Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

651–660 of 928 posts

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

#651

Post by siva7 »

adastra22 wrote: post #365
firloop wrote: post #47

This is slightly different from what OpenCode was banned from doing; they were a separate harness grabbing a user’s Claude Code session and pretending to be Claude Code. OpenClaw was still using Claude Code as the harness (via claude -p)[0]. I understand why Anthropic is doing this (and they’ve made it clear that building products around claude -p is disallowed) but I fear Conductor will be next. [0]: See “Option B:…

Has there been an actual change to their ToS? As of the last change which I saw reach HN, a week or so ago, `claude -p` was still in compliance with the Claude Code ToS. Has that language changed?

Came here to say the same. I remember the discussion on HN back then where we discovered that an official from Anthropic made clear that claude -p was still okay.

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

#652

Post by skywhopper »

goosejuice wrote: post #194
jmalicki wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You aren't paying to be using that limit all of the time. You are paying to be using that limit some of the time. There are 5 hour windows when you are sleeping and can't use it. There are weekend limits. Theoretically you can max out every 5 hour window, but they lose money on that. It's structured so users can have bursts of unlimited usage, and spend ~15% of the theoretical max cap, and that's still cheaper than a…

> Theoretically you can max out every 5 hour window, but they lose money on that. Then it's not priced correctly. As I said, you can do all of this without OpenClaw.. claude code ships with everything you need to maximize the limits.

Yes, and they are in control of Claude Code, so they are fine with that. If it causes problems they can tweak it. If OpenClaw causes problems they can’t.

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

#653

Post by saaaaaam »

dimmke wrote: post #337
satvikpendem wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why "should" they? There's no reason they would especially when their competitor now owns OpenClaw.

Because a big part of Anthropic's story is that they build based on how people actually use AI. Power users aren't just annoying edge cases, they're signal. Throttling them and calling it done is inconsistent with that.

They build based on how _people_ use AI.

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

#654

Post by esrauch »

goosejuice wrote: post #251
brookst wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it is priced correctly. Just because outliers can be money-losing doesn’t mean you should raise the price for everyone.

> Just because outliers can be money-losing doesn’t mean you should raise the price for everyone. If they are losing money then it's not priced correctly. That's what I responded to. Yes, subscriptions work as you say. Plenty of people under utilize subscriptions from prime, to credit cards, to netflix. But if they lost money overall, they too would raise prices. Because that's how economics works. Shortage of capaci…

I think "offer unlimited but TOS ban behaviors that would cost too much to support" is actually a very normal way that things work instead of "raise prices until equilibrium is reached", including in credit cards. Credit cards do simply ban people they think are "rewards churning" based on a completely subjective TOS policy for example.

Raising prices is a bad strategy if you have a smaller base that costs enormously larger than the rest. "A million users that cost $1 and one user that costs $10 million, charge everyone $10 equilibrium", you're screwing over almost all of your users. The $20/month sub price is basically just not trying to capture the openclaw users, it doesn't make sense that all of the vanilla Claude users should subsidize them (and in fact it wouldn't even work because they will just go to Gemini or ChatGPT if your cheapest paid plan was very expensive to try to subsidize the other users)

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

#655

Post by reactordev »

jmalicki wrote: post #190
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…

You aren't paying to be using that limit all of the time. You are paying to be using that limit some of the time. There are 5 hour windows when you are sleeping and can't use it. There are weekend limits. Theoretically you can max out every 5 hour window, but they lose money on that. It's structured so users can have bursts of unlimited usage, and spend ~15% of the theoretical max cap, and that's still cheaper than a…

Train a generation to min/max stats and then put them in a time box limit and then explain to them why “this is normal”.

The issue is, and always will be, competing views on what these services are for. Most, see them as augments of their normal everyday workflow. Others see it as the tool that allows their creativity to flow as fast as their thoughts do. The problem is the service is more than capable of catering to both but the creative vibe commander will hit those limits far faster. Simply telling them to “take a break” is a kin to those video game screen nags that developers were forced to put into games to remind people to pee.

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

#656

Post by zozbot234 »

jmalicki wrote: post #190
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…

You aren't paying to be using that limit all of the time. You are paying to be using that limit some of the time. There are 5 hour windows when you are sleeping and can't use it. There are weekend limits. Theoretically you can max out every 5 hour window, but they lose money on that. It's structured so users can have bursts of unlimited usage, and spend ~15% of the theoretical max cap, and that's still cheaper than a…

> You are paying to be using that limit some of the time. There are 5 hour windows when you are sleeping and can't use it. There are weekend limits.

They could easily structure their limits to enforce that kind of pattern fairly on both human and automated users. They could e.g. force a cooldown period between your daily activity bursts, by decreeing that continued heavy use on a 24h basis would count exponentially more towards your limit. That would be transparent and force the claws to lighten their load below that of a typical human user. We're talking about a company that's worth hundreds of billions of dollars and targeting highly sophisticated enterprise users, not consumers; it's just not credible that they'd be technically unable to set that up.

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

#658

Post by freedomben »

xvector wrote: post #312
freedomben wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah thank you, this is very helpful distinction to know. When they shut down open code, I thought it was a lame move and was critical of them, but I could understand at least where they're coming from. With this though, it's ridiculous. Claude core tools are still being used in this case. Shelling out to it to use it there's no different than a normal user would do themselves. If this continues, I'll be taking my $200…

No a normal user is not shelling out to Claude Code 24/7, but OpenClaw certainly is. OpenAI will soon do the same thing, don't be delusional.

If OpenAI does it too, well then I guess my principles will be challenged. Gemini CLI is unfortunately too eager to use Flash despite my setting it to use Pro, and it generates ass code that doesn't work, so that's out. I might have to invest in some GPUs then and run local. We'll cross that bridge when we get there though.

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

#659

Post by jruz »

goosejuice wrote: post #160
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…

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…

-p gets penalized is not worth using it.

It’s shame they do all this sketchy stuff, I switched to Codex I have enough of their bs.

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

#660

Post by abdelkrimb »

jmalicki wrote: post #190
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…

You aren't paying to be using that limit all of the time. You are paying to be using that limit some of the time. There are 5 hour windows when you are sleeping and can't use it. There are weekend limits. Theoretically you can max out every 5 hour window, but they lose money on that. It's structured so users can have bursts of unlimited usage, and spend ~15% of the theoretical max cap, and that's still cheaper than a…

I don't believe that Anthropic looses money when heavy users consume the max amount of tokens.

do you have any proof of your statement ?

Post reply on HN