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

Post by stavros » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 2:51 PM UTC

Lihh27 wrote: post #716

stavros wrote: post #42

Looks like I'm going to be switching to OpenAI. I know the whole "well those are the terms" Stockholm syndrome argument, but no, those weren't the terms when I signed up. If one of the parties decided to unilaterally change terms in any other everyday situation, nobody would think it was acceptable, but we've become so resigned to corporations having enough money to make the law suit them that we think it's moral beh…

lol, you aren't buying tokens. you're renting subsidized compute predicated entirely on your biological inefficiency. the $200 tier math only works because humans have to type, read, and eventually go to sleep. OpenClaw replaced that human latency with a non-blocking while true loop. tbh they aren't really defending an ecosystem here, they are just desperately patching a hole in their unit economics that collapsed th…

Post by mark_l_watson » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 2:55 PM UTC

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…

Post by Lihh27 » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 3:01 PM UTC

stavros wrote: post #721

Lihh27 wrote: post #716

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lol, you aren't buying tokens. you're renting subsidized compute predicated entirely on your biological inefficiency. the $200 tier math only works because humans have to type, read, and eventually go to sleep. OpenClaw replaced that human latency with a non-blocking while true loop. tbh they aren't really defending an ecosystem here, they are just desperately patching a hole in their unit economics that collapsed th…

My problem isn't that they're banning OpenClaw, it's that they're banning OpenCode.

Post by narmiouh » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 3:05 PM UTC

emidln wrote: post #667

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…

At least on a personal max account, I can't max every window. There is also weekly limit. If I max every window, I run out of tokens halfway through the week.

Post by SergeAx » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 3:18 PM UTC

port11 wrote: post #612

lukewarm707 wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

value is high but what about the competitors? is claude that good? the last time i tried claude it was sonnet 4.5. it was ok, not worth the api money clearly. but i only use api tokens for llms.

If you look at SWE, Claude models aren’t that special. Other benchmarks come up with different results. But… anecdotally, Claude is just that good. Gemini needs a lot of hand-holding, and it will still tell you it’s done when it achieved half the work. Or say, “this test isn’t passing, I’ll just delete it”. Every now and then I get tired of it and give the same task to Sonnet 4.6; 5 minutes later I’m done. Bug fixed,…