 21, 2026, 8:48 PM UTC

steipete wrote: post #269

Peter here from OpenClaw. For context, here’s why our post reads the way it does: Boris from Claude Code said publicly on Twitter that CLI-style usage is allowed. We took that seriously and invested time building around that guidance. I even changed the defaults, so when using the cli we're automatially disabling features that use excessive tokens like the heartbeat feature. But in practice, Anthropic still blocks pa…

Peter, while we are on the subject of clarifying what is and isn't allowed I have a question: has OpenAI clearly communicated about precisely where one is supposed to be able to use their Codex quota? For instance, as far as I understand, it is allowed to use it with OpenClaw, but does it extend to any other coding harness? Say I have an app (potentially a paid one) and want my users to use their Codex quota in it, is it permitted to do? As you can probably imagine that would unlock a lot of uses cases given smaller actors can't subsidize as much token costs, but unfortunately, and maybe expectedly due to the nature of subscriptions, I have not been able to find any answer regarding this.

Re: Anthropic says OpenClaw-style Claude CLI usage is allowed again

#276

Post by extr » Tue, Apr 21, 2026, 8:51 PM UTC

MillionOClock wrote: post #275

steipete wrote: post #269

Peter here from OpenClaw. For context, here’s why our post reads the way it does: Boris from Claude Code said publicly on Twitter that CLI-style usage is allowed. We took that seriously and invested time building around that guidance. I even changed the defaults, so when using the cli we're automatially disabling features that use excessive tokens like the heartbeat feature. But in practice, Anthropic still blocks pa…

Peter, while we are on the subject of clarifying what is and isn't allowed I have a question: has OpenAI clearly communicated about precisely where one is supposed to be able to use their Codex quota? For instance, as far as I understand, it is allowed to use it with OpenClaw, but does it extend to any other coding harness? Say I have an app (potentially a paid one) and want my users to use their Codex quota in it, i…

I'm not sure they have "officially" said anything but they do allow Codex OAuth login for 3rd party coding agents: pi, opencode, etc. Employees on twitter have explicitly approved this.

Re: Anthropic says OpenClaw-style Claude CLI usage is allowed again

#277

Post by TIPSIO » Tue, Apr 21, 2026, 8:53 PM UTC

steipete wrote: post #269

Peter here from OpenClaw. For context, here’s why our post reads the way it does: Boris from Claude Code said publicly on Twitter that CLI-style usage is allowed. We took that seriously and invested time building around that guidance. I even changed the defaults, so when using the cli we're automatially disabling features that use excessive tokens like the heartbeat feature. But in practice, Anthropic still blocks pa…

A lot of people have spent a considerable amount of time building out "claude -p" workflows trusting Anthropic because of those same Tweet assurances outside of OpenClaw.

It seems with the new "--bare" flag they are introducing, a huge rug pull is coming as they plan to deprecate -p for unlimited users.

The docs now read:

> "Bare mode skips OAuth and keychain reads. Anthropic authentication must come from ANTHROPIC_API_KEY or an apiKeyHelper in the JSON passed to --settings. Bedrock, Vertex, and Foundry use their usual provider credentials. --bare is the recommended mode for scripted and SDK calls, and will become the default for -p in a future release."

Hope I am reading this wrong or this is clarified.

https://code.claude.com/docs/en/headless

Re: Anthropic says OpenClaw-style Claude CLI usage is allowed again

#278

Post by MillionOClock » Tue, Apr 21, 2026, 8:55 PM UTC

extr wrote: post #276

MillionOClock wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Peter, while we are on the subject of clarifying what is and isn't allowed I have a question: has OpenAI clearly communicated about precisely where one is supposed to be able to use their Codex quota? For instance, as far as I understand, it is allowed to use it with OpenClaw, but does it extend to any other coding harness? Say I have an app (potentially a paid one) and want my users to use their Codex quota in it, i…

I'm not sure they have "officially" said anything but they do allow Codex OAuth login for 3rd party coding agents: pi, opencode, etc. Employees on twitter have explicitly approved this.

That matches what I have seen, but I think I remember reading a tweet that had mentioned those "developing in the open" (not an exact citation, just based on what I remember), which made me wonder if it meant they considered this allowed only for open source software, or if they were intending to be much more permissive, essentially considering users can use their quotas wherever they want, or maybe even completely different rules, again I feel there could be more transparency regarding all of that.

Re: Anthropic says OpenClaw-style Claude CLI usage is allowed again

#279

Post by LatencyKills » Tue, Apr 21, 2026, 8:57 PM UTC

dnautics wrote: post #233

LatencyKills wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Keep in mind this is hearsay How, exactly, is that not saying something about the announcement?

It's saying something about the announcement, it's not saying something about the correctness of the announcement. I used the word hearsay to imply that flip-flopping should only be a judgement on the comms of the entity accused of flip-flopping, not information living on some third party source.

And I was referring to the all of the historical flip-flopping. This new flipping is just proving the point.

Of course, you're simply being pedantic. Everyone knows why they are making this change (which is more important than your silly take on what constitutes flip-flopping).

The point: Anthropic is losing subscribers because it has no idea what it actually wants to be.

Re: Anthropic says OpenClaw-style Claude CLI usage is allowed again

#280

Post by ryanshrott » Tue, Apr 21, 2026, 8:58 PM UTC

The underlying issue here is that OAuth credential reuse is different from API key scraping, and Anthropic hasn't really made that distinction clear. CLI-style usage that respects rate limits and uses official libraries is, architecturally, the same thing Max subscribers do in the web app, same auth, same endpoints. The problem isn't the use case. It's that companies get nervous about anything that looks like it could scale past what they priced in.

It'd be a lot cleaner if they just published explicit rate limits for each subscription tier instead of these vague policy statements.