Subscribers to Claude Code will soon face higher costs when utilizing Anthropic’s coding assistant with OpenClaw and other external applications.
An email to customers, posted on Hacker News, revealed Anthropic’s announcement that from noon Pacific on April 4 (today), subscribers’ existing Claude subscription allowances will cease to cover usage with “third-party harnesses including OpenClaw.” Instead, additional usage will require payment via “a pay-as-you-go option billed separately from your subscription.”
Anthropic clarified that while OpenClaw is the initial focus today, this policy “applies to all third-party harnesses and will be rolled out to more shortly.”
Boris Cherny, Anthropic’s head of Claude Code, stated on X that the company’s “subscriptions weren’t built for the usage patterns of these third-party tools.” He added that Anthropic aims to “be intentional in managing our growth to continue to serve our customers sustainably long-term.”
This declaration follows news that OpenClaw’s founder, Peter Steinberger, was moving to OpenAI, a competitor to Anthropic, with OpenClaw slated to persist as an open-source initiative backed by OpenAI.
Steinberger shared that he and OpenClaw board member Dave Morin “tried to talk sense into Anthropic” but managed to postpone the pricing adjustment by merely one week.
“The timing is certainly coincidental; they first integrate popular features into their proprietary system, then restrict open source access,” Steinberger commented.
Nonetheless, Cherny asserted that the Claude Code team strongly supports open source, mentioning he personally “just put up a few [pull requests] to improve prompt cache efficiency for OpenClaw specifically.”
“This primarily concerns engineering limitations,” he explained, noting that Anthropic is providing full refunds to subscribers. “We recognize that not everyone was aware this isn’t something we endorse, and this action aims to make that unequivocally clear.”
Concurrently, OpenAI recently discontinued its Sora app and video generation models, reportedly to conserve computing power and align with a wider strategy to attract software engineers and businesses increasingly adopting solutions akin to Claude Code.