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Google restricting Google AI Pro/Ultra subscribers for using OpenClaw

discuss.ai.google.dev

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Re: Google restricting Google AI Pro/Ultra subscribers for using OpenClaw

#491

Post by cedws »

usef- wrote: post #95
cogman10 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh man. What a wonderful way to stop people from using your LLM. All these AI companies trying to get everyone to be locked into their toolchains is just hilariously short sighted. Particularly for dev tools. It's the sure path to get devs to hate your product. And for what? The devs are already paying a pretty penny to use your LLM. Why do you also need to force them to using your toolkit?

There is a reality that when they control the client it can be significantly cheaper for them to run: the Claude code creator has mentioned that the client was carefully designed to maximise prompt caching. If you use a different client, your usage patterns can be different and it may cost them significantly more to serve you. This isn't a sudden change, either: they were always up-front that subscriptions are for th…

It reminds me of the net neutrality debate from a decade ago. I'm not American but I remember the discord and online hate towards Ajit Pai when they were repealing it.

On one side you had the argument that repealing net neutrality would mean you can save money on your internet bill by only paying for access to what you use. On the other, you had the argument that it would just enable companies to milk you for even more profit and throttle your connection as they see fit.

IMO we need 'net neutrality' for LLM clients. I feel like AI companies are hypocrites for talking about safety all the time, but want us to only use their LLMs in the way they intend. They're saying we're all going to be replaced by AI in 12 months, and we have to use their tools to survive, right?

Yann LeCun recently warned that the AI coming out of China is trending towards being more open than the American alternative. If it continues like this, I can see programmers being pushed towards Chinese models. Is that what the US government wants?

Re: Google restricting Google AI Pro/Ultra subscribers for using OpenClaw

#492

Post by xnx »

Additional information from Google employee https://x.com/_mohansolo/status/2025766889205739899 :

"We’ve been seeing a massive increase in malicious usage of the Anitgravity backend that has tremendously degraded the quality of service for our users. We needed to find a path to quickly shut off access to these users that are not using the product as intended. We understand that a subset of these users were not aware that this was against our ToS and will get a path for them to come back on but we have limited capacity and want to be fair to our actual users."

Re: Google restricting Google AI Pro/Ultra subscribers for using OpenClaw

#493

Post by cedws »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #112
paxys wrote: post #68

I don't know why people here can't accept the simple fact that AI companies are offering cheap "unlimited" plans as a loss leader to tie you to their ecosystem, and then make up for it via add-ons, upsells, ads etc. If you use those API tokens to access external services it defeats the purpose. The hack may have worked so far, mainly because no one was checking, but they are all going to tighten the access eventually…

OpenAI and the Chinese companies let you all you can eat openly. Anthropic's lead vs OAI is slight and these things are going to homogenize quickly. The market is going open and the people trying to keep it closed are just generating ill will pointlessly.

Likely we'll just move to the Chinese models.

Re: Google restricting Google AI Pro/Ultra subscribers for using OpenClaw

#494

Post by bilekas »

distances wrote: post #445
vincston wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What google search alternative have you found? Im trying out ecosia, duckduckgo and brave search, but i find their search results even worse, so in the second query i tend to bang to google..

Have you tried Kagi yet? It's pretty popular among HN folks, and I find it easily worth the price.

Kagi indirectly funds the Kremlin's regime, just to know where your money goes if we're talking about not supporting google.

Re: Google restricting Google AI Pro/Ultra subscribers for using OpenClaw

#495

Post by Thorrez »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #424
Thorrez wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But Google are banning entire accounts, with years, even decades, of personal history, photos, even phone accounts and app development projects. Source? It seems to me only the anti-gravity access was blocked. The link says > Our product engineering team has confirmed that your account was suspended from using our Antigravity service. > there’s no way we can restore our accounts to use Antigravity anymore yeah? Disc…

Hmm, you might be right. I'm reading the forum thread linked in the OP. > ”Thank you for your continued patience as we have thoroughly investigated your account access issue. Please be assured that we conducted a comprehensive investigation, exploring every possible avenue to restore your access. > Our product engineering team has confirmed that your account was suspended from using our Antigravity service. This susp…

>This suspension affects your access to the Gemini CLI and any other service that uses the Cloud Code Private API.

That sounds like the suspension only affects those things. Not e.g. gmail.

Re: Google restricting Google AI Pro/Ultra subscribers for using OpenClaw

#496

Post by coryrc »

vincston wrote: post #440
shevy-java wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, getting banned without warning is rough as well. Agreed. The lesson is: do not become dependent on Google. Ever. (Unfortunately I still use youtube and a chromium-based browser. Long-term I hope to find alternatives to both problems. Google search I no longer need because Google already ruined it a few years ago; the quality now is just horrible. I can not find anything useful with it anymore.)

What google search alternative have you found? Im trying out ecosia, duckduckgo and brave search, but i find their search results even worse, so in the second query i tend to bang to google..

I use ddg and haven't found better results from searching with google in a long time, but that might just be the kind of things I search for.

Re: Google restricting Google AI Pro/Ultra subscribers for using OpenClaw

#497

Post by fasbiner »

MattRix wrote: post #375
fasbiner wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

This is a really weird response man. No need to get so judgy and personal. Besides, as far as I can tell what they said is true. The users are losing access to Antigravity, not to their entire Google accounts. So you’re getting mad at this guy just for stating facts.

[flagged]

Re: Google restricting Google AI Pro/Ultra subscribers for using OpenClaw

#498

Post by TeMPOraL »

lurkshark wrote: post #411
mirashii wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally speaking, there's prompt caching that can be enabled in the API with things like this: https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/prompt... For a specific harness, they've all found ways to optimize to get higher cache hit rates with their harness. Common system prompts and all, and more and more users hitting cache really makes the cost of inference go down dramatically. What bothers me about a…

I feel like a lot of this would go away if they made a different API for the “only for use with our client” subscriptions. A different API from the generic one, that moved some of their client behaviors up to the server seems like it would solve all this. People would still reverse engineer to use it in other tools but it would be less useful (due to the forced scaffolding instead of entirely generic completions API)…

> I feel like a lot of this would go away if they made a different API for the “only for use with our client” subscriptions.

They literally did exactly that. That's what being cut off (Antigravity access, i.e. private "only for use with our client" subscription - not the whole account, btw.) for people who do "reverse engineer to use it in other tools".

Nothing here is new or surprising, the problem has been the same since Anthropic released Claude Code and the Max subscriptions - first thing people did then was trying to auth regular use with Claude Code tokens, so they don't have to pay the API prices they were supposed to.

Re: Google restricting Google AI Pro/Ultra subscribers for using OpenClaw

#499

Post by hgo »

If I was an investor in an AI provider I would be quite worried.

1) Switching between LLM API:s is incredibly easy if you are not concerned with differences in personality. As the models get better, it is less important to pick the best one.

2) The products built to bundle the API with a user experience are difficult to build on a level that outclasses open source alternatives.

3) Building an understanding of the user to increase the product value over time and create stickiness is effective, but imho less effective over time as time passes and the user changes. For example, I suspect that these adaptations have a hard time to unlearn things that are no longer true. Learning about the user opaquely is less useful to the user and doing it overtly makes it easier to take the learnings and go. (Besides, it is probably not legal under the GDPR to not let the user export the learnings and take them to another provider.)

Taken together, the moat becomes quite shallow. I see why they aggressively ban any tools demonstrating when open alternatives are in fact better than their own walled gardens.

edit: readability.

Re: Google restricting Google AI Pro/Ultra subscribers for using OpenClaw

#500

Post by sapphicsnail »

bilekas wrote: post #494
distances wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried Kagi yet? It's pretty popular among HN folks, and I find it easily worth the price.

Kagi indirectly funds the Kremlin's regime, just to know where your money goes if we're talking about not supporting google.

How so?
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