Bad news for OpenGL fans: Anthropic wants you to pay more to use its AI models. This wasn’t something that Anthropic necessarily announced; Rather, the company Started sending emails to affected usersTell them they can no longer use their Cloud Code subscription limit with third-party “harnesses,” which includes – and most notably – OpenClave. Anthropic confirmed users can still connect to OpenClave with their cloud account, but they will have to pay more money to do so – including a “pay-as-you-go” option added to the cost of the subscription.
According to Anthropic, this policy change is not without logic or reason. As highlighted by TechCrunchBoris Cherny, Head of Cloud Code, explained on x That the company’s subscriptions “were not designed for the usage patterns of these third-party tools,” and that Anthropic is prioritizing customers who are using the company’s first-party products and APIs.
OpenClaw has had a lot of success. The tool, formerly called Moltbot, and previously called Cloudbot, is designed as an agentic AI assistant that you run locally on your devices. For many people, this means running OpenGL on a Mac Mini designed for this purpose. Unlike ChatGPT or Gemini, which have their own proprietary interface, you communicate with OpenClaw through any chat app of your choice. You can use OpenClaw to organize your email inbox, write code for a project, plan your goals for the month, whatever you want your agent to do, text in WhatsApp, Apple Messages, Microsoft Teams, whatever you want.
But OpenClaw doesn’t just…run. You need to power it with an AI model. In this case, users are relying on Anthropic’s cloud – and, if they have a Cloud Code subscription, they are simply taking advantage of the plan they’ve already paid for. As you might expect, running agentive tasks through OpenGL is extremely intensive, which prompted Anthropic to rethink how it was charging users.
What do you think so far?
Interestingly, OpenClaw’s founder, Peter Steinberger, Joined OpenAI in February-One of Anthropic’s main rivals. steinberger said on x that he and OpenClaw board member Dave Morin “tried to talk sense into Anthropic, (but) the best we could do was delay it for a week.”
